(soft music) - And you can see these gills here, how pretty is that?

If I didn't know what this was, I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna get a piece of black paper and white paper side by side.

- Goodbye.

(kissing) We give it a (kissing) woo.

The muckets are back, the muckets are back!

(soft upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funding for this program was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, Live Wide Open, the more people know about West Central Minnesota the more reasons they have to live here, more at livewideopen.com.

Western Minnesota Prairie Waters, where peace, relaxation and opportunities await (instrumental music) - [Instructor] It's mid-April in Minnesota and winter just won't go away.

The late spring is a setback to those eager to head to the woods and find morels, ramps and fiddleheads.

But that doesn't dampen the enthusiasm of forager, Nicole Zempel.

she's out tracking the upper Minnesota river valley to show us what's coming alive.

(soothing music) - Okay, check it out, scarlet cup.

One of the first one, ones of the day here but you're gonna see hundreds of them.

Some of them are just so pretty and I never get tired of seeing them all different shapes, all different sizes.

This is so fun.

So they always grow on twigs and they are one of the first mushrooms to fruit after a winter and they oftentimes, when there's snow on the ground you're still gonna see scarlet cups.

They're a cool weather mushroom and they're just gorgeous.

Inedible mushroom, but I think they're so pretty.

Like I don't have the heart to harvest them and they're not like a sort after edible I hear that they taste kind of nutty like a rich earthy flavor and more scarlet cups.

I told you we're gonna see like hundreds.

Ah, perfect, all right?

So it's a scarlet cup and you can see here, the mycelium that it's fruiting from.

(soft upbeat music) And we need mycelium, there would be, dare I say almost no life on this planet if it were not for mycelium.

90% of our plants are here maybe even a little bit over because of their connection with mycelium.

So it'll connect different roots of plants to trees and they communicate their needs.

If you've seen pictures of under like underground with the mycelium and the little pings of light, very similar to our own brains.

And actually, a tree says, "Hey, I need this," that mycelium picks up that ping and boom it sends it or a plant needs a certain something, boom, that mycelium is gonna send it.

These are mock oysters, they can be smelly.

Apparently they're not going to harm you but they're not recommended as an edible.

And you can see these gills here, how pretty is that?

And this particular mushroom produces a pink spore.

So if I didn't know what this was, I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna get a piece of black paper and white paper side by side.

Then I'm just gonna put it in this case, gill side down, maybe put a glass around it and then check back, half hour or so to see what color those spores are.

And you want the black white paper because if you have a white spore, it's only gonna show up on the black paper and then I'm gonna look the spore color up in a book.

And also when I'm researching the mushrooms, in the description, it lists spore color.

(soft music) People always ask me if a mushroom's not edible, what's it good for?

And I'm like, well, they have jobs to do, right?

And one of those jobs is decomposing wood and you can see just how soft and crumbly it is.

And that basically once it's done decomposing it's gonna be nutrient rich top soil.

So it keeps the forest healthy.

I'm fascinated just by the decomposing wood.

I think it's incredibly beautiful.

And I can truly, gimme an hour, I will sit here and just look at these stumps and find all kinds of life in them, oh.

Some old turkey tails.

See, we didn't walk away very far and look at all this stuff we're finding.

Oh, here's a better scarlet cup.

Oh, right next to a ramp.

There's another ramp, oh, couple of them.

And we were in a hot bed of like ramps.

There, there.

(soft instrumental music) I only take one leaf per ramp plant.

And I stagger my harvest because ramps like most things are really threatened.

Just loss of habitat or over harvesting.

And I think humans kind of have that tendency like, wow, these are great, they're good, they're there.

Let's just get 'em all.

But it takes five to seven years for one of these plants to produce seed.

So if I were to like, dig this up, take the bulb, that's it.

It's gone from the forest forever.

And then something that I love even more than ramps are nettles.

And I used to avoid them.

I just thought, you know what?

No, it hurts to harvest them.

Finally, a friend had prepared some dish with nettles in 'em and I was like, "Wow, this is amazing, these are so good."

I have discovered that I think they are my favorite plant as far as taste, anything in nature, there are medicinal benefits or anything that you forage is gonna be really healthy for you.

But nettles are one of the most nutrient rich plants on the planet.

People are often not afraid of 'em, but they might avoid 'em like I used to because they sting you.

They have little fine hairs that are like hollow needles.

And so if you walk through a patch of nettles you're probably gonna come out with some rashes or walts.

But if you kind of harvest when young too like this, but in that upward manner.

I like to put them, just scald them in some boiling water, and then they're not pokey anymore.

I put them in pasta dishes, soups, you can do tea with them, all of the rhizomes and the root system, it's the whole plant is edible from top to bottom.

(soft music) - [Instructor] In the weeks ahead, Nicole will be searching for other spring delicacies.

- The fiddlehead should start popping.

Next week our temps are supposed to kind of consistently warm up, so, you know, 50s or above kind of consistently they'll start to pop.

I take only ostrich ferns.

And a lot of them, people have growing in their yard.

They can forage in their yard and they don't even know it.

'Cause I want my fiddleheads to keep coming, I'm only gonna take two or three little fiddleheads per plant and let the rest just grow.

Parmesan and crusted fiddleheads is what I make.

And I like 'em a variety of ways, but that is my favorite.

There's something called the wild Prairie onion, those and again, most any of these wild plants they are threatened due to habitat loss.

If I harvest, let's say a wild Prairie onion I'm gonna cut the base off and put the roots back into the ground.

Then there's wild garlic coming up.

That'll be all in the next month.

We'll start to see the Prairie onions, the Prairie garlic and then the mushroom season kicks in too, dryad's saddle or pheasant back, morel mushrooms, oysters, they'll fruit, morel are excellent.

They are, you wait all year for mushroom season like to really kick in with the morels.

So it's the excitement factor, but also they are so, so tasty.

I make a really good morel white gravy, I put that over like pork chops, it's excellent.

- [Instructor] Besides morels, chanterelles are one of Nicole's favorite shrooms.

- They're a great dessert mushroom.

They smell like a spring breeze and they start fruiting July, August and take you right into fall.

I make chanterelle cake.

I know people make chanterelle ice cream.

So it's, oh, and they're great in pasta dishes too.

(soft instrumental music) So jelly fungus is super popular in Asian cuisine.

Super, super iron rich.

It's very good for you, it does not taste.

It does not smell, you can eat it raw.

After a good rain, these will plump right up.

And then when they are plump I like to just cut them off at the base and I'm gonna go home and throw those maybe in a stir fry.

I don't know, man, there's just plants up the wazoo, fungus up the wazoo.

You can eat forged meals all year long.

People ask me, well, I bet you're bored because it's winter.

And I'm like, "What are you talking about?"

Like if it's, 20 degrees, that's comfortable for me and know when I'm out there.

And there is always something.

You can find enoki, it's a cooler weather mushroom.

The wild version is velvet foot.

That looks like a burst of fire.

There are about anywhere between three and 5 million species of mushroom yet to be learned about and discovered.

We know of right now or science has been studying and knows 80,000 ish species.

So you figure that's mind blowing what's out there and yet to be discovered (soft instrumental music) (guitar music) - [Instructor] Nicole has harvested about 20 varieties of mushrooms and is familiar with dozens more edibles.

But the fun guy bug didn't bite until 10 years ago.

- And at first, like I didn't give mushrooms a second thought, and I never noticed mushrooms.

Then I bought my home and it butts up to some Prairie land.

And so my first passion and love was plants.

And so I learned to ID those plants and some of those plants that I was IDing on the Prairie led me into the woods and I was IDing plants in the woods, and I saw, I don't know what the first mushroom I saw was but I was like captivated by it and intrigued.

And then I just went crazy full bore down that rabbit hole of learning about mushrooms.

- [Instructor] The self-taught forger takes photos of wild mushrooms and plants, then uses books to ID them.

When the Nicole spends countless hours alone in the woods, she doesn't keep her knowledge to herself.

She especially enjoys introducing young people to the magical kingdom in the woods like the tiny horn fungus beetle, the male lives its entire life on an artist's conk mushroom and will fight off any other males at enter its home.

Her passion is infectious and she is frequently asked to lead community workshops.

- I quickly learned like the deeper you dive into the land and all that it has to offer us, like the land is so giving, I always feel like it never takes it just knows how to give.

Too with the uncertainties now, like in supply chains, food, inflation, knowing that I can come out here and create a meal for free, it's kind of cool.

And when I'm out on the land, whether it be woods or Prairie, I am not thinking about anything other than the sounds or what I am seeing.

And I come here and all is well, all is right.

You know, and I learn so much.

(instrumental music) (instrumental music) - [Instructor] DNR river college's, Mike Davis, has been studying freshwater mussels for 35 years.

The native species that once covered Minnesota lakes and river beds was almost wiped out in the early 1900s by pearl hunters and button makers.

On a chilly April day, Mike and his crew are out with a bucket of young muckets that they will reintroduce to a Cannon River tributary.

(instrumental music) - We are on the Straight River in Medford, Minnesota at the City Park, a place I visited for the first time in 1987, doing a mussel survey of the Cannon River system.

And the cool thing I found here were a bunch of old shells of a mussel species that no longer lives here.

So the mucket mussel had at one time been abundant in the river, here and on downstream, but it was gone.

The only place I found live ones downstream of Northfield and upstream of the dam at Byllesby.

And so that gave me the idea way back then that we could get mussels from that part of the river and bring them back to the areas in the river where they have disappeared.

And they filter water like crazy, removing all kinds of contaminants.

And then one of their best, most favorite foods is bacteria, E. coli bacteria, for which many of our rivers are now listed as contaminated with.

- [Instructor] For mussels to grow, each species must have a host fish that carries larva until it transforms into a juvenile.

- The fish that would normally bring them in can't swim here because of the dams that are on the river in various places.

And so that brings us to where we are today, a historic time, 'cause we are now using female mussels from that part of the Cannon River, raising the babies in a lab and then rearing them to a good size at the Waterville Fish Hatchery.

And today we're gonna release some of those here into the Straight River and restart the population that disappeared perhaps.

a hundred years ago or more.

We've tagged them and measured them, and we're ready to now release them here into the Straight River where we hope they will quickly burrow themselves into the bottom and set up their lives and grow up and reproduce and spread up and down the river and make everybody happy, especially me.

(soft soothing music) Free of the mussels.

They've been stuck in that nafta little basket for two years.

- The muckets.

- Mucket babies.

Goodbye.

(kissing) I give it a (kissing) woo!

The muckets are back, the muckets are back.

(audience applauding) (soft upbeat music) Part of their disappearance had to do with exploitation by the settlers that came in.

Somebody discovered a pearl, so everybody ran to the river and started butchering our plums or mussels looking for pearls, which were extremely rare, of course.

And then a guy from Germany figured out that you could make buttons from the shells that were very beautiful and durable.

And so he started buying shells and then people went back to the river and harvested for that.

So they depleted the populations to the point where it wasn't worth looking for 'em anymore.

Which means they weren't completely eliminated but their populations were very much subdued.

Interesting thing about the harvest was that the guy that invented or discovered you could make nice buttons out of the shells, ended up being swindled out of his fortune.

And he ended poor and while bathing in a river as a homeless man, cut his foot on a mussel shell, got infected and died from it.

So the mussels got him back in the end.

Revenge, who knows if it's really true, but it's a great story.

Never ruin a good story with the actual truth.

But then at about the same time, everybody threw everything in the river in those days, including the flush toilets, when they were invented, the pipes went straight to rivers and it polluted the water so badly that some species actually were wiped out completely.

It's like the triple whammy.

You know you got the harvest, the pollution and the dams all combining, I guess, to get rid of the mussels in the river, and we're trying to undo as much of that as we can.

(soothing music) - [Instructor] For mussels to grow, each species must have a host fish that carries larva until it transforms into a juvenile.

- Well, St. Croix is our reference stream for the upper Midwest because it still retains the species.

We think historically we're here, about 40 species in the St. Croix River.

There are several species that we come get here that you can't find anywhere else.

And we're reintroducing the snuffbox into the urban river of St. Minneapolis, St. Paul, in the Mississippi, so it's really cool, is the winged maple leaf that we come and get here and we've been releasing them into the Mississippi and fish and wildlife services reintroduced them to the Chippewa River in Wisconsin.

So to propagate these mussels for reintroduction, we first have to know the host fish.

- So we determine what the host fishes are by going out and getting female mussels that we're working on and taking the larva that they're brooding, they'll brewed little clam shaped larva in their gills.

And so we can bring those back to the lab and either extract them by just flushing them out with a syringe filled with water or in sometimes, some species we allow them to release on their own.

We have a variety of fish species in our lab that we use to test and see whether they're compatible with the mussel larva.

(soft music) - This is a hatchery raised eel.

He has now become one of our pets, his name is Bob.

Another unique fish that we have in the lab is actually a sturgeon.

And then the stars of the show.

For snuffbox, we utilize log perch.

It is a soul host fish.

Snuffbox mussel is the mussel that are also referred to as darter trappers.

They open up their shell just slightly and lure.

And as a log purchase foraging for food, their head can get clamped by this mussel.

- Well, that's one of the cool things about mussels that, deception is the way a lot of the females go about their business.

There's an extension on the back end of the pocket book female, she'll position into the substrate and expand this lure that looks remarkably like a small fish.

And then she'll even push the brooding gills out in between this lure and flap the fish to give it life, trying to and entice a bass or a walleye to come and strike the lure.

And then the gills are ruptured and fish will suck in the liberated larva and that's how it happens.

Other other species will fool a fish by releasing small little packages of larva that look like fish food.

- [Instructor] Once host fish are inoculated with larvae, they're kept in a recirculating tank system, that Madeline design.

When the pin-head size juveniles drop off their host fish, they're collected in nets, rinsed through sieves, counted by volume, and grown in containers with recirculating river water.

(soft music) - We take these containers of mussels out every three to four weeks, we'll assess the mussels for size and condition and clean the system, and then put them back in.

Native mussels at a certain point, will start to develop byssus.

Byssus will help a juvenile mussel hold onto, a rock or some hard object that will help hold them in place until they're able to continue their growth and develop.

So, in culture, they become just this beautiful matted mess of juveniles.

In nature though, you wouldn't necessarily find them clumped together like this, but because we're holding a container with up to 1600 mussels in it, we get this nice concoction.

- [Lady] And then we have to separate them all.

- Yeah, fun part.

- [Lindsay] And then we get our little fingers going.

- [Instructor] The baby mucket mussels are spread out in rearing ponds, including the DNRs Waterville Fish Hatchery.

- [Lindsay] They spend a year, year and 1/2, two years out there before we get them back out, and they're ready for tagging and releasing.

(soothing music) - In the Cannon River system so far, we've released over 1800 mucket mussels as juveniles at three different sites.

And as the fish pick up the larva from where we're reintroducing at these sites, they can swim up and down the river for miles and then doing that they'll seed the river with more and more and mu mussels again.

And hopefully, the population will explode into this.

But it probably once was, a lot of our were literally paved with these mussel beds.

- If we were to come back in five or in 10 years and see smaller juveniles or smaller mussels that are unmarked, those could be a representation that there was a successful reproduction effort.

And that they're reproducing naturally which is our end goal.

(soothing music) - [Narrator] True or false, goldfish can survive cold winters in fresh water lakes and streams.

True, goldfish are a cold water species and will thrive and quickly reproduce without any predator.

Like their relative., the common carp, goldfish will search for food in pond and lake bottoms, where they stir up sediment and pull up plants.

Goldfish can grow to the size of footballs and will rob native fish of nutrients and impact water quality.

We can prevent goldfish from invading our waters.

Do not release live pet fish into ponds, lakes, streams or rivers, and do not flush them down the toilet.

Donate your unwanted fish to a pet store or school or advertise that you have fish to give away for free.

If you wish to dispose of unwanted fish you mainly contact a local veterinarian for advice.

Funding for this segment was provided by the Aquatic Invasive Species Task Forces of Wright, Meeker, Yellow Medicine, Lac Qui Parle and Big Stone counties.

(soft music) Funding for this program was provided by, the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, Live Wide Open, the more our people know about West Central Minnesota the more reasons they have to live here, more at livewideopen.com.

Western Minnesota Prairie Waters where a peace, relaxation, and opportunities await - Christmas gift from my awesome neighbors.

It is the nicest mushroom knife that I have.