No place like home

Del Norte provides some surprises for mushroom expert

A steer tastes a porcini mushroom picked by Dr. Dennis Desjardin on Oct. 23 on private land in Del Norte County where his family has collected mushrooms for decades. Del Norte Triplicate/Bryant Anderson

The Crescent City native and San Francisco State University mycologist, with the help of advanced amateur mushroom enthusiasts Michael Wood and Dr. Fred Stevens, was plodding familiar ground in Del Norte County on a recent misty October morning, looking for rare examples to photograph and — might as well — collecting any delectable common specimens to take home to eat.

As Desjardin, Wood and Stevens headed for the woods, Desjardin’s mother, Alice Desjardin of Crescent City, and Dennis’ wife, Stanford biochemist Ann Desjardin, headed in another direction, out to the fields to collect more edible mushrooms.

The area, private farmland, is well known to both Dennis and his mother.

“I’ve been picking on this property all my life,” Alice said.

A family tradition since before Alice was born, Dennis Desjardin has been collecting mushrooms in Del Norte County since he was 3 and spent a lot of time in his high school years studying the area’s fungi and taking notes.

“What’s so special is that a particular species may come out for only three or four days, so you never know what you’re going to find. It’s like an Easter egg hunt,” Dennis Desjardin said as he crept through undergrowth, his eyes studying the ground for fungal treasures, some as small as carpet fibers.

Desjardin was in town for a twofold purpose. One, of course, was to visit Mom.

The other was that fall is the best time to study mushrooms on the North Coast, when autumn rains spur the cobwebs of fungal mycelium growing underground to fruit. Pushing through the ground and ballooning with water, these “fruit” — mushrooms — then drop hundreds of thousands of spores into the air to sow more fungi.

For 25 years now, Wood and Stevens have been gathering photographs of the mushrooms of California. Along with Desjardin, they now have a contract for an 800-page comprehensive guidebook to the state’s mushrooms. Even a few “Easter eggs,” then, can make a trip worthwhile.

A bovine interloper

On this day, the surprise find wasn’t a mushroom, but an aficionado.

It had proved to be a slow day. With sparse October rains, the mushroom population was much smaller than the mycologists were expecting. Desjardin was apologetic.

“We’re supposed to be showing off scientific research, not just holding porcinis picked for the table,” he said.

As the search moved in and out of woods and meadows, the mycologists encountered a group of cattle grazing on dewy grass. Just as Desjardin raised a fleshy porcini, a steer ambled up to him, casually sniffed the mushroom, licked it and then took a bite. Then another bite, and another, until the porcini was ultimately devoured.

Desjardin laughed.

“This is amazing! I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said.

It is well known that cattle fields are fertile ground for mushroom growth, but not because the animals were heretofore known to eat mushrooms. Cattle do eat grass dusted with spores from nearby mushrooms. The hardy spores survive the digestive system and come out the other end of the bovine mingled with a rich pile of fertilizing nutrients that foster growth.

“We know that deer and bears eat fungi. Rodents eat them because you see tooth marks on them a lot. And then you have all the mollusks and of course there are specific insect families that eat nothing but fungi,” Desjardin said. “But a cow? I’ve never seen a cow eat a mushroom. I’ve certainly never seen a cow — a steer — come up to me and ask me if it could eat the porcini I had in my hand.”

Delightedly, Desjardin turned the event into a quick science experiment. He offered the steer two other varieties of mushroom, a crimson-capped Russula and a peppery Chalciporus, neither particularly palatable to humans. The steer sniffed both but declined.

“He was a very discerning steer,” Desjardin said.

Chalk one up for a new discovery on an otherwise slow day.

Running into ranger trouble

Things didn’t go so well the next day, providing a cautionary tale for any mushroom scientist working in Del Norte County.

Desjardin, Stevens and Wood had turned their attention from private land to Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.

To photograph mushrooms for their work, a mycologist’s typical practice is to find multiple specimens of the same species that are at different stages of development because young mushrooms can look quite different from their elder siblings. At least one specimen is picked and placed next to another so they can be photographed together for comparison.

While photographing mushrooms in the state park, four picked specimens were laid out on the ground for their portraits. At that moment two park rangers on Howland Hill Road passed by Desjardin, Stevens and Wood. They looked in the back of the mycologists’ vehicle and saw empty mushroom collecting baskets used the previous day, Desjardin said.

By Desjardin’s account, things went downhill from there.

“They said, ‘you are picking mushrooms. That’s illegal in this park. Show us your hands. Do you have any weapons?’

“‘Well, yeah,’ I told them. ‘I’ve got a collecting knife.’”

Desjardin uses the small knife to slice mushrooms from their stems and cut them open for inspection.

He said one ranger told him, “Well, that’s a weapon, sir. That could hurt me.”

For 20 minutes, the three mycologists were ordered to stay seated on the ground with their hands in plain view, and they were forbidden from photographing the mushrooms already picked, Desjardin said.

As the ranger’s partner drove to radio range to find out if the scientists had criminal records, the debate continued over whether they were doing anything illegal, Desjardin said.

The mycologists pointed out that picking and eating mushrooms and berries in most national parks is not illegal, only collecting them and removing them from parks is against the law, Desjardin said. Wood said he has specifically verified this policy with Yosemite National Park officials.

National park laws apply within the state park sections of Redwood State and National Parks, authorities said.

The ranger told them that picking alone is against the law and ultimately wrote up Desjardin on a citation with a $125 fine for, as the ticket says, “possess, disturb, destroy plants or parts,” Desjardin said.

Among Desjardin’s many other complaints about the citation, he pointed out that fungi aren’t plants and the law is not specific about fungi.

The mycologists said that they have never been treated this way in any other state or national park in the country or, for that matter, the world. In fact, they’re accustomed to park rangers showing interest in their work and asking questions about the park’s fungi.

“But here, they’re acting as cops, not as park rangers,” Desjardin said.

‘Sounds kind of sketchy’

Marshall Neeck, chief ranger of Redwood National Park, explained the local policy.

“Here in Crescent City we do see a pretty intense level of law enforcement than we do at other national parks, so they often deal in a way that other people find offensive especially if they’ve been to other national parks,” Neeck said.

Common problems include automobile break-ins, drug use, escalating resistance to law enforcement due to intoxication, and park visitors with warrants for their arrest, Neeck said.

“I don’t know the specifics of the case, but whether or not you move mushrooms an inch and a ranger comes upon you, it’s easy to say, ‘I was just moving them to take a photo.’ That puts us in a difficult spot because any criminal could say that they were just moving them to take a better photo. That really sounds kind of sketchy,” Neeck said.

The debate will continue. Although Desjardin paid the fine because it was too much trouble to return from San Francisco to Eureka to contest it in court, he intends to send a letter to the head of the National Park Service reporting the incident and the “unreasonable attitudes of park rangers to innocent users of the parks and how the letter of the law does not include fungi.” Desjardin said the letter also will be signed by the current presidents of the Mycological Society of America and the International Mycological Association.

On the brighter side, a month later Desjardin is in better spirits about North Coast research.

“I spent the weekend in Jackson State Forest (with permits!) in Mendocino County with 75 students from SFSU, UC Berkeley and UC Davis,” he told the Triplicate by email. “It was one of the best collecting years I have seen in over a decade. We found over 200 species in great abundance, including a number of rarely encountered species. It was fantastic.”