After the fire, life resumes! And the fire morel is one of the first species to colonize the soil when it is completely charred. Given that Quebec experienced a historic forest fire season, we could experience a record harvest of fire morels in Quebec.
“With the big fire season, there is a lot of interest in harvesting the fire morel in Chibougamau,” mentions Vincent Lapointe, teacher in Natural Environment Techniques Center d’études collegiales in Chibougamau, which is affiliated with the Cégep de Saint-Félicien.
A bouquet of morels. (Guillaume Roy/Archives Le Quotidien)
A sign of the enthusiasm, around thirty people participated in an information evening on the subject organized by Vincent Laponte in Chibougamau on May 8. “It’s not that easy to find, but there are good online tools to identify sectors with high potential,” he says, speaking in particular of the Quebec Government’s cartographic tools.
Simon-Pierre Murdock, the owner of Morille Québec, is also enthusiastic as the harvest season approaches in Quebec. “The harvest should be super good, unless there are forest fires that prevent us from picking,” underlines the entrepreneur who expects to collect nearly 5,000 pounds of morels with his partners in the field.
Simon-Pierre Murdock, the founder of Morille Québec, shows a beautiful morel that he has just harvested, in 2021. (Guillaume Roy/Archives Le Quotidien)
To take advantage of the season which promises to be exceptional, the latter has joined forces with “crinqué” partners who will operate a purchasing station at Radisson. “They will have all the equipment to buy a lot of morels and dry them on site in a dome,” he said. I expect this to be the best crop year in the last 20 years.”
For his part, Luc Godin, owner of Champignon Boréal, hopes that the harvest season will be good, but he remains cautious. “I don’t expect anything anymore,” he says, referring to several years where fires produced very few morels in Quebec. For the moment, he does not plan to set up a purchasing station, but he will buy all the morels that the pickers want to sell to him to supply his restaurant customers. “For big harvests, I am ready to go up into the woods to get them,” he says.
Although Quebec experienced a record year for forest fires, these fires mainly burned isolated forests in northern regions. Before setting out to conquer the fire morels, you must be well prepared, because the adventure is more like an expedition than a short walk in the forest.
How to maximize your chances?
“When we look at the maps, the potential is enormous,” confirms Jean-François Bourdon, a trained forestry engineer, who today works in the Forest Inventories Directorate at the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forests. “There are so many suitable territories, that it is impossible that there is not a good territory.”
Passionate about the fire morel, he also achieved his mastery on the subject, by attempting to develop a model model of the probability of the presence of morels in burned forest, by combining measurements and images taken in the field with images satellites, during an expedition carried out in 2014.
To find fire morel, you have to look in forests that have burned intensely, where all the organic matter has burned away, exposing the mineral soil, he says. “Jack pine forests are the most suitable,” he adds, explaining that thin soils are found in this type of forest.
Where to target good territories?
To properly target harvesting territories, Jean-François Bourdon suggests using the Open Forest ecoforestry maps, developed by the government and available free of charge.
Jean-François Bourdon during a fire morel harvest in 2015. (Guillaume Roy/Archives Le Quotidien)
With this tool, you can superimpose different map layers. For a newbie to the morel harvest, Jean-François Bourdon first suggests adding the “Sentinel NIR Mosaic Summer 2023” layer to identify burned areas, recent cuts and recent paths. Subsequently, he recommends adding the “Ecoforestry population” layer to identify pine forests, then the “Forest paths (AQréseau+)” layer. The cartographic expert emphasizes, however, that we must remain cautious with the information on the paths indicated on the maps, because they are not always passable.
“If an area has been harvested by the forestry industry, it is generally less interesting to go and pick morels,” he adds, because there are more logging residues covering the ground and it is more difficult to move there. By targeting an area beyond the tree harvest limit, it is possible to avoid such a problem.
Nothing guaranteed
Unlike Western Canada, where intense forest fires produce morels year after year, the harvest is always unpredictable in Quebec. Morels do not appear after every forest fire and conditions must be right to allow fruiting. And even when there are fires, the morel harvest is not always interesting.
The interactive Open Forest maps allow you to target areas with high potential. (Government of Quebec)
We have to go back to 2021 for the last morel harvest period in Quebec. The season looked good, but it was disappointing, and volumes remained very thin.
As the majority of fires are found in the north, you have to cover a lot of territory to find good potential sites. You must therefore calculate the cost of fuel in your budget, to go to the field, but also to deliver fresh mushrooms, if the idea is to make money with a harvesting project. If you cannot deliver fresh mushrooms, it is also possible to install dryers in the forest to dry your harvest.
Arrive at the right time
It is also difficult to predict the exact date of the emergence of fire morels. According to the pickers interviewed, the fire morels should emerge in early or mid-June. In an ideal world, interested people should do some prospecting beforehand to identify paths and target areas with high potential, suggests Jean-François Bourdon.
With all the preparation and prospecting work that this involves, it is difficult to make the harvest profitable for the majority of pickers, especially for neophytes, he believes. The adventure is still worth it, believes Jean-François Bourdon. “Picking morels is like a big treasure hunt,” he says. It’s also a pretext to go to the woods isolated from the world for a few weeks,” adds the man who will take two weeks of vacation in June to pick the enigmatic mushroom.
