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Harmless🍽️ Edible

⚫ Black crowberry

Empetrum nigrum · Ericaceae

🌲 Boreal
🧠 To remember it"Black crowberry, clear juice" — unlike blueberries that stain purple, crowberry leaves an almost colorless juice.
Black crowberry — Empetrum nigrum

🔍 Identify it without mistakes

Small, creeping, evergreen dwarf shrub, 10 to 30 cm, forming dense heather-like mats. Very small, linear, needle-like rolled leaves resembling a tiny prostrate conifer. Tiny, barely visible flowers, followed by shiny black berries, round, clustered along the branches, resembling small black blueberries but with a more watery and less sweet flesh.

  1. foliage in tiny rolled needles like a creeping dwarf conifer
  2. low and dense mat-forming habit
  3. shiny black berry with clear juice (not purple, unlike blueberry)
  4. typical of tundra and arctic or alpine heathlands
Size10-30 cm
Floweringmai-juin
Habitattundra, heather moorlands, and acidic bogs of the far circumpolar North, also found at high altitudes on certain alpine peaks

⚠️ Not to be confused with

No known dangerous confusionaucun

To tell them apart: the foliage in tiny rolled needles like a creeping dwarf conifer and the clear (non-purple) juice of the black berry distinguish the crowberry from any other toxic tundra berry

🍽️ Eating it

Partsripe berries
SeasonAugust-October, often preserved under the snow until spring
Tastenot very sweet, slightly tart, watery texture

Preparation : raw (bland to slightly tart taste), traditionally mixed with sweeter berries (blueberries, lingonberries) in jam or combined with fish or seal fat by Inuit peoples ("akutaq")

🪓 Other bushcraft uses

  • traditional ingredient in Inuit akutaq ("Eskimo ice cream" made from whipped animal fat and wild berries)
Sources (2)

No entry replaces a certain identification in the field, or medical advice. When in doubt: don't eat it. If ingestion is suspected: poison control or 112/911.