Reiner Firnau is a mushroom seeker, as he says in the book, and so he would like to lead his companion blindfolded to his secret places here in the southern district. But he has to deactivate his mobile phone; otherwise he could save the secret location of the forest and return there. And then the Unterhachinger would probably become poisonous. He knows three enemies of mushroom pickers: worms, snails and other mushroom pickers, explains the 74-year-old Unterhachinger his caution, which he also takes when collecting.
He has focused his eye on red caps, birch mushrooms, porcini mushrooms and chanterelles. He prefers to keep his hands off other mushrooms, such as the pearl mushroom that peeks out of the mossy forest floor in front of him. “I won’t take it with me, it’s easy to confuse it with the deadly panther mushroom,” says the native Danube Swabian. A chestnut bolete is also allowed to stand, only right after the Federal Office for Radiation Protection recently issued an emphatic warning about radioactive fungi and explicitly named chestnuts in addition to the yellow-stemmed trumpet chanterelles and various snail species, as every year after Chernobyl.
“It looks bad with porcini mushrooms today,” the expert oracles – and should be proved right. The boletus, uncrowned king of the mushrooms, has made itself a bit rare this year, but there are a lot of foot soldiers around. And so Brigitte Fiedler, a certified mushroom consultant from Taufkirchen, already speaks of a “mixed mushroom year 2021”, although this is not yet over.
The morel season in spring was fantastic, as was the chanterelle season. “People couldn’t save themselves from Reherl,” says the expert, who, on her forays through the local forests, made a positive finding for her: “This year you are seeing more and more very rare mushrooms that are threatened with extinction,” says she cites as an example the golden-colored mica shake, which in older literature mostly rated as an excellent edible mushroom, but is now classified as a health hazard.
Only two kilograms per person may be picked. Two retirees weighed 15 kilos
Brigitte Fiedler, mushroom advisor to the Bavarian Mycological Society (BMG) since 2018, offers couples, families and companies mushroom tours, but you can also come to her with your own mushrooms so that she can recognize and sort out possible poisonous mushrooms with her trained eye. After all, of around 8000 types of mushrooms, only 100 are on the list of recommended edible mushrooms. The trend towards mushroom hunting has increased since the outbreak of the corona pandemic, as has the demand for her courses and seminars, she reports. This year she also saw more and more young people strolling through the forest with baskets. She has at least saved the health of a collector this year by removing pointed hunched rock heads, deadly poisonous agaric mushrooms, from a basket. She relieved another basket of a pointed-scaly umbrella, which the finder must have mistaken for a parasol. Severe gastrointestinal complaints have been spared this. Unfortunately, according to Fiedler, many mushroom hunters often come to her with a basket full of mushy, rotten mushrooms and when asked what they can eat of them, she has to answer: “Nothing at all.”
The mushroom consultant’s gaze goes beyond the mushrooms’ hats – she also has an eye on the well-being of the forest and its natural inhabitants. For example, she doesn’t go straight after sunrise, “that’s how early you disturb the game that is on the way home,” she says. And in her courses, she advises the participants that, according to the Bavarian Constitution, forest fruits may only be collected to the extent customary in the area, i.e. no more than two kilograms per person per day, and only one kilogram for protected species. Last year two pensioners were caught with 15 kilograms of porcini mushrooms. They should have kept two kilograms and had to pay a fine of 100 euros for the rest. And it also encourages collectors and walkers to remove rubbish from the forest. Gerrith Hinner, head of the Pullach forest district, reports that he often sees signs with inscriptions such as: “How would you find it if you were blindworms?” The Altkirchner forest farmer Johann Killer attaches importance to the statement that mushrooms are also tasty for the deer and have a very high value for the forest, because they supply the trees with water and minerals through their underground network and are therefore important for the forest ecosystem.
It is enough for one serving: Chanterelles, also called Reherl, are very popular with mushroom connoisseurs such as Unterhachinger Reiner Firnau.
(Photo: Claus Schunk)
Reiner Firnau is not one of the voracious people, he deliberately does not drive his car, but rather a bicycle to collect and also treats his secret places with care. As a nature conservation officer of the Austrian Alpine Club Warnsdorf-Krimml, he also sees himself as committed to diligence. He carefully reaches for a chanterelle. “I turn it out so as not to damage the mycelium,” he says. He leaves a single irritant (“breadcrumbs and fry them in butter!”). Now he carefully pushes a few twigs aside and three splendid chanterelles emerge. How could he see it? “I put the twigs over it myself a week ago,” he says and, a few meters away, covers chanterelles that are still too small with twigs – for next week’s harvest.
At the end of the short forest excursion, Reiner Firnau will set off home with around a pound of chanterelles. A boletus did not show up.