Outdoorsmen Adventures.com

Well, I do believe its spring, temperatures are warming up, the snow geese have moved through and the turkeys are strutting.

It’s also that time of the year when an infectious disease attacks avid outdoorsmen and women that live throughout the upper Midwest.

It can infect men, women, children and it doesn’t make any difference if you’re young or old!

What causes this infectious disease is a fungi that’s will soon be among us, it’s the morel mushroom and once they start poking their heads out of the ground, men and women will leave their home, family and job heading for the river bottoms, island and hills on mushroom hunting excursions.

Morels are found throughout the upper Midwest, are easy to recognize and delicious, making them the most sought after wild mushroom.

Identifying them from other mushrooms is easy. Morels are elongated with an off white stem and a crown that is made up of white with dark brown pits or indentations.

They vary from off-white to gray in color. The simplest way to explain what a morel looks like is to look for a mushroom growing on the ground that resembles a cone shaped brain.

They start to appear in the spring when temperatures reach around 50-60 degrees.

When’s the best time to start looking for morels? Well, according to some of those experienced old timers, you’re just wasting your time hunting mushroom until the oak leaves are the size of a mouse or squirrel’s ear.

Honestly, I’ve never known anyone who’s measured a squirrel or mouse ear, but I’ve been told that they are about half the size of your smallest fingernail.

There are several indicators that tell you it’s time to head out and start looking for morels.

If you have a lilac bush in the neighborhood, keep an eye on it and when it starts to bloom, it’s a good sign that the morels will be out.

You’ll also want to watch the crab apple trees as about the time, they start to bloom which is generally the week of Mother’s Day as this is when the morels should be the thickest.

With many years of turkey hunting under my belt, I’ve probably ran into just about every hunting condition and or problem a turkey hunter might encounter

Many of these are things could have been taken care of before heading for the woods and a little time spent before the opener on these things would have helped to make several of my hunts more successful.

One thing that many turkey hunters take for granted is the gun and the ammunition they are shooting.

As most of us know, for some reason or another, there are certain ammunition brands and shot size that just seems to pattern better in certain shotgun/chokes than others.

This is why it’s a good idea to test fire or pattern your gun before heading out each season.

This year, I’ll be using my new Escort 12 gauge, so I’m going to have to try several chokes and different loads at several distances to see which of these patterns best.

As far as shell’s over the last several years, I’ve had excellent luck with Winchester Xtended Range 5 Shot and will start with that using a Full choke.

I’ll start out by test firing my shotgun at 25-30-40 yards using a Shoot•N•C turkey head targets, making sure that I get the tightest pattern at different distances.

Another problem that turkey hunters run into is rainy weather as this makes many of the old stand by turkey calls useless as when they get wet some of them just don’t work well.

There are a couple of calls that I’ve used that work very well no matter what the weather and they are glass/slate calls and the box calls that doesn’t need chalking.… Continue reading

Reprinted from the Sioux City Journal

BRANSON, Mo. — When Denny Myhre and I drove down to the bottom of Table Rock Dam, we knew fly fishing would be out of the question.

All four generators were pumping water at an alarming rate, spilling into the headwaters of Lake Taneycomo.

This is a world-class trout fishery and the first four miles below the dam are restricted to fly fishing or artificial lure fishing only.

But no one was braving the heavy currents and neither would we.

We went back to Denny’s home, which is only about two blocks away from Taneycomo and hooked up his G-3 boat and towed it to the Branson Landing boat dock.

There we met Denny’s brother Dale, who lives in the woods just north of Branson.

Dale took the wheel and we were soon drifting in the heavy current and bouncing slip sinker rigs tipped with Berkley Power Bait Nitro Eggs. Our hook was a size 8 Eagle Claw baitholder and we hooked two eggs on it, a chartreuse and a white.… Continue reading