The rest of us are content to chase wildflowers. For one thing, we’re guaranteed success.

“We usually look for wildflowers, because there are lots of them around, and unlike wildlife, they don’t run away,’’ said Dave Hanke of Shakopee, Minn., who was photographing flowers in Whitewater State Park one May with his wife, Terri. “And if one thing isn’t blooming, something else is.’’

There's nothing so providential as baskets overflowing with morels, and the taste is so divine hunters dream about it all winter. In spring, they offer a fervent prayer to the mushroom gods: May the fungus be among us.

Morels do taste heavenly. But it's the hunt that's so addictive, not the mushroom itself. For one thing, it's fun to find something for free that's so expensive in stores and restaurants, and it's fun to beat the odds by finding something so notoriously elusive.

Warm sunlight filters down through budding forests, and the rich smell of humus wafts up from their floors. Then, amid the decaying leaves and grasses, we find the first spring ephemerals.

Cherry blossoms and daffodils are the showiest spring flowers on this tourist playground between Lake Michigan and Green Bay. But it's the wildflowers, many of them rare, that provide the most joyous proof that spring has arrived.

Exploring a septet of Minnesota's scientific and natural areas, or SNAs, I found more pasqueflowers in bloom than I'd ever expected to see in a lifetime. I saw a panorama of the Mississippi as the Dakota would have seen it 200 years ago. I walked under the budding canopies of old-growth forests and listened to choruses of courting frogs.