Fri, May 16 2008
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Hit the woods now. The morel season is upon us. You’ll have to look closely for the little black and gray sponges that are popping up, but they have arrived. We’ll need above-normal temperatures and precipitation from Tuesday through April 28 for the big yellows.
The long-range forecast calls for above normal temperatures and precipitation the last eight days of April. If that holds true, this could be a great morel season, especially for the big yellows. My last find of 2007 was May 3. It was also the largest.
As of Tuesday, only a few morels were being reported on www.morels.com for Indiana. However, weather from Wednesday through today has been conducive to morels showing themselves.
The Web site www.morels.com is not just a message board for all the states; it also offers tips on hunting, freezing and drying morels. Another piece on this Web site worth reading is the one about ticks.
The mystery about morels will never go away, but we do learn a little more about how they exist. When a spore goes airborne, it has to come in contact with another spore. I’m not sure if there are male and female spores or if blacks work with grays or yellows — probably not. When two compatible spores connect, they eventually fall to the ground. They develop root systems and normally won’t send up the first morels for five years.
When my daughter Jourdan was 8 years old, I took pictures of her holding two big yellow morels. Five years later, two large yellows came up about eight feet from where she was standing. These two morels grew between an apple and pine tree.
I wanted to watch these two morels mature. They soon dried to look like old pieces of shoe leather. Three years have passed without another morel coming up in that spot. I believe the root systems are still there though.
It is easy to post your morel find on www.morels.com, and I encourage you to do so. If you read this column, please put RLB at the end of your sentence or e-mail me about your find.
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Tim Brobst was probably daydreaming while trolling his deep running Rapala at Shadyside Lake last week. The hit and fight that ensued gave Tim and his father, Bob, all they could handle.
What Tim had on the business end of his rod was an 8-pound plus wiper. A wiper is a cross between a white bass and a striper. The Shadyside Lake record is 16 pounds.
The Indiana DNR stocks 1,000 fingerling wipers in Shadyside every two years. The early spring is the time most are caught. The little ones look like white bass, but have offset lines on their sides. These fish are not good table fare but are great fighters. Please do as the Brobsts did and release them. They are stocked to keep the shad population in check.
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Since 1980, numbers of adult largemouth bass in northern Indiana natural lakes have nearly doubled, and there are more big bass now, according to a press release from Jed Pearson, DNR Division of Fish and Wildlife fisheries biologist.
The increases, he said, are most likely due to the minimum size limits and widespread acceptance of catch-and-release fishing by area bass anglers.
In 1980, most northern Indiana natural lakes had no minimum size limit on bass. A 12-inch size limit was imposed in 1990, and it was increased to 14 inches in 1998.
Based on estimates of the number of 8-inch and larger bass in 59 natural lakes sampled on 171 occasions by DFW biologists, the average density of bass increased from 13 per acre to 24 per acre between 1980 and 2007.
The actual number of 8-inch and larger bass captured by biologists increased from 78 per hour of sampling to 123 per hour.
As bass numbers increased at natural lakes, so did bass size. Bigger bass now make up larger proportions of the adult populations.
The proportion of 12- to 14-inch bass increased from an average of 13 percent in 1980 to 26 percent in 2007. The proportion of 14- to 18-inch bass increased from 8 to 18 percent.
Meanwhile, the proportion of 18-inch and larger bass stayed the same, at 3 percent.
“Indiana now has more bass and more bigger bass in its natural lakes than ever before,” said Pearson, who compiled the figures from the large set of data gathered over the 27-year period. “We’ve also seen a rise in the catch rate of bass by anglers.”
In 1980, it took anglers an average of 2.7 hours to catch a bass, including both bass that were taken home and those that were released. Now it takes bass anglers about one hour to catch a bass.
Overall, bass densities ranged from a low of less than one bass per acre at Lake-of-the-Woods near Bremen in 1985, to a high of 69 per acre at Barrel-and-a-half Lake near North Webster in 1998.
Other lakes with unusually high densities of bass included Appleman in 1995, with 52 per acre, and Big Long in 2005, with 40 per acre. Both are in LaGrange County. Crane Lake, in Noble County, contained 50 per acre in 1990, and Robinson Lake in Whitley County held 49 per acre in 2002.
Other lakes with low numbers of bass were Maxinkuckee in Marshall County with three bass per acre in 1990, as well as Kosciusko County’s Wawasee with four per acre in 1997 and Beaver Dam with four per acre in 1985.
Ball Lake in Steuben County contained less than four bass per acre in 1995 and 1996, but the number rose to more than 15 bass per acre in 2001 and 2002, after imposition of a special 18-inch size limit and two-bass daily creel limit.
Rick Bramwell’s column publishes Thursdays in The Herald Bulletin sports section. To contact him, e-mail rickbramwell@aol.com.
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