Arkansas Foraging Calendar 2026

In October, the species inside their typical Arkansas window are chicken of the woods, american persimmon, black walnut, lion's mane. Those windows come from 2,033 research grade observation records in Arkansas, 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 Apr 30 in Arkansas, peaking around Apr 15. That is derived from 147 research grade records of Morchella in Arkansas, 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 Arkansas 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 Arkansas 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 Arkansas 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 Arkansas and compares this year against the 1991 to 2020 average, giving the shift in days. In Arkansas that applies to morel, black trumpet, chicken of the woods. It does not apply to the autumn mushrooms, which fruit on late summer and autumn rainfall rather than on spring warmth.