A Morel Miracle

Long time readers will remember that I have a particular disease called morel madness. It occurs every spring when the temperatures warm up and there is moisture in the ground. It causes me, and hundreds of others in the area also inflicted with the madness, to park our vehicles alongside roads and wander aimlessly in the woods. Really long time readers will remember that I've been in kind of a drought in recent years where I have been unable to effectively cure the madness by finding and consuming morels. Between the cold and lack of moisture during the only two or three weeks a year they grow, I have barely found enough for a taste. So this year with plenty of moisture in the ground and the weather finally getting up to what I judged a warm enough point, I drove south to the farm, parked my car along the road and wandered into the woods.

I wandered the woods for well over an hour without seeing nary a morel mushroom and started feeling sorry for myself. I blamed my poor eyesight, years of picking from the same wooded draws, etc. for my failure. Then, for some reason I decided to start talking to my mom who passed away three and a half years ago. I simply said that I missed mushroom hunting with her. I didn't get any direct response nor was I expecting too. There were no claps of lightening, peels of thunder or burning bushes. But when I looked down at the ground, I saw that all around my boots were gray morel mushrooms, my favorite kind. I quickly thanked my mom and proceeded to pick them.

As you can see below, I ended up finding a sizeable mess of gray morels and one lone yellow morel though it is hard to distinguish in the photo. It is up near the top of all the mushrooms with the stem touching the antler and is bigger than all the rest. Yellow mushrooms, while typically bigger than their gray cousins, don't have as intense nutty/earthy flavor that makes the gray morels my favorite. 

As you can see, I also found a matched pair of eight point deer antlers. I don't find those very often as the rodents will eat them before I stumble across them. When a deer naturally sheds them, they can be in random places and are often covered up with leaf litter and hard to spot. However, these weren't natural sheds, i.e. the deer didn't scrape them off on a tree this spring. I'll explain below but if you are squeamish, proceed with caution.

 

I normally post pictures of animal homicides I find in the woods during this time of year when I'm trying to find a cure for my morel madness. Other times of the year there are just too many ticks to venture into the woods looking for animal homicides and morels don't grow then anyway. But this time I found a much more recent death. I'm not a animal death investigator by any means so I don't know how long it has been there but my guess would be early last winter. That is when our deer hunting season is and I'm guessing somebody shot this one and couldn't find it. It was wounded enough that it went ahead and eventually died where it did and has since been mostly consumed except for the hide. Or possibly it died from some random sickness since then but I would guess that more unlikely. I do know I would have seen it last spring when looking for mushrooms so it was less than a year old.

The antlers were still attached firmly so that also leads me to believe that it died earlier on in winter. I found a big stick and with a couple whacks, separated the antlers from the skull. No sense giving the mice all the fun and besides, I might turn them into something. Years ago, I used to make fountain pens out of deer antlers so I might do that with them at some point. My razor handle is also made from deer antler that I turned on a mini lathe. But for now, they will just remain in my garage with a few more antlers I have collected and gather dust.