By Daniel Butler, author and forager
A BBC Devon online article published today (3 November) has come up with one of the usual anti-foraging pieces – clearly parroting a press release put out by the local Woodland Trust:
Under Section 4 of the Theft Act 1968, it is "perfectly legal to forage for fruit, foliage, flowers, and fungi on any land, provided they are wild and collected strictly for personal use", but "foraging becomes criminal theft if you pick wild plants for commercial sale or reward without permission".
Now, the first part of this is true for personal use cannot be cannot be a criminal act, but the the Act does not stipulate it becomes criminal if commercial: it is actually silent here. Certainly many bodies choose this interpretation, but this is not borne out by facts.
Firstly, I can only find three prosecutions for commercial harvesting. In each the defendant openly admitted they were picking for sale. The first two cases took place some 150 years ago and the magistrates ruled fungi were effectively ‘Acts of God’ because they are not planted or nurtured, so cannot belong to the landowner. In the most recent episode in 2004, the judge also threw the case out and awarded huge costs against the Forestry Commission.
The second point is that if picking for sale is a criminal offence, every autumn hundreds of WI members become villains when they pick blackberries for sale as jam on charity stalls.
This BBC report ends with the Woodland Trust manager saying: "I have seen commercial pickers, dropped off in mini buses with bags for life, laden heavy with mushrooms and they are going through and they are wiping out everything on the path edges they can find, trampling the forest floor."
If this is true and picking commercially is a criminal offence, why hasn’t he whipped out his phone to gather evidence and to mount a prosecution?
West Country National Trust signage
Photograph: Exmoor Natural History Society
A couple of days earlier there was similar outrage on Exmoor when local conservationists exploded with:
It was disappointing to find - regardless of the National Trust notice . . . a stash of foraged fungi which had been hidden in the pathside undergrowth - presumably for later collection after potential witness members of the public had left the area. . . Several kilos of fungal stash probably doesn’t quite equate to responsible foraging for personal use.
Again, this displays both legal and fungal ignorance. Firstly, there is the Theft Act (see above). Secondly, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that picking a mushroom harms the mycelium, any more than picking blackberries or apples harms the bramble or tree. It is also perfectly reasonable for an individual forager to pick a large quantity of mushrooms – these can be taken home and preserved by pickling, freezing and drying. Finally, during the 1990s the British Mycological Society suggested foragers might want to restrict themselves to just 3kgs per person, per forage (even though the BMS conceded there was no scientific basis for this limit). When the Forestry Commission attempted to restrict foraging in the New Forest in 2015, it also adopted a 3kg per person limit – although the next year it dropped this in favour of a complete ban. (This completely failed by the way.)
Routine forestry operations are devastating to fungi and the woodland understorey
Photograph: Author’s own
Perhaps a more sensible response from members of the public came from The Forest of Dean in early October:
‘I know we live in a working forest and I'm not looking to start an argument but am I the only one to see the irony in a post made by FE today concerning fungi. It said "No licking, no picking, no kicking............If you're out exploring this autumn, enjoy fungi with your eyes and your camera. Leaving them undisturbed helps protect the many species that wildlife and woodland ecosystems depend on."
I live close to [this site] . . . it usually [has] an abundance of various fungi. Virtually nothing this year! . . . Just a field of fallen timber made to be a road for the loggers.
Mustn't "kick or pick" but apparently felling and crushing doesn't damage the species that "wildlife and woodland ecosystems depend on"!
FE really need to think about the messages they send out!
This post was echoed by scores of other locals who were outraged by the blatant hypocrisy of Forest Enterprise.