Morels are one of the few mushrooms associated with wildfire in British Columbia forests.

Together, wild morels, chanterelles and pine mushrooms from British Columbia forests comprise a multi-million-dollar non-timber forest products industry.

Like many other families in British Columbia, Michael Keefer and his family inhaled smoky air, felt their house shake as water tankers rumbled past every 10 minutes, heard helicopters and water bombers flying over day and night, and stood on one-hour evacuation alert for weeks on end last year. They live 10 kilometres from the Lamb Creek fire site, which blazed across 11,000 hectares of forested mountainside 25 kilometres southwest of Cranbrook—one of 28 fires that burned in southeastern British Columbia last summer.

Despite the anxiety and discomfort, the ethnobotanist for the Ktunaxa-Kinbasket Treaty Council says, “People like me were gleefully rubbing their hands thinking of all the mushrooms that were coming.”

Keefer is referring to morels, a tasty, prized mushroom that grows out of the ashes of burnt forests. “We didn’t know how much or where in the burn they would be, but they were sure to come—as were the pickers.”

Now, anyone who goes walking in the burn site is bound to bump into somebody carrying a bucket of mushrooms. “In Lamb Creek alone on any given day, there must be at least 50 pickers,” says Keefer, “There’s also the Plumbob fire site, and the White River–Middle Fork site…. There’s potentially a lot of money to be made from morels around here.”

Keefer is taking part in a study that partners the Ktunaxa-Kinbasket Treaty Council with researchers at the Canadian Forest Service and Royal Roads University’s Centre for Non-Timber Forest Resources. The aim of the study is to assess impacts of non-timber forest products, such as morels, on local communities, as well as the interaction of resources’ supply and demand.

The researchers will also try to identify plant associations necessary to morel growth and survival, which will increase understanding of morel ecology and biology. The association between morels and fire is well documented, but, according to Pacific Forestry Centre Research Scientist Richard Winder, who works with Keefer on the project, “Not every burn site produces morels, and not every area within a burn site. And although they’re found primarily in burn sites, morels are found in other places as well. We’d like to determine what conditions or plants are needed to make a site a good morel-producing area.”

Because of the dependence on forest fire, morel supply is capricious. Bumper crops of morels appear early in the spring after a fire, with quickly decreasing numbers appearing in subsequent years.

“Demand tends to follow supply,” says Winder. “There are a lot of burns, and the supply of morels goes up, which meets existing demand and lowers prices, but it also stimulates and generates additional demand. Then the supply runs out and demand eventually returns to normal. It’s hard to develop a sustainable industry under these conditions.”

According to Keefer, this year’s pickers are harvesting as much as 40 to 50 pounds of wild morels per person per day from the Cranbrook area. Prices paid to pickers at the buying stations in the area fluctuate. The abundance of fires last year has caused prices to be relatively low, ranging in May from $3.00-$7.00 per pound—paid in cash. Part of the project involves determining where pickers and buyers are from, and how much of their annual income comes from picking mushrooms and other non-timber forest products. As much of the business between pickers and buyers is undocumented, few pickers and buyers may provide accurate figures. However, for non-timber forest products to be considered in the overall mix of a community, the forestry industry and provincial regulations, this information is crucial.

“There’s been very little research about non-timber forest products on the whole, and when it comes to morels, there’s a real need for more information,” says Keefer. “You hear stories and see figures, but we have a long way to go to verify them.”

Many of the pickers, Keefer says, are local residents, but some are from Alberta or Saskatchewan, and some from the north coast of British Columbia. “Those tend to be the professional pickers. They harvest morels in the spring, some of them pick wild berries and boletes in the summer, and move on to pine mushrooms and other species in the fall, and through the winter they’re often gathering salal or boughs for the florist market.”

From the August 2004 edition of Information Forestry