What Does Chaga Look Like?

Have you ever wondered what chaga looks like? Countless people around the world have harnessed the power of chaga to improve their health, but unless you’re an outdoorsman living in the northern hemisphere, it’s likely that you’ve only ever seen chaga in the sterilized, prepared form that your vendor sells it to you in. Is it possible for a lay person to identify chaga in the wild?

The answer is yes. Whether you want to harvest chaga for yourself or simply learn a little more about this magical mushroom, it’s relatively easy to identify chaga in the outdoors. Here’s what to look for.

Where to Find Chaga

Chaga has a much wider range than its heritage would suggest, as it can be found throughout a wide range in the northern hemisphere. This includes not only Arctic locales such as Alaska, Siberia, and the Canadian territories, but more southerly places such as the continental U.S., much of Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Mongolia, and even as far south as Turkey.

However, you must keep in mind that chaga’s medicinal properties require it to reside in extreme cold in order to be unlocked. While chaga can be easily found in more temperate regions of the world, the warm temperatures there destroy the chaga’s nutritional value. As such, chaga harvested outside of Alaska, Siberia, and other Arctic lands is nutritionally useless, so don’t even bother.

In addition to this, chaga does not grow on its own, but is found on birch trees. As such, only locations that have significant amounts of birch forest have chaga in large enough amounts to be worth harvesting. Chaga has occasionally been spotted on elm, beech, and hornbeam trees, but this is extremely rare.

Given that there are many mushrooms out there that are poisonous for human consumption, it is worth studying the types of mushrooms in your area so you can better identify chaga. Fortunately, in many regions of the world where chaga is located, there aren’t any poisonous tree mushrooms, which makes identifying and harvesting chaga that much easier.

How to Identify Chaga in the Wild

Chaga appears as a black fungal growth on the side of birch trees. This often leads newbies to misidentify tree burls as chaga, particularly from a distance. A tree burl is an outward growth that is the result of environmental stress, such as pollutants, fungus, insect invasions, or physical trauma. They manifest as large bulges on the side of a tree trunk. Burls are not fungi and are a part of the tree itself, though they can appear as fungi to the untrained eye.

One good thing about identifying chaga in the wild is that there are few mushrooms, particularly in North America, that are chaga lookalikes. The closest is the black tree knot fungus, a fungus that grows on birch trees and is distinguished by its beehive-like appearance.

Chaga appears as a solid black fungal growth on the side of a tree, with a craggy appearance akin to that of basalt or another rock. Chaga also generally features a phallic shape, protruding outwards from its host tree, while tree burls and black tree knot fungus have a more rounded appearance that blends in with the tree. Chaga also does not blend in well with its host trees, unlike black tree knot fungus.

However, if you’re still not certain if what you’re looking at is chaga, there is one foolproof test to confirm: break off a piece of the chaga and look at the interior. Chaga’s most distinguishing physical feature is its golden-yellow interior, where all its nutritional content is stored. This golden core is also soft and spongy to the touch, much like cork. If you want to make sure that you’ve found chaga, just snap off a piece of it to look at the core.

However, you should always be careful and ethical when harvesting or looking for chaga. Other chaga users rely on the same wild chaga stocks that you find, and overharvesting or bad harvesting practices can lead to exhaustion of chaga, the death of trees that support it, or worse.

When harvesting chaga, be careful not to remove the entire chaga mushroom with a knife, only removing what is necessary for you to use or sell. This is to ensure that the host tree does not have a gaping hole in it from the chaga’s removal, which would open the tree to infection from diseases much in the same way that a cut on your skin does the same.

Conclusion

Chaga is truly one of nature’s wonders, an all-purpose mushroom with immeasurable healing effects. While you don’t need to go out into the wild to harvest your own chaga like people used to do in the past, knowing how to identify chaga is a worthwhile skill if you live in a part of the world where it grows naturally.

Whether you’re planning to become a professional chaga harvester, you merely want to collect chaga for your personal use, or you just want to look for chaga on your next nature hike, knowing what chaga looks like in the wild is very useful. The next time you’re out in the forest, try and see if you can find chaga. Who knows what you’ll turn up?