(GT) - On a rainy spring day in the Coast Range foothills of southern Polk County, three women armed with assorted gardening implements and accompanied by two dogs leave their cars and hike out onto a commercial tree plantation to hunt for truffles.

One of the women leans over to give her dog a command.

“Isis, cerca,” she says. “Go find it!”

Isis is a Lagotto Romagnolo, an Italian breed that looks like a dust mop with legs. And like many of her forebears, she’s been trained to sniff out edible truffles, a type of underground fungus prized by gourmet cooks.

Cerca is Italian for seek, and Isis gets right to work, hunting through the rows of 25-year-old Douglas firs with her nose to the ground, stopping occasionally to dig a small hole.

It’s ideal truffle habitat, and the women have had good luck here before. But they won’t find much today.

The poachers have been here ahead of them.

Responsible truffle hunters, explains Marilyn Hinds, president of the North American Truffling Society and the leader of this expedition, get permission to go onto private property, dig carefully to minimize their impact on the land, and take only fully developed edibles.

The poachers, sometimes organized into crews, use heavy landscape rakes to scrape away the fir needles and topsoil beneath the trees. They dig up everything they find, ripe or not, decimating truffle beds and leaving sensitive roots exposed, which can kill the trees. Everywhere you look around this site, the earth has been churned up and garbage has been scattered around.