For mycologists and fungus lovers alike the festival is a great opportunity to celebrate one of nature’s greatest gifts: the morel.  At this event a multitude of activities are offered to keep everyone busy.  The events include softball tournaments, a morel seminar, a morel collecting contest, guided morel hunting tours, and finally a carnival.  These are just a sampling of the fun to be had at this unique festival.  This festival is named after the morel that is hunted throughout Michigan.  Morels are cup fungi of the phylum Ascomycota that have a sponge-like ascocarp. They are highly valued for their taste.  In particular revelers search for morels that are commonly known as Classic North American Yellow Morels or Classic American Black Morels. The Classic Yellow Morel is found throughout North America, primarily under ash trees or dying elms, but they also can be found near conifers or on recent burn sites.  Superficially, the Yellow Morels are classified as Morchella esculenta, but in truth they can not be called by this name until a genetic comparison has been made against the original morels found in Europe.  In addition to this, there are several types of Yellow Morels that have been distinguished from one another only by genetic means, and can not be separated from each other realibly using morphology; they known simply as Taxon 12 and taxon 13.  Unfortunately, the Classic Black Morels suffer from the same lack of study as the Yellow Morels, and they do not have a valid scientific name either. These fall under three common names, Morchella conica, Morchella elata, and Morchella angusticeps.  The Classic Black is distinguished by its sharp conical appearance and ridges that turn black at maturity.  Similar to the Yellow Morels, there is a variation in the Classic Black, known as Taxon 4 that cannot be distinguished properly due to a lack of genetic comparisons.  These findings may confuse the morel hunter, but they indicate that these fascinating variations of morels ensure that there are even more morel diversity that we recognized previousty. Perhaps taste tests should be held by the revelers at the Annual Morel Festival to give them needed non-genetical taxonomic characters to determine the diversity of morels. One thing every good morel hunters knows, however, is that not all morel-like fungi are good edibles and some are very poisonous. In addition to fun, therefore, morel festivals serve a second very important function --teaching neophytes to recognize a real morel!    --M. Popovich