Small desert truffle / bird truffle

What it is

Picoa lefebvrei is a hypogeous fungus, meaning its fruiting body forms underground, in the family of desert truffles. It was first described as Phaeangium lefebvrei in 1894 and later moved to the genus Picoa. It is called the bird truffle in English, and the Arabic name hober appears in Gulf sources.

Desert truffles grow in semi-arid and desert ecosystems, usually in association with the roots of desert shrubs, and are found from the Mediterranean basin to the Middle East. Picoa is one of several genera of such truffles, and the morphology separating it from its near relatives is a matter for a specialist, so this page does not describe one.

Food use in the sources

A review of Picoa and desert truffles in the Arabian Gulf and Middle East describes the fruiting bodies as edible and reports that the species is valued as food and used as medicine in parts of the Arabian Gulf. The same region's sources say it is commonly eaten by birds in Kuwait, which shows that the fruiting bodies are a food source in the wild.

The catalogue lists the species with a food-use label, but the label is a research flag and not a finding. The sources do not record how the fruiting bodies are cooked, how they are preserved or how they are sold.

Africa and the open question

The species is reported in North Africa, from Mauritania to Egypt, and a study of continental African truffles lists it among the desert truffles of Tunisia. Morocco has ten desert truffle species across several genera, Picoa among them.

No source reviewed for this page confirms that Picoa lefebvrei itself is harvested and eaten in Africa. Such a claim would need a targeted check in Tunisian or Moroccan ethnomycology studies, and until then the African food use stays an open question.

Safety and limits

The sources describe the fruiting bodies as edible, but they give no safety assessment for this species, no preparation method and no guidance on how to tell it from other truffle-like fungi. The catalogue flags the record for specialist review and does not treat the food label as an edibility verdict.

A reader should not gather or eat a desert truffle on the basis of this page. Identification of underground fungi needs specialist knowledge, and no conclusion here replaces it.

Notes

Open questions: the African food record, the local names used in North Africa and the cooking methods are not established. A targeted search of North African ethnomycology literature would address the first two.