Iknow the clock’s ticking. I sit with my back to an old oak tree, clucking and yelping, hoping to get a dominant tom to respond. As the sun gets higher in the sky, I know that my chances are fading. The toms have gone silent and may sneak up on me, but the excitement is in hearing them gobble. While I’m slowly walking through the woods, my mind focuses on a much smaller prey – a mushroom. When turkey season gets underway, Michigan’s morel mushrooms are just starting to pop up. Most turkey hunters walk right on by them. Not me. I’m already looking for them because they go great with wild turkey kabobs.
The same landscape that grows turkeys grows morels and our spring gives us both! Traditions Media photo
The mid-morning lull is real, and it happens every single day during Michigan’s spring season. From roughly nine o’clock until early afternoon, gobblers that hammered at every sound during fly-down go completely silent. They’re not dead. They’re not spooked. They’re with hens, feeding, or dusting their wings in the warming sun. A tom that gobbled a hundred times between dawn and eight-thirty might not make a sound for the next four hours. Most hunters respond by leaving the woods – heading to the truck, driving to town, calling it quits until tomorrow. That’s a mistake. Those same woods where turkeys live are producing morel mushrooms right now, and the overlap between these two seasons is one of Michigan’s best-kept spring secrets.
The biology explains why this works so well. Morel mushrooms emerge when soil temperatures hit fifty to sixty degrees at a depth of two to four inches. You can check this yourself with a meat thermometer pushed into the duff layer under last year’s leaves. Black morels appear first when the soil reaches forty-eight to fifty degrees, followed by the larger yellow and blonde varieties once temperatures hold steady above fifty-three. In Michigan, this happens from mid-April through late May, depending on your latitude – the exact same window when turkey season runs in most areas. That’s not a coincidence. Both species respond to the same spring conditions, prefer the same habitat types, and occupy the same landscapes you’re already hunting.
Think about where you set up for turkeys. You look for ridges where toms like to roost and gobble at first light. You scout creek bottoms where they strut and display. You hunt field edges near old orchards where hens bring their poults later in summer. Every single one of those locations is prime morel habitat. South-facing slopes warm up first in spring, triggering both gobbling activity and mushroom emergence. Mixed hardwood forests with oak, ash and aspen provide the mast crop turkeys feed on and the dying trees around which morels grow. You’re already positioned in exactly the right places.
The key is recognizing what you’re looking at while you’re out there. Dead elm trees are the most reliable indicator. The bark splits vertically, plates fall away, and the bare wood shows through in distinctive patterns. Morel fruit within six to thirty feet of the trunk, sometimes ranging out to fifty feet if conditions are right. Ash trees dying from emerald ash borer have become morel goldmines in recent years, particularly two to three years after the tree dies. Old apple trees near field edges produce reliably within the drip line of their canopies. These are the same trees you walk past getting to your setup in the dark at five-thirty in the morning.
When the gobbling stops around nine o’clock, you need to shift gears both mentally and physically. Turkey hunting demands stillness and patience. Morel hunting requires movement, but a specific kind. Slow down considerably, scanning constantly at a range of five to twenty feet ahead. Your eyes need to adjust to spotting the honeycomb pattern of a morel cap among leaves, sticks, and dappled sunlight. Camouflage that helps you disappear while turkey hunting actually works against you now. Morels blend into the forest floor, and you need to train yourself to see what doesn’t belong.
Look at the base of every dead elm and ash, check around old apple trees, and pay attention to small rises, the uphill side of fallen logs, and areas where leaf litter is thin enough to see bare soil. Morels often grow in clusters of three to fifteen mushrooms, then you’ll find nothing for fifty yards, then another cluster appears. When you find one, stop and search the immediate area carefully before moving on. Any mesh bag works perfectly – it keeps your mushrooms fresh, and old-timers will tell you the mesh spreads spores as you walk. The science is debatable, but the bag isn’t. Leave anything smaller than an inch and a half, but remember to come back in a day or two – they grow fast.
I always cut one open as I’m filling my bag: a true morel is completely hollow from stem to cap. If you find cottony filling or a brain-like wrinkled cap instead of the distinctive honeycomb pitting, you’ve found a false morel from the Gyromitra family, which can cause serious illness. Leave those alone.
The midday lull typically runs from nine until one or two in the afternoon – three to four hours of productive mushroom hunting in terrain you’re learning intimately for future turkey hunts. You’ll notice things you’d never see from a stationary setup: fresh scratchings where hens have been feeding, dust bowls where toms have bathed, strut zones marked by wing-drag patterns in the dirt.
Just because I’m looking for mushrooms doesn’t mean I’m not calling sporadically and listening. I’ve killed three of my last five Michigan toms after spending the midday morel-hunting. Once I walked up on a tom working up a sandpit, and the other two times the hen yelps gave the tom’s position away. Staying in the woods instead of driving home, defeated, at ten in the morning kept me in position when gobblers fired up again later. The slow, methodical movement kept me sharp instead of stiff. The extra scouting showed me terrain and bird patterns I’d have never discovered otherwise. And the practical reward of fresh morels in the skillet that evening – whether or not a gobbler hit the ground – made the entire day feel successful.
When the woods go quiet in the morning and that tom stops answering, I don’t pack up and leave. Instead, I slow down, look down, and start covering the country I’m already in. The same landscape that grows turkeys grows morels, and Michigan’s spring gives us both
at the same time. Take advantage of it.
