Help Locating a Lobster Mushroom in the Fraser Valley

Can this be done?

What I know of them is that they are a parastical infection of other mushrooms. What is the ecology that brings this to pass? are they more common in certain areas or terrain and fauna?

I badly want to see one and perhaps.... eat one!


Thanks for all your help!

 

I don't know any specific areas in the Fraser Valley where you can find lobster mushrooms, but I doubt that anyone will provide that kind of detail. Regarding habitat, I would look for them in a fairly mature forest of mainly conifers, especially Douglas-Fir trees. I've only found them in a few places near Vancouver, but in each location Chanterelles are present. The other mushroom to look for is Russula brevipes, which is the most common host of the parasitic fungus that turns the Russula into a lobster mushroom. If you don't mind looking farther away than the Fraser Valley, I can provide a location. Send me a PM if you are interested.

 

If you don't see any Russula's, you are in the wrong spot.

 

Ah, and I understand that R. brevipes is the typical host.

 

Last year I took a friend out mushroom foraging, her first time out on a harvesting type mushroom hunt. She's a pretty clean-living person and correspondingly has an excellent sense of smell. She'd never hunted for lobster mushrooms before, I don't think she'd ever seen them before, but she found the sign of them before I did, by noticing the smell of seafood in the air. We followed the smell, she found the first one, and then we found about 20 of them.
:-)
frog

 

There are usually a few dozen (or more in good years) of them on the hillside behind my property each year, and they grow alongside--or very near--chanterelles. Typically (for my area anyway) I find them almost exclusively in second growth douglas fir forests where the forest floor is open (ie. relatively free of undergrowth) and moss covered. They are delicious, in my opinion, though I find that by the time they emerge, large numbers of them have been eaten at by bugs, and the tops are a bugger to clean. I prefer them to chanterelles, though: they are very firm and crunchy even when fried.

 

Fantastic information everyone.

Thank you so much for helping me with this. I mainly forage for Chanterelles and Love the second growth douglas fir forest for that reason. Clean and easy to navigate and its like walking on a carpet.

Its just been so dry this year that I have hardly found chaterelles let alone anything else. only a hat full so far on 3 trips out.

Need to locate another patch or area. I am going to try davis lake this weekend if possible. Anyone know of it?

 

We checked out the Davis Lake area a few years ago. It has Chanterelles, but not an abundance. The only potential edible that was of vague interest was the presence of a fair number of Grisettes, Amanita vaginata, one of the few Amanitas that is reasonably safe to eat. However, we were not interested; so we didn't try them.

Davis Lake is at a fairly low elevation; so it's currently likely to be just as bare of mushrooms as the rest of the Lower Mainland. The only place that I've found terrestrial mushrooms in this area lately has been high up in the North Shore Mountains. I guess that the late snowmelt combined with a few sparse showers provided enough moisture to bring them up.

One mushroom that I have been seeing is the Sulphur Shelf. They seem to be unaffected by dry conditions; it appears that rotten wood holds enough moisture throughout the summer. If you are interested in them, I found quite a few farther up the logging road that goes past Davis Lake.