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Showing results for tags 'Bears eating mushrooms?'.
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Today I took a hike in the local mountains, not expecting to find any mushrooms because there have only been a few brief showers since early July. However, when I neared a popular viewpoint, I began to notice quite a few Russulas in the area, many of them R. xerampolina, which is a decent edible. The mushrooms were quite noticeable because many of them had been disturbed: turned over and broken. After I looked at them more closely, I could see that the stems had been removed from many of the larger mushrooms. At first I thought that some other mushroom pickers had been cutting them and discarding them because they were wormy, but the stems seemed to be broken off, not cut with a knife. I wandered away from the trail and started picking nice buttons of the shrimp Russulas, which were quite abundant. Many of them were wormy, but there were still plenty of worm-free specimens. I noticed that the worms were concentrated in the stems; the caps were a lot less wormy. So I figure that bears were the likely suspects eating the Russula stems. They must have been after the worms contained inside. The disturbed Russulas went on for a long way, until I hiked down to a lower elevation where there were fewer mushrooms. Since the critters were only eating the larger, older mushrooms, that left many nice, young buttons for me to harvest; and the partially eaten larger mushrooms were typically turned over so that you could see the white gills from far away. It was really easy to spot them and then search for buttons nearby. I've never found so many good shrimp Russulas before. In the process I also found one perfect specimen of Boletus mirabilis, which is the first one I've seen this season. The photo below shows the typical appearance of the damaged Russulas.