Mushrooms can’t run away. But they don’t wait either. That’s why Timo Hans puts his foot down when he drives up the narrow streets of the Hunsrück. The tall Rhinelander crouches behind the wheel of his off-road vehicle like a ten-year-old in a bobby car. He shouts against the noise of the diesel engine. “It’s fifty meters deep”he shouts, nodding down the bluff to his left that’s so close you could spit on it. He grins and speeds up again.
Timo Hans is the district forester of Damscheid, a municipality in Rhineland-Palatinate on the Middle Rhine. Some days he can see the Loreley Rock in the morning sun. Today fog hangs over the valley. “I started here 15 years ago”calls Hans into the wind. “And since my first day it’s been about defending the forest against outside attacks.”
The all-terrain vehicle rushes through a tunnel of hanging branches. There is a layer of orange-brown-red leaves stuck to the wet asphalt. “What some people do here…” He rumbles grimly through a particularly deep pothole. “…that’s criminal.”
“You saw her here last week”
Hans has to protect his forest from timber robbers and even treasure hunters. They can be expected in any season. Between August and October, people invade the Damscheider Forest who are particularly aggressive: mushroom thieves.
“You saw her here last week.” Hans turns onto a side path and brings the all-terrain vehicle to a stop. To the right of the path there is a spruce forest. The ground around the dark trunks appears to have been swept away. Hardly any undergrowth, ferns or bushes. Just a flat carpet of moss.
“Best conditions for porcini mushrooms”says Hans and gets out. Boletus edulis – its scientific name – is the favorite prey of mushroom thieves. When resold, a kilo brings in 20 euros or more. “Even ten large specimens can be worth a hundred euros.” Hans speaks more quietly now. Like an investigator at a crime scene.
His eyes jump back and forth between the spruce trees, his body seems tense. Then he takes a big step over the ditch that separates the path and the forest.
Baskets and food buckets full of mushrooms
It is quiet and dim between the spruce trees. The damp moss smacks under the forester’s sturdy shoes. At first he walks slowly and carefully, then he relaxes. “They grazed everything.” Not an animal, not a person or even a porcini mushroom are in sight.
Hans still remembers his last encounter with a gang of mushroom thieves. “There were eight or nine people. When I saw them, they were still widely scattered. After I performed there, they all came together.” As he talks, he walks deeper into the forest, checking the condition of the roots, bark and treetops.
“Some of them were really hostile to me. What would occur to me is that people would only collect mushrooms here. I always tried to keep a certain distance because everyone has a knife in their hand. And if possible, stand on the edge of this group so that you don’t have anyone behind you.”
The situation was very unpleasant for him. He accompanied the people to their vehicle and asked them to open the trunk. “Which they willingly did. If they hadn’t, I would have called the police. There were baskets and even food buckets full of mushrooms in the car.”
The Nature Conservation Act allows a maximum of one kilogram of mushrooms to be collected per person per day. There were significantly more in the trunk. “I then asked the group to unload the baskets and buckets and take them into the forest. There the people then had to dump them, distribute them and work them into the forest floor.” This means the biological material remains in the forest and can serve as food for insects.
Mushroom thieves face heavy fines
Situations like this happen every mushroom season. People keep contacting Hans who notice groups with headlamps walking through the woods before dawn. Asking them is often a coincidence and is now too dangerous for Hans. “I wouldn’t do it today like I did last time. People seem to be becoming more and more unpredictable.”
Two years ago, the North Rhine-Westphalia Forest Farmers’ Association sounded the alarm. Chairman Philipp Freiherr Heereman saw himself left alone with the problem of fungal gangs: “The legal and regulatory situation is clear. To protect our forests, we don’t need new laws, but rather consistent enforcement”he demanded in a kind of fire letter.
“The foresters”Heereman said in the letter, “well-organized mushroom-picking troops alone cannot control the situation, and the call for a permanent police presence in the forest is purely theoretical.” Only concerted actions by all law enforcement forces from the police, municipalities and the state forest and wood company could help.
“The trade in mushrooms is unchecked”says Heereman today. “The guest in the restaurant is happy. The well-organized search parties are a fright for deer, rabbits and wild cats.” He didn’t get any real help even after his letter. “Regionally it was possible to close the forest. Signs were put up. But that was it.” It is questionable whether help will come from Düsseldorf or even Berlin in the 2025 election year. “Poor mushroom!”
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The demand to place mushrooms under police protection sounds just as absurd as the cases in the context “Mushroom crime” become public. For example, at the beginning of October, several collectors tried to smuggle over 70 kilograms of mushrooms from the Black Forest across the border towards Switzerland. Customs caught them red-handed and imposed fines of over 7,000 euros. In the fall of 2023, a mushroom hunter threatened a forester with his knife and then ran over his foot with his car. In 2022, an older man even took the forest guard who caught him collecting unauthorized amounts to court for assault. The trial ended with the forester’s acquittal.
What these stories have in common is an attitude of mind that also robs Timo Hans of a lot of time and nerves: “The forest is sometimes seen as a self-service shop. People do not see themselves as guests, but rather as masters of trees, bushes and mushrooms. He can use them as he pleases.”
“I’m crazy about mushrooms”
The forester has walked a circle and is now back on the path. “There is another area deeper in the forest”he says and gets back on his all-terrain vehicle. “They could still be there.” He now steers the forest buggy over unpaved, muddy paths that lead up the Hunsrück with a slight incline. First the trees become denser, then they thin out and Hans stops at one of the highest points in the region. Here you are more than 500 meters above the waters of the Rhine. And there is actually a lonely figure wandering between the rows of trees.
The man’s name is Michael and he says about himself: “I’m crazy about mushrooms.” But he is not someone who steals the fruiting bodies (that’s what experts call the visible part of a mushroom) in order to sell them. Even consumption seems to be secondary to him. “My passion for mushrooms, one could almost say obsession, started in childhood.” As a little boy, he went searching in this same forest with his grandfather.
Today he attends mushroom congresses and conferences where experts give lectures on the more than 70,000 species identified in Germany. “If you really know where exactly to look, you can still find a porcini mushroom.” Michael has a wicker basket with him. And therein actually lies: Boletus edulis. He crawled into a thicket to do it, he says with a grin. Of course, someone who’s just looking for a quick buck wouldn’t do something like that.
“It’s a shame that there’s so much robbery going on here”he says. But this shouldn’t be harmful at all, as a recent study from Switzerland showed. It makes no difference how recklessly the harvesting takes place. Next year all the mushrooms will come back. Forester Hans, who has been listening patiently so far, has to disagree. “That may be so. But there are microorganisms that feed specifically on the fruiting body of the porcini mushroom, for example. Such overexploitation becomes a problem for them. And that can then disrupt the ecosystem of the entire forest.”
After a short discussion, the forest protector and the mushroom madman say goodbye to each other. When Hans gets into his forest vehicle, he says: “That’s just the thing: everyone who comes to the forest has their own perspective and wants something different from the forest. I have to bring it all together.” Then he gets back into his all-terrain vehicle and puts the pedal to the metal.
Source: Stern
