FRANCE: The Mushroom Capers; Poachers are devastating France's beloved truffle fields.

Byline: Benjamin Sutherland

It looks like a lump of coal. But it is the king of French delicacies, a reputed aphrodisiac that lends an eyelid-fluttering taste to everything from butter to pasta. The treat is the truffle, and French farmers are struggling to protect this season's 30,000-kilogram bumper crop, the largest in the world, from thieves. A kilo of truffles fetches about 700 euros on the wholesale market. This season poachers have made off with an estimated 10 percent of French truffles, worth 2.1 million euros, almost a third more than last year, according to the French Federation of Truffle Growers. "It's a war," says Jean-Pierre Ducret, who regularly patrols his truffle fields at night near Ampus with a shotgun during harvest season, which stretches from November to March.

The truffle, at once a fungus and a tuber, grows a few centimeters underground in symbiosis with the roots of trees naturally inoculated with the spore Tuber melanosporum. Traditionally growers gather truffles every week or so, using dogs trained to sniff out ripe truffles. Thieves operate in small, semi-organized gangs, often driving hundreds of kilometers to hit fertile fields by cover of night, wearing infrared or light-intensifying goggles and ski masks, and using their own dogs. (Pigs can smell ripe truffles, too, but it's harder to flee with a waddling swine.) Muzzles keep the dogs from eating poisoned bait set out by farmers.

Farmers are fighting back. Like many of his colleagues, Armand Fabre of Montagnac, in southeastern France, now searches for truffles daily, "so when thieves arrive they don't get too much." Michel Tournayre, president of an as-sociation of some 200 truffle growers in southeast France, says some farmers plant microphones throughout their fields and then listen for the telltale crunch of leaves. Tournayre began paying a guard 80 euros a night to watch over his fields near Uzes after a recent encounter with intruders "got nasty." Two years ago thieves made off with one of his truffle hounds, which sell for around 2,000 euros. Grower Ayme Pierre, who carries a shotgun and spotlight on patrols and periodically sleeps in his field, heads a campaign urging the French Federation of Truffle Growers to issue sales permits to bona fide trufficulteurs to make it harder for thieves to sell purloined truffles.