Mushroom pickers set for exodus May 16, 2006 - pqbnews.com

Big nuggets of brown gold, just sitting there on the ground, waiting to be picked up as you wander through the sun-dappled glen.
That’s the way some people look at mushroom picking, but if you described it like that to Allan Savage he might very well roll his eyes and shake his head. It’s not entirely an accurate description. Savage is a mushroom man, an experienced picker of many seasons — one of many from Vancouver Island who are even now preparing for their spring exodus to the mushroom fields of the B.C. Interior.
Like his many colleagues, the Parksville resident will spend much of the summer cruising the burns from Salmon Arm to Kitwanga and from Prince George to Bella Coola, anywhere forest fires have hit over the past year.
He’ll be searching for fire morels, choice mushrooms that explode onto the landscape the year after a forest fire. They’re in demand in Europe and can fetch as much as $9 a pound, or as little as $1.50. That’s part of the reason, Savage says, the mushroom picker’s life can be a difficult one.
“It’s a crapshoot,” he says. “Some years you can do really good, and other years you don’t do nothing.” Sometimes, he says, the mushrooms just don’t come up, despite the burns. Sometimes the prices fluctuate wildly, depending on the number of pickers supplying the buyers as well as the supply to the European market from other mushroom producing areas, such as Russia and Southeast Asia.
“It’s the number one bitch of anyone who does it for a living,” he says, noting one year when pine mushrooms dropped from $20 a pound to a buck and a half.
So why do they do it? Why crawl around in burns in the middle of nowhere, getting filthy black soot over every square inch of their bodies to find mushrooms that could well prove nearly worthless when they get them to the buyer? Because, says Savage, it can pay very well.
“I heard of two guys who picked $450 pounds of morels in one day, at $9 per pound,” he says.
There’s more to it than that however. There’s also a certain freedom, missing from the world of suits and ties. “You can get up whenever you feel like it, and work as long as you want. You can start when you want and quit when you want. You go in, you get paid every day, and the harder you work and the luckier you are, the more money you make. It’s that simple.”
Luck, he says, plays a large part in how successful a season will be. y amongst newer pickers, who have yet to learn all he tricks of the trade.
"For those in the know, it's about 20 per cent luck," he says. "For everyone else, it's about 95 per cent luck. You get a lot of people who think they can make a lot of money because they hear the stories of $500 to $800 a day, but those stories mostly come from the buyers, who spread the word out in the bars in hopes of getting more pickers out in the burns."
The green pickers can find themselves making as little as $50 a day, barely scraping by. "The buyer doesn't care," Savage laughs. "Instead of having 30 pickers at a fire they have 300 and their volume is up." Morels, he says, can be difficult to find, particularly for newbies.
"They can be anywhere," he says. "There can be 20 of them sitting right there and you don't see them. You see one and take your eyes away and sometimes you can't see it again. You have to have an eye. They don't like to get picked. If they're growing in some needles, they'll take on the same colour as the needles. They're not like chantarelles, which stand out."
Savage and his colleagues will be picking them, too, when the fall rains kick in. That's when the mushroom people will begin filtering back home to Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlottes.
Instead of stooping to pick up brown gold however, it will be bright, bright orange.
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