I am very disappointed in this spring, up to this point. I recommend that the Great Creator dismiss whomever he put in charge of it! For one thing, this spring should have been one of the best mushroom-finding years ever and a series of nights well below 40 degrees about a week ago ruint things. That time should have been the prime time in my neck of the woods, but in three trips I found only about 50 or 60 morels where I might usually find two or three hundred. And there have been few that were over eight-inches tall. I walked miles to do that well.

A very odd thing… this year I found all of them around or within eight feet of an ash tree and nowhere else. And places where I usually find bunches of them, I find none. Never ever saw that before. Oddly enough, many of those ash trees were only a foot or so in diameter. And not once did I find more than two at one spot. To the north of me about 40 miles as the crow flies, the Truman Lake watershed should be growing a bunch of morels all this coming week.

I’ve had some readers ask some things about morels recently. I will answer them here… No, morels do not grow in the daytime, they come up in a time period of less than 30 minutes in the darkness of early morning and none, not even small ones do not get any bigger than they are at dawn. In a wet spring they can survive up to ten days and when they begin to dry out you can soak them in water and they are still good eating after they moisten. I do not look around my feet when mushroom hunting, I look for them out away from me, and usually see them up to 20 or 30 feet away.

If you want to take a vacation to hunt mushrooms, one of the best places to find them is in southern Iowa, on public land known as the Stevens Forest. Best place I have ever seen. They will likely be coming soon in that large woodland that is rolling hills even elderly folks can walk and will likely be coming up well in the first week or ten days of May.

I think maybe the spawning of walleye and white bass was later than it has been in a long, long while, and in some waters of the northern Ozarks, whites and crappies haven’t yet begin to spawn seriously. The water has just been too high and too cold for good fishing. Every time I have fallen in or stepped off over my boots this spring I have noticed that the water is colder than it was the same time in past years that I have fallen in!

I have had some good fishing trips, but the mediocre and poor trips so far have outnumbered the good ones. That is unusual for me!! At least it is unusual for me to admit it! As I get older, a bad fishing trip bothers me because I may not have as many in my future to adequately make up for it. All of us grizzled old veteran outdoorsmen want to go out on a good note. My Uncle Norten, one of the Ozarks best known fishing guides, told me often about how one of his favorite clients went on dozens and dozens of river trips with him, always talking about catching a five-pound smallmouth some day. Finally he caught one out of Crooked Creek in north Arkansas one spring day, and a few hours later he had a heart attack and died. I hope someday I go like that, if the Great Creator sees fit. I hope it isn’t any time soon after all the complaining I have done lately.

Brother do I have a turkey hunting story to tell in next weeks column, about a gobbler I killed that was one in a million, and a technique I used that is much easier than the way I use to do it when I would chase one from one mountain to another. I intend to keep at it this week, hunting turkeys in the morning and fishing in the afternoon, in order to keep up with this social distancing. But heck, I have always done that. I never wanted to be seen in town. And I have heard it said on my pick-up radio that we are all in this together. WE AIN”T!!! I am most usually untogether, out in the woods or on the water as by myself as I can get, or up here on Lightnin’ Ridge where the woods grows up to my back porch, fifteen miles from the closest Wal-Mart. But I meet lots of folks on this facebook thing. You can read weekly excerpts there from one of my books. I just don’t know how to tell you to get onto it. Somebody else did it for me. I now have more than 2000 friends and most of my life I only had two or three. Write to me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.