Alabama Foraging Calendar 2026

In October, the species inside their typical Alabama window are american persimmon, black walnut. Those windows come from 3,185 research grade observation records in Alabama, corrected for how many people were out recording. They describe when each species has historically been found here, not what is out there this week.

Mar 1 to Mar 31 in Alabama, peaking around Mar 15. That is derived from 135 research grade records of Morchella in Alabama, adjusted for observer effort. It moves year to year with spring: the live panel on this page reads the USA National Phenology Network Spring Index at three points in Alabama and tells you whether leaf out is running ahead of or behind its 30 year average this year, which is the best available signal for whether the morel window will be early or late.

No Alabama state parks foraging rule is verified against a primary source on this page. Treat that as a gap rather than as permission, and ask the agency that manages the specific park before gathering anything. On federal land the rules are different again: National Park Service units prohibit gathering by default unless the superintendent has designated otherwise, while national forests generally allow small personal use amounts with the threshold set regionally.

Not from this page. This is a timing site; identification is a job for a person with the specimen. CDC states that poisonous mushrooms often resemble and are difficult to distinguish visually from nonpoisonous, edible mushrooms, and that cooking does not remove or inactivate the toxins. Take it to a person: the North American Mycological Association keeps a free list of volunteer identification consultants organised by state, and Poison Control is on 1-800-222-1222 around the clock. Where a species on this page has a lookalike that authorities name, the lookalike is named and identification is left to a person.

Because most of them are folklore copied between websites, and these are derived from records. Two corrections in particular move the dates. Counts are divided by the total observations of everything in Alabama in the same month, which removes the effect of how many people happened to be outdoors; that shifts the peak month for about a quarter of the species on this site. And fruit and nut species are counted only from records an observer annotated as fruiting, because a raw count of a plant peaks when the plant is most photogenic rather than when it is ripe. Elderberry raw counts peak with the flowers, two months before there is fruit.

For the spring species, yes, and the panel at the top of this page measures it. It reads the USA National Phenology Network Spring Index First Leaf surface for three points in Alabama and compares this year against the 1991 to 2020 average, giving the shift in days. In Alabama that applies to morel, chicken of the woods, wild blackberry. It does not apply to the autumn mushrooms, which fruit on late summer and autumn rainfall rather than on spring warmth.

Sep 1 to Dec 31 in Alabama. Collector permit required. Alabama treats American ginseng as a threatened species and still licenses a season. American ginseng is listed on Appendix II of CITES, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service states that harvest is illegal on most state lands, all National Park Service land, and all national wildlife refuges, and is prohibited in most national forests. Ginseng is not on the calendar on this page and we are not encouraging you to dig it; the dates are here because the question gets asked and is widely mis-stated.