Bob Hodge/special to the news sentinel The recent rain in East Tennessee has led to a lot of oyster mushrooms popping up, and with duck season being slow, there are several advantages to mushroom hunting.
Tis the season … to pick mushrooms.
With Christmas two days away and, supposedly, East Tennessee in the throes of winter the dry fall has a nice dividend for anybody outdoors a lot: mushrooms are sprouting up everywhere.
This may be the best hunting season on record and it has nothing to do with anything with fur or feathers. That lack of rain that was wilting foodplots and keeping duck hunting holes dry also kept oyster and other varieties of mushrooms from busting out. Now they are everywhere.
Nothing says Christmas like bringing bags of fungi into the house.
And if you're the kind of person that has no interest in finding wild mushrooms then more power to you. That just leaves more for the rest of us.
I'm not a mycologist —that's a two-dollar word for mushroom expert —because I avoid anything that has even the slightest chance of not being what I think it is. I've eaten plenty of things that can kill me —sharks, bears, rattlesnakes — but eating an unidentified mushroom is like going bear hunting armed with toothpicks. It may be OK for a while, but in the end things probably won't go your way.
There's an old saying about mushroom hunters that are, literally, words to live by: "There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters. There are no old, bold mushroom hunters."
So while the duck hunting has been slow and the deer hunting has slowed down because the freezer is only so big, there's been a lot of time to look for mushrooms. And Mother Nature has done her best to make the mistletoe season the oyster mushroom season.
Since most of the fall was dry, oyster mushrooms were hanging around waiting for some water. When it started raining a couple of weeks ago, they started popping out and we've found them everywhere from old willow stumps behind the house to poplar stumps where we hunt, to the stump of something along the road.
And if you're thinking "Why is this guy wasting my time with mushroom stories in the middle of hunting season?" it's because finding a stump full of oyster mushrooms is like finding money. They sell on the internet for about $35 a pound, dried, more if they are "organic." There's not much in the world that's more organic than something that's growing on a dead tree in the woods, so this is some high-priced fungi.
The best thing that can come out of a hunting trip in East Tennessee (and these are in order) are wild turkey breasts, deer backstraps, frog legs, and the hams off a black bear and mallard breasts in a tie. But oyster mushrooms need to be somewhere on the list.
Get them before they begin to wilt and they are as good as anything that's served in a fancy New York restaurant. But once you see them you better start picking because oyster mushrooms go from infancy to old age in about 24 hours. Wait too long and it looks like they've been melted.
The advantages to mushroom hunting are you don't have to sit still, you save a lot of money on ammo and you can clean them in the kitchen without your wife saying "Why are there feathers all over the dishes?"
All you have to do is wash them in the sink and cook. Miss a piece of tree bark or those little black bugs that tend to cling on mushrooms? A little ground black pepper and no one's the wiser.
Bag limits? You're only limited to how many bags you can carry.
And the best news is once you learn what they look like, you can pick them and never worry about poisoning your family and friends. Nothing else in the East Tennessee woods looks like an oyster mushroom. In Japan and Australia there's a poisonous lookalike, but that's only a worry if the woods you're hunting are in Queensland or Yokahama.
So take your pick: it's the Holiday Season, hunting season and, at least for a while, mushroom season. That makes for a pretty Merry Christmas.
Bob Hodge is a freelance contributor.
