When we Take from the forest, we must admit what it is we do. We do not Harvest, for we have not planted. We may take scientific collections, we may take mushrooms for our food, or we may take mushrooms to sell. But all of these should be viewed together, because in all these instances we take from a source we have no idea how to replenish. I have seen diligent, careful, nurturing commercial mushroom pickers, and I have seen scientific collecting abandoned in the face of a massive fruiting of Cantharellus or Boletus as otherwise restrained individuals indulged in an orgy of picking. In some cases, every mushroom, right down to the primordia, were picked. In other cases, very young and overripe specimens were left standing.
We must all adopt and internalize an ethic of taking, rather than attacking others who share our love of mushrooms. The enemy of the mushroom picker is not the other mushroom picker; it is the loss of habitat to logging, development, and other means. I'm among the recreational variety of mushroom picker, meaning I probably pick more than I need for dinner tonight. I feel my collecting is not excessive, and yet perhaps I have wiped out a subspecies of edible mushroom from the Missoula valley. Taking is relative to both the habitat and the weather, and can seem very insignificant when it is your own and quite outrageous when it is somebody else's. It is easy to be hypocritical in this debate, and beat "those other" mushroom pickers with our halos, isn't it? Is the pride one feels in gathering a basketful of chanterelles somehow diminished by finding "stumps" indicating another picker was there first? How often do you leave the mushrooms that are too old to eat? Do you believe that a mushroom can be too young to collect?
We all must strive to contain our own greedy urges, and try to take just what we will use. Mushrooms wasted in your fridge are like fish that rot, uncleaned. Mushrooms standing in the field rotting are contributing to the ecosystem. Which leads us to Leaving.
What you leave is often more important than what you take. If we take without leaving, soon nothing is left. Why take that which you do not need? Leave a wormy matsutake in the field? Leave the older "flags?" Some pickers have a saying for morels "Rule of Thumb: if it is smaller than your thumb, leave it." I do not feel that being a commercial picker is an indication of mindless greed anymore than being a "recreational" picker is a guarantee of ethical righteousness.
A time-honored tradition exists in many mushroom cultures, that is the secrecy of the "patch" For knowing either the identity of a fungus or its location is insufficient; you must know both. Wise gatherers are understandably cautious about to whom they reveal such information, and in many cases attach conditions to sharing such knowledge. Which, I believe, is how it should be. The value of this tradition was to deny access to people that did not respect the resource, and the goal is the continued vitality of the patch and the species.
What you leave should be proportional to what you take. It makes less sense to try to chase down every last mushroom than it does to seriously thin out a few extravagant fruitings. I tend to leave large, sparsely mushroom-populated areas untouched, and seek out the maximum habitat.
The mushrooms left to spore out provide the next generation of mushrooms. Sometimes this happens all at once, like salmon spawning, and other times it happens repeatedly over the course of the fungus' perennial existence. Oyster mushrooms are an example of a mushroom with a "determinate" or "life cycle" approach to sexual reproduction. Natural morels are an example of a fungus that exhibits an "indeterminate" approach, fruiting each spring of its life for decades or more. Yet each future fruiting depends on the ones before it. We should be careful, in our collecting, not to snip this thread that runs from the past to the future.
And Leaving means more. It is perhaps enough to leave a mushroom or 3 from an abundant fruiting, but when you are out examining likely habitat, why not disperse a few spores? You may put pieces of lobster on Russula brevipes, fold old oyster mushrooms into the crook of a likely snag, or bury chanterelle tailings under your pet Douglas fir. I often bring mushroom scraps from here to there, hoping to compensate for the fragmentation of habitat that has occurred in the last few years. This breaking up of suitable habitat has restricted the exchange of genetic information that contributes to species vitality, and by putting our mushroom scraps where they belong, we can help to complete the cycle that our mushroom gathering interrupts.
It's at this point Leaving
becomes Returning. We all speak of returning things to the soil, but we actually
return very little. A wild animal leaves its scat around the forest, thus dispersing
seeds and spores. A human that takes from the forest doesn't usually return
these seeds and scats to the woods; rather they are destroyed in septic tanks
and sewage treatment plants. So I habitually return my mushroom scraps to the
forest, rather than just tossing them in the compost.
(to left) A Russula mushroom stashed in the branches of a fir tree by a squirrel for a winter snack.
I also think of returning in the sense of coming back to the same place, year after year. Forming a relationship with the piece of land that makes the chanterelles you eat, seeing the effects of "management treatments" on your favorite patches, and seeing the variation in mushroom productivity from season to season may not help fill your basket, but it will increase your appreciation of the delicacy and resilience of the fungal jungle.
Its also nice to return in order to see the greater cycles at work. How long does a patch last? What are its cycles over its lifetime? I go up to the same patch of Stropharia kaufmanii every year. First I found a dozen biggish mushrooms, then for 4 years there were immense fruitings of ten pounds or more. Two years ago the patch produced just a dozen mushrooms. This year I did not find a one. I wonder what next year will bring. (Note: this is not an edible species; I didn't collect more than the occasional mushroom for microscopic study).
And Returning is more complicated nowadays, for it involves not just our personal relationship with nature but our social contracts. As a society, we decimate crucial habitats simply by the way we use newspaper and toilet paper. I feel the need to return some of my personal gain, taken at the expense of biological processes near or far, to maintain and restore those ecosystems which are still intact, and learn how to do things like increase the complexity of an ecosystem, establish symbiotic partnerships, and maintain sustainable productivity. But that is another story.
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