Outdoors: Morels an elusive springtime delicacy

May 10—The single best day of trout fishing I ever have experienced was not highlighted by trout. The show was stolen by morels, those secretive little stanchions of the forests and woods with the honeycombed head and exquisite flavors that even the best professional chefs are unable to replicate.

As we approached a deeper section of a northern Michigan blue-ribbon trout stream, my brother Sean and I had to scale a high sandy bank in our waders in order to walk around the small gorge the river had carved out of the soft bottom. Once we got up to the level of the forest floor, what opened up in front of us was a treasure fitting for any Indiana Jones of wild mushroom hunters.

There were morels at the peak of ripeness, growing in a dense patch about the same dimension as a queen-sized bed. We carefully picked them as my father had taught us years earlier, when we had excellent kid vision to find these well-disguised morsels but had not yet developed a taste for anything called fungi. In 10 minutes we had a landing net and a wicker creel full of morels.

A late dinner back at camp that night consisted of fresh rainbow trout, a snapping turtle we had pulled from the river, and a generous side of morels, all cooked in an iron skillet over an open fire. To this day, some 50 years later, Sean and I are still looking for that next promised land of morels.

May is morel month in many Midwestern states, although depending on rainfall patterns and the number of warm days to heat the soil, the woodlots and pine stands can provide these truly gourmet meal enhancements anytime from mid-April until June.

Since there are some 2,000 varieties of wild mushrooms that grow in this region, and some are delicacies while others are poisonous, knowledge is essential in the hunt for morels. My dad had extensive knowledge of the flora of the woods after growing up in northern Indiana, so he provided the species expertise until we were old enough to distinguish the target morels. He also owned a well-worn copy of The Mushroom Hunter's Field Guide for review.

Many mushroom hunting aficionados have their own super-secret Casa Grande sites where they scour for morels each spring. Some state parks and state forests in Michigan and Ohio permit mushroom hunting but it is best to contact the park office to clarify the rules for each location. In Michigan, morels found on public land are for personal use only and cannot be sold. In Ohio, mushroom hunters must stay on designated trails while on state park property, but mushroom hunting is prohibited in Ohio's state nature preserves and natural areas.

Morels are extremely valuable, selling for $50 to $90 a pound fresh, when available, and about $250 per pound when dried. There are many folklore theories on when the best chances to find morels take place, based on the blooming of other plants or short-term weather patterns, but I always liked the backwoods genius of my grandfather, who said that once the oak leaves were the same size as the ears on a squirrel, it was time to hunt for morels. I never had a chance to hold a squirrel down and measure its external auditory receptors, but that guideline made as much sense as anything else in the mysterious realm of morels.

—Ohio turkey season: Hunters in the Buckeye State harvested 8,235 wild turkeys during the first week of the spring season. In the 2020 spring wild turkey hunting season, the harvest count was 8,113 birds. The state is divided into two zones for the spring wild turkey season, with five counties making up the northeast zone (Ashtabula, Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, and Trumbull) and the remaining 83 counties making up the south zone. Hunting in the south zone closes on May 23, while the northeast zone spring season remains open until May 30. Wild turkeys were extirpated in Ohio by around 1900, due to unregulated harvest and loss of habitat. They were reintroduced in the state about 70 years ago and spring hunting opened statewide in 2000. About 50,000 hunters are expected to take part in the current spring wild turkey hunting season.

—Michigan pheasant licenses: Under a new provision of state law, hunters who plan to hunt pheasants on public lands throughout Michigan's Lower Peninsula will be required to purchase a $25 license. The license is also needed for hunting on lands enrolled in the Hunting Access Program, and a base license must be purchased in order to acquire the 2021 pheasant hunting license. Those who hunt pheasants on private land, on public land in the Upper Peninsula, as well as lifetime license-holders, hunters age 17-and-under, and those hunting on game bird preserves, are not required to have the pheasant hunting license. The funds collected from the sale of the new pheasant license can be used only for the purchase and release of live pheasants on state-owned public lands with suitable pheasant habitat.

—Bear facts: Over the past decade, wildlife officer Eric Moore, assigned to Ohio's Medina County, had received numerous calls about black bears that never had panned out — reports of cubs that were actually raccoons, calls about a bear stalking livestock that turned out to be a wayward big dog, and weathered ATV tracks that were mistakenly identified as bear tracks. After all of those false alarms, the real thing appeared recently in a populated area near a busy highway. Waving his arms and yelling when the bear closed to within 10 yards, Moore was able to get the bear to do an about-face and retreat into a woodlot. It eventually moved on to habitat more suitable for black bears.