Eagle’s eye for morels

April is prime time to hunt for spring delicacy.

A frosty morning in autumn is ideal for hunting the elusive white-tail deer. It’s bad news in April for hunters who go on springtime safari for morel mushrooms.

One spell of cold weather after another has created challenging conditions this month for mushroom sleuths like Melissa Nichols of Jane, Mo. She’s bagged up plenty of morels on her woodland treks that take place almost daily not far from her cabin on Little Sugar Creek. Still, she’s used to picking more.

Nichols normally measures here take of mushrooms by the pound, not by counting individual morels. She typically exits the forest with dozens of morel mushrooms of all sizes in her mesh shoulder bag.

The hunter’s expertise at finding them has been honed over a lifetime of looking for morel mushrooms. She’s got an eagle’s eye for seeing morels. The delicacies blend in so well with the forest floor they can be hard to spot. Even mushrooms hidden deep in leaf litter can’t hide from her searching eyes.

“My dad started taking me into the woods with him when I was a baby,” she said.

Nowadays Nichols takes friends, family and their children into the woods to share the joy.

“It’s one of my favorite things to do in the whole wide world. I’m out in the springtime woods, out in nature. I’m out here doing mushroom aerobics. I go home tired,” she said during a mushroom hunt on Wednesday.

Nichols is a fourth generation McDonald County gal and knows everybody up and down Little Sugar Creek. Friends and neighbors let her hunt mushrooms on their property. She’s got her pet patches that are dependable spring after spring — most

years.

A couple of her hot mushroom spots haven’t yielded a single morel this spring. Nichols’ favorite areas to search are hillsides and hollows where sycamore trees grow. Spots where elm trees grow often produce the highest number of morel mushrooms, she said, especially where dead elms are lying on the ground.

“This has been a weird mushroom year. I think the problem we’ve had is we’ve been getting cold moisture, but we need warm moisture,” Nichols said.

Warm rain followed by sunshine gets morel mushrooms popping, she coached. With warmer weather, morel mushrooms should pop to earth across the region. This home stretch of April could bring the best morel hunting. Sleuths might sack them up by the pound, as Nichols routinely does.

When she finds a morel, Nichols pinches it off at the ground, gives it a shake and pops it in her mesh shoulder bag. Shaking the morel

(NWA Democrat-Gazette/Flip Putthoff) Find sycamore trees and you may find morel mushrooms. Melissa Nichols hunts April 15 around a massive sycamore tree near Little Sugar Creek in McDonald County, Mo.

(NWA Democrat-Gazette/Flip Putthoff) These are just a handful of the many morel mushrooms Melissa Nichols found Wednesday in the springtime woods. Nichols looks mainly in hollows and hillsides where sycamore and elm trees grow.