CRAPPIE AND MOREL MUSHROOMS
When out crappie fishing this month, there is a delicious treat waiting for you besides the crappie you catch. Motor back in a wooded cove, tie your boat up to a tree, and get out and go hunting for morel mushrooms.
Start searching near certain trees favored by morels like ash, dead or dying elm trees, old apple orchards, red oak and white oaks are also good. Another good place to look is in areas of disturbed ground. Mushrooms sometimes are produced in response to environmental stress, so you often find them around burn sites. Morels thrive on the nutrients that burned trees release back into the soil.
Areas disturbed now, or in the past by water like old flood plains, or near rivers and lakes are also good places to look. One of my favorite search places is old logging areas. Also, where there are a lot of downed rotting trees.
Morel mushrooms spread through the dispersal of spores, and the more spores you allow them to drop, the better the chances of more mushrooms in the future, so use a mesh bag to carry your morels. Do not pick every last mushroom you see. Leave a few so they can continue to drop spores and you and others can enjoy them for many years.
There is nothing better than a plate full of fried crappie fillets, potatoes and onions, baked beans, cornbread, and sauteed or fried morel mushrooms.
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson.
MY SPECIAL TIME
When I am not out crappie fishing in April, I am usually out turkey hunting. I have spent many years sitting with my back against a tree, waiting for the sun to come up and the woods to come alive with sounds of birds, chattering squirrels, and flapping turkey wings.
If I had a dollar for every yelp and cluck I have made on my calls, I would be rich. More times than I would like to count, I did everything right, and the gobbler wouldn’t respond or come in.
There were times I did everything right and then scratched an itch or blinked an eye, and the gobbler caught my movement.
Then, there were magical times when my hen calls got answered by a lovesick gobbler who was very close. My neck hairs bristled, my heart rate cranked up, and the ache in my butt disappeared. I point my gun where I expect the gobbler to appear and cluck on my mouth call.
Suddenly a wrinkled head appears and God smiles down at me. I smooth his bronze feathers, feel his bristly beard, admire his spurs, and look up and say thank you once again for my time in the turkey woods. Then I go back to crappie fishing.
THE WISDOM OF OLD BOONE
Did you know if the smoke from your campfire rises straight up, good weather will continue or arrive soon? If the smoke rises, then falls, or hangs low over the fire, wet weather is coming.
Also, when you hear frogs croaking longer and louder than usual, bad weather is coming. When you hear the frogs getting even louder, a storm is close, so get off the water or out of the woods.
