Turkeys, fish and morels all in season

Poor decisions and risky behavior too often occur while in thrall to the procreant urge.

“Urge and urge and urge. Always the procreant urge of the world,” Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself.”

The influence of that urge is apparent in the life cycles of the three species that for many outdoors enthusiasts, myself included, make up the spring trifecta — turkeys, fish and morels.

We would never pick a morel unless its underground hyphae sent forth its spore-laden fruit in an effort to reproduce itself. Game fish are seldom as vulnerable to anglers as they are on their annual upstream journey to their spawning beds.

The whole spring turkey hunt — in which hunters deploy hen decoys and simulate hen sound in order to lure a gobbler into an ambush — rests upon the premise that one of nature’s most circumspect denizens will throw caution to the wind in pursuit of an expanded presence in the gene pool.

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Two-year-old gobblers, who have the least control of their hormones, are first to the party. They are, as Beetlejuice said en route to the brothel, “feeling a little ooh anxious, if you know what I mean.” No matter how amateurish the call, the young gobbler hears what he wants to hear. Like most marks, he wants to believe in the con.

The only con required to catch spawning run fish is convincing them that a lure containing a sharp hook is something they want to eat. They too want to believe. The challenge is timing the run and finding their rest stops.

The timing — based on constants like day length and moon phase and variables like water temperature and current speed — is hard to predict but can be discovered through time on the water and trial and error. The rest stops can be discovered by probing likely spots such as eddies, current breaks, creek mouths and sandbar drop-offs.

The smallmouth bass spawning run peaks during one of Iowa’s four spring turkey hunting seasons, which in 2024 run from April 8 to May 12. This year it peaked during the first season (April 8 to 11), for which I had already purchased a license. I hunted turkeys on Monday and Tuesday mornings and fished in the afternoons. On each day I caught more than 30 bass, including many lunkers, in half the time it took to see and hear no turkeys.

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The big ones frothed the water with their thrashing,. They were at times so concentrated and competitive that you could, after a quick release, throw back into the foam and catch another before the bubbles dissipated.

I returned to the turkey woods Wednesday morning and left, discouraged, at 9 a.m. By 10 I’d caught a dozen bass, half of them lunkers. By noon I’d written this column, declared turkey season over and committed to fish hard until the bite cools, the soil warms and morels get the urge to emerge and scatter their spores.