With A Puff

While I have yet to find a lobster mushroom this season, I can tell by by signs of other mushrooms starting to emerge that it won’t be long now.

The other day I spotted the first Orange Peel mushrooms that popped up in one of the many wildlife trails I traverse during the hunt for Chanterelles.

The Orange Peel is the mushroom with a secret, it likes to talk back when spoken to. If a human can get close enough during the right weather conditions and during the perfect grow cycle for these little beauties, a puff of breath can trigger the mushrooms to send out a puff of spores in response.

The puff is not instantaneous, I usually get to a count of three or four before the response puff emerges from the forest floor. The hardest part of the puffing is getting close enough to get the breath right to the orange cups. There there is the huffing and puffing to stand back up.

On this day, the cups were too wet to puff back, we had just had an extended shower-filled day. Not a lot of rain but enough to keep the fungi damp for at least 24 hours. While I wait for the lobsters to show themselves, I will continue to huff at these little beauties and console myself with buckets of Chanterelles.