Hunting for the underground fungus delicacy with dogs ensures ripe truffles and minimum environmental impact – and it’s a great way to bond with a canine

Jason Swindle has already learned the best and hardest lesson that his dog can teach. “It’s about trust. River does the craziest things when we’re out here – she charges up cliffs or hillsides – and I have really just had to learn to trust her.”

This trust is perhaps even sweeter than the prize she helps him find beneath the forest floor: truffles.

River’s talent for truffle hunting – and the tail-wagging joy she finds in it – are more remarkable if you know that she only learned how to do it two years ago, when she was six. Swindle says that any dog can learn at any age. In fact, he says, “if we’d tried when she was younger she may not have done as well”.

Before her lessons, River was an ordinary family pet. Now she’s the heart of a growing business, Hound Found Oregon, in which together they search out truffles for sale, survey private land for them and lead curious gourmands out on forest forays.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest River at work. Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian

Like many successful truffle dogs, River is a labrador. Like the best of her breed, she’s equally happy at work, at play, or curled up in front of a home fire. She’s equally at home in the woods or in the suburbs.

As Swindle extols River’s virtues he kneels in front of a small furrow that she’s dug out in the needles, dead branches and arboreal trash that litters the floor of John Hafner’s Douglas fir plantation.

The hunt proceeds with a steady rhythm. River studiously follows her nose to a spot where she starts pawing and scratching at the dirt. Swindle, following close, rushes in before she can accidentally carve the fungus to bits with her flailing paws. He then sifts the earth with a dessert spoon.

Almost every time, he finds one or more ripe truffles, which range from the size of a pea to that of a new potato. Swindle adds the new finds to a zip-lock bag that fills up steadily and replaces the disturbed litter. Then River darts off through the pines in search of more.

The aroma that wafts up from the bag is at once redolent of many other things and utterly unique. It’s also something of a culinary Rorschach test.

When I breathed it in and later tasted it, shaved over scrambled eggs, I got the scents of the forest – pines, earth, clear air, musk and a high clear note of fresh chanterelles. It is a smell that brings European Perigords to mind only in order to mark the clear differences. Others compare it darkly to petroleum and rot.

The only place that anyone – man or dog – can sniff out an Oregon truffle is near the base of a Douglas fir tree. Tuber oregonense and Pseudotsuga menziesii have an arrangement honoured throughout the part of the world they share, which ranges west of the Cascade mountains, between the southern end of Oregon’s Willamette valley north to the shores of Puget sound.

It goes like this: young trees between five and 30 years old are colonised by the fungus, which mingles its roots with those of the tree. The fungus spreads much farther than a small fir tree’s feeder roots can, and supplants the conifer’s lack of root hairs.

The exchange is rich, essential and simple. The fungus brings back the water and nutrients that the fir needs to grow tall and strong. For its part, the tree deposits nourishing sugars that the truffle can’t make.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest River the lab finds some truffles. Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian

All going well, the fungus fruits between late fall and early spring, producing the little white balls so beloved of voles, squirrels, black bears and Portland chefs. It’s a delicate, molecular interplay that no human hand could engineer. But human intervention has ensured that it happens far more often. The best places for finding truffles are those where people have created large stands of young firs.

Left to themselves, old-growth and wilderness pines would produce the right conditions only patchily. But now plantations, recently clearfelled areas, and overgrown Christmas tree farms are the best places to look.



You could, if you wanted, and if any landowner would still allow it, take an iron rake and rip outwards several feet from the trunk of a fir until you gathered up every truffle in the vicinity. This has been a customary method in the Pacific north-west. Recently, it has led to tensions in the forests.

That’s because it is an indiscriminate practice, picking up ripe and unripe truffles alike. Humans work by sight. Only a dog’s nose can make the requisite distinction while the fungus is still in the ground. The scattergun approach of the rakers has damaged the reputation of the fungus and the industry.

It also damages the forest floor and its ecology. This is something that those in charge of managing public lands are acutely aware of.

The most recent initiatives from the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon are a significant step towards ensuring that any truffles gathered on public land will need to be done with dogs, not rakes.

Until recently, truffle-gathering on public land existed in a legal grey area. Mushrooms were regulated but truffles were out of sight and mind. This year, the jovial and enthusiastic Salem BLM officer Jim LeComte developed a pilot scheme offering permits to those able to prove that their dog could detect truffles.

Whereas dog-led hunting has little impact, LeComte says he really wants “to stop raking happening” in forests at all.

“They take huge areas, regardless of whether there are mature truffles there or not.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jason Swindle and his new pup Lily. Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian

If his work setting up permits at the BLM sets the pattern, in the future, anyone who wants to gather truffles will need a dog who can pick out the ripe ones. This is a capacity that LeComte is prepared to field-test. He thinks that opening up public lands to dogs alone will help to protect the forest and the truffle market. Fewer immature truffles means better eating.

It’s good news for those who train dogs, and those who have come close to despair in the past as the industry has sagged under the weight of substandard, raked produce. It’s also good for timber growers, who otherwise have to wait decades for a stand of plantation firs to deliver any value. A rising tide of truffle quality may lift a number of boats.

No one’s expecting a fortune – even at $35-$50 an ounce, Swindle calls truffles a “get rich slow” scheme. Some will make a living, but “not everyone can go out every day. Not everyone’s dog can go out every day. And that’s what it takes.”

But if it doesn’t make you rich, truffle hunting might be something that gives you something to do with your dogs, and that brings you closer together. If you’re lucky enough to live in the north-west, you could think of it as less like gold mining and more like fishing.

And while you’re dashing through the pines, you might marvel. What other food still requires you – a human and a dog – to stand eye to eye, under a Christmas tree, each with faith in the other, to enjoy it?