I’ve hunted morel mushrooms for most of my 65 years, and I’ve heard all the advice.
Look for dead elms. Look on the south side of hills first. Look in apple orchards.
The hard part is actually seeing the sponge-shaped delicacies. They are a brownish yellow or sometimes gray that seems to blend in like a ghost on the forest floor. Tuck them under some May apples, ferns or other understory, and it’s like Mr. Magoo trying to find his glasses.
Morels are so delicious they should never be compared to ordinary canned pizza mushrooms. When rolled in flour or egg and cracker crumbs (the two traditional breadings), then pan-fried and seasoned with salt and pepper, they rival the greatest delicacies of the ages.
This is why I got very excited when a strange ad for mushroom-finding eyeglasses popped up on Facebook. Cleverly named “Fungeyes,” the maker claims they make it easier to spot wild morels and more. This deserved further investigation. So I called the company in Finleyville, Pennsylvania, (a Pittsburgh suburb) and talked to inventor Justin Fowler for the skinny on Fungeyes.
“I like going to new places and exploring,” the 47-year-old inventor and entrepreneur said.
For about 40 years, he’s enjoyed finding and eating morels but doesn’t simply return to his honey holes like most schroomers.
Fowler made his fortune at the tender age of 22 as the inventor of a synthetic adhesive for artificial turf called STA-1000, made at his Sports Turf Direct company in a Pittsburgh suburb. The last thing he needed was another project, but this self-proclaimed “MacGyver” began eyeing different colors of lenses after working with a buddy on some welding shields.
Another friend had a sunglasses business and supplied him with various colors of lenses Fowler tinkered with until he came up with the perfect combination that eliminates the whites, yellows and browns of a morel to make them visually pop.
“It took me two years to get the right lens color, but it took me six more years to get the clarity right,” he said. “Everybody sees color and depth differently.”
A few with certain types of color blindness may find his Fungeyes ineffective, but that’s why he offers a 30-day money-back guarantee and a lifetime warranty on every pair.
They are not sunglasses and definitely not polarized. Polarized lenses eliminate glare and are ideal for fishing but not good for morel hunting, because they decrease depth perception. His lenses actually increase depth perception.
Trap shooters often use different lens colors to help see the clay targets pop out from the sky background. Yellow, pink, blue and other colors are used in different weather conditions. This is the principle behind Fungeyes.
He initially made about 20 pairs for family and friends, and they all said he had to bring them to market.
He went kicking and screaming into this new venture.
His website, www.fungeyes.com, has a video that explains the ideas behind the lenses, but what most impressed me about his site was the vast amount of morel hunting tips.
“There are so many myths,” he said of morel hunting.
Dead elms, particularly dead slippery elms in his area surrounding his 88-acre woods, will yield morels for a few years, but not forever. Old apple orchards can be good. His all-time best yield was near a giant oak that had been struck by lightning.
“We spent four hours on our hands and knees clipping,” he said of the 44-pound haul.
But the real key is soil temperature. Morels can be found in soil from 50-60 degrees, and he recommended getting a soil thermometer at any garden store. This is also the soil temperature when dandelions and lilacs typically bloom (two old-school morel hunting indicators).
Keep your eyes looking down at the ground, not up at the trees.
“Every area has microclimates,” he said.
A warm spot might yield morels, while a nearby cold spot may not.
Although designed to find morels, Fungeyes have also made it easier to spot shed deer antlers, rocks (such as agates), sand dollars, seashells and even bones. After a fruitless search for human bones with black light, one Tennessee investigator used a pair of Fowler’s glasses to find the bones and solve a homicide.
Letters of praise from new morel or shed antler hunters are his real reward, he said.
A Scheels employee saw the glasses at the Iowa Deer Classic and after a test run at the Des Moines store, all Scheels stores nationwide now carry Fungeyes, he said.
Will these glasses alone help you find yellow fungi gold?
“You need way more than our glasses,” he said.
That includes a little luck and a lot of patience.
Ross Bielema is a freelance writer from New London and owner of Wolf River Concealed Carry LLC. Contact him at Ross@wolfriverccw.com.
Vision quest: Fungeyes glasses make morels pop
