On Sunday, Jay Damm summed up morel hunting so far, “2021 has proven to be a challenging year for morels in northern Illinois for obvious reasons, whereas they’ve had a strong season in southern Illinois which appears to have gone into overtime.”
Despite that slow start he and his partner found between 2 and 3 pounds Sunday morning.
“The morels were found under a mix of elm, cottonwood and silver maple trees, some dead stumps and some under living silver maples,” he emailed. “It just goes to show you it’s not all about dead elms.”
To the north Adam Savicz messaged on Saturday, “Got a few in McHenry County. We need more rain. More should be coming in next week or two.”
He is a good weather forecaster.
MOTW, the celebration of morel mushrooms and their stories (the stories matter, as this one shows) around Chicago outdoors. MOTW will run, as warranted, Wednesdays and/or Saturdays in the outdoor section of the paper Sun-Times. 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).
