New guide helps morel hunters

It’s the season for veteran Iowa hunters to take to the woods in the annual search for morel mushrooms. A veteran spotter and botanist by profession, Lois Tiffany is co-author of a new pocket guide to mushroom hunting published by the University of Iowa Press. Like fast-reference road maps, it’s in a folding format and laminated in touch plastic. She says it’d be real handy and not blow away or give you the other problems paper materials can at times. The guide titled “Mushrooms in Your Pocket” is one in a series by the U-of-I press, and color photos with accompanying text introduce the hiker to more than three-dozen images of wild fungi. They’re taken from a mushroom book that’s out of print but undergoing revision right now and likely to be out once again within a year and a half or so. Tiffany co-authored that book with Professor Donald Huffman, a retired biology prof at Central College who’s now a visiting expert at a university in China. Most people hunting for Iowa mushrooms want morels, and the season’s on right now — normally mid-April to mid-May, she says it’s a bit later than usual this year and we’re right in the middle of it. Professor Tiffany, who still teaches a couple classes at I-S-U, isn’t giving any off-the-cuff tips about her morel hunting spot, or about which wild mushrooms might be tasty or dangerous. If you’re looking for edible things, you simply have to know what that mushroom is and be able to identify its species, because otherwise you might have problems. See the selection at University of Iowa press on their website, www.uiowapress.org