On Thursday, Jay Damm, an outdoor enthusiast/mycophile from Tinley Park with decades of experience, assessed prospects for morel mushrooms this spring around Chicago outdoors.
He emailed:
Hi Dale,
It’s that time of year I start to get nervous, and with the last two consecutive morel seasons being lousy ones, I’m particularly nervous. Will the law of averages save us this year? Here’s my take, it’s an interesting weather forecast. Seasonably cool tomorrow, 60’s weekend, 70’s, possibly even 80 next week. Little to no rain in the extended forecast. We’ve had enough rain to last a week or so and perhaps enough to get things started, but what happens after that depends when the next storm comes. If the rains show up too late, we’re screwed.
Yellows starting to show up in Peoria, black morels are starting to show northeast of here in SW Michigan. Two weeks or less for us here in NE Illinois, the strip pits in Grundy Co. are usually the first reports around here.
I’m just expressing my thoughts on the season to anyone who will listen…
Regards,
Jay
By the looks of the weather forecast, I think the itch will be here for at least some of us next week.
On Monday, Damm emailed this update:
Dale,
Just a bit of an update. I do like to keep my guesses on the conservative side, but the morels will likely arrive around Chicago within a week, as there were reliable sightings in Will and Kankakee Counties over the weekend. Black morels found along a railroad track in the gravel (ballast) near Braidwood and yellow morels in Kankakee County. The rain outlook, however, hasn’t really improved much. My guess is that if it doesn’t happen by sometime next week, that could spell trouble.
. . .
Jay
I’m guessing Morel of the Week will begin again in the next couple weeks.
MOTW, the celebration of hunting for morel mushrooms around Chicago outdoors and their stories (the stories matter, as this one shows), runs Wednesdays in the paper Sun-Times as warranted. The online posting here at https://chicago.suntimes.com/outdoors goes up at varied days of the week, depending on what is going on the wide world of the outdoors.
To make submissions, email (BowmanOutside@gmail.com) or contact me on Facebook (Dale Bowman), Twitter (@BowmanOutside) or Instagram (@BowmanOutside).
