Parks under pressure as foraging goes mainstream

While the cool temperatures and fall rain have brought a bounty of brightly coloured mushrooms to wooded areas in Metro Vancouver's regional parks, amateur pickers searching out prized edible, wild mushrooms on parkland may not know they're breaking the law.

"Anybody coming to a regional park site and taking any vegetation would be in violation of bylaw 1048," says Mitch Sokalski, area manager for Metro Vancouver Regional Parks. "We see it as extracting a resource in a park where plants depend on one another to retain the integrity of the ecosystem."

With most of the wooded area near Vancouver marked as a regional park, ecological reserve or private land and slapped with a ban on removing any vegetation, it’s hard to find a spot to pick mushrooms legally.

Park patrollers step up their game in parks such as Pacific Spirit and Lynn Headwaters during the prime mushroom season, Sokalski says, with violators who are caught possibly facing a fine of $100. First-time offenders usually get a warning and must hand over their haul; patrollers dump the mushrooms back to the forest floor.

Most people breaking the bylaw in Vancouver are casual pickers, snatching up the occasional chanterelle mushroom for dinner. The prized fungi sell for between $8 and $20 per pound at farmers markets, depending on the time of year.

Sarah Parker's interest in foraging was sparked by a visit to Italy, where her husband's great-uncle introduced the pair to mushroom picking. After moving to B.C. she picked up a few reference books, attended events hosted by the local mycological (fungi) society and began roaming the woods.

Parker says she didn't realize until recently that it's illegal to forage in the parks — not that that's made her stop picking in protected areas near her Port Moody, B.C., home.

"Where we go, it's pretty remote. I don't think I'm disturbing too much of the woods," she says. "I try to be respectful of where I am and where I'm going."

Terry Taylor, a Vancouver botanist and one of the region's most respected experts on fungi, says the greatest impact occurs in heavily trafficked urban parks where adventurous foragers damage the soil and ground moss.

"There's an invisible network that ties everything together," he says. "Think of it as a construction crew that's building stuff up, paired with a demolition crew that's breaking things apart, sending them back into the soil to be used by the other fungi to cycle through the system."

The advent of commercial mushroom picking spoiled the fun for recreational pickers, Taylor says. "Years ago, very few people were going out picking."

Officials are also worried about legal responsibility if an individual who gets sick from collecting wild mushrooms accuses the jurisdiction of not providing proper warning. "It may seem a little extreme, but there are people out there suing parks for hiking injuries," he says.

Metro Vancouver doesn't keep track of how many people are intercepted by patrollers in its regional parks, Sokalski says. "It's a seasonal problem where we see mostly individuals coming in with little plastic or paper bags and taking out the chanterelles."