Paul Vang

I've moved!

2011-10-31T18:56:00.000-07:00

Hi!

I'm moving! Nope, the house isn't for sale. I've just established my own website at http://writingoutdoors.com. All my past postings are there, as well as information about my book, Sweeter than Candy--a Hunter's Journal.

The site is still under construction, but pardon the dust, enjoy my weekly column, and I hope you might be interested in my book.

Paul

Pheasants on the Montana prairiesF

2011-10-26T19:07:00.000-07:00

Flicka and I celebrating a successful pheasant hunt.

A rooster pheasant flew across the road leading to the Freezeout Lake Wildlife Management Area’s campground as if to greet or, more likely, to tease us. Was this a good omen for the week’s hunting?

As we set up camp after getting our trailer parked my wife asked if I wanted to take a break to find that pheasant. “He’ll wait,” I replied. “Besides, it’d be almost dark by the time I got my hunting stuff together and walked down to where we saw it land.”

As it turned out I never did go after that particular pheasant, as on following days I hunted on farms where I had permission to hunt and that was more than sufficient.

Pheasant hunting in that area, at least, was surprisingly good, especially considering that prior to the trip I had no positive expectations. As we all know, the winter of 2010-2011 was tough, and there was a cold, rainy spring: a combination that’s not conducive to good reproduction among upland birds.

The first farm I hunted was new to me, but the landowner said there were a lot of pheasants out there. On the opening day a party of hunters got their limit of pheasants in just two hours. It took me more than two hours to get three pheasants, though it wasn’t for lack of seeing birds. The pheasants that survived opening weekend some five days earlier acquired an education in a hurry, as they always do. Most of the birds I saw were getting up around 50 to 100 yards out, especially if they were in light cover, such as the barley stubble I walked across in our first walk.

The farm has a marshy draw going up a hillside, where springs create patches of cattails and tall cover. Flicka, my Labrador retriever, went on point at the edge of some tall grass. When the bird couldn’t stand it any longer it took to the air, giving me a quick chance to swing my shotgun on it and pull the trigger. The bird folded and Flicka quickly retrieved her first pheasant of the year.

The next rooster pheasant came just a couple minutes later, though it took several more hours before we got our third pheasant of the day, along with a bonus Hungarian partridge. Flicka and I did a lot of walking, but that was to be expected. Pheasant hunting has always been synonymous with long walks across the prairie. Expecting the worst, I was pleasantly surprised by the day’s hunt.

Rick Northrup, the Game Bird Coordinator for Montana’s Fish, Wildlife & Parks said, in a phone interview, there have been some surprisingly good early reports from Montana’s pheasant hunters, with some caveats. “This is one of those years that where birds had good cover, they did okay.” On the other hand, he said, “There are some marginal or poor areas that sometimes do okay when they have mild winters and optimal spring conditions that were pretty disappointing this year.”

There were some factors that, in Northrup’s opinion, mitigated the harsh winter. “Some ranches, where they were feeding cattle, had enough traffic to beat down the snow so pheasants were able to move around and find food, even if there was a hundred inches of snow.” Still, he conceded, “There were vast areas that weren’t too great.”

As so many Montana hunters have turned their attention to big game hunting, pheasant hunting will continue to provide a lot of opportunities. With most hunters concentrating on deer and elk, there’s a lot less pressure on upland birds as well as fewer hunters competing to get permission to hunt pheasants on private land.

There is a newer challenge in some areas, however. People hunting in some parts of eastern Montana might find good hunting, but in many oil patch communities, motel rooms are booked up indefinitely, so if you think you want to hunt there, you’d better bring your own accommodations.

This just underscores that whether you’re a pheasant or a pheasant hunter, it’s all about habitat and finding a place to get shelter.

Deer and Elk Seasons Begin in Montana

2011-10-19T20:09:00.000-07:00

The wait is almost over for people who pay no attention to the early upland game, antelope and archery seasons. Yes, if hunting season means chasing deer and elk with a rifle, the hunting season begins this Saturday at dawn.

The Montana deer and elk firearms season opens Saturday, October 22 and runs through November 27. It’s the time of hunting camps, lost sleep, and shivering on frozen mountainsides before dawn in hopes of an elk coming your way to help fill the freezer.

New for 2011 is a youth deer hunt on October 20 and 21, an important prelude to the general season. The regulations for the youth hunt are simple. Participants must be legally licensed hunters age 11 through 15. During these two days, youth hunters with a general or deer B license may take those deer species and sex otherwise available on the general or deer B license the first day of the general firearm season in the specific hunting district the youth is hunting. A non-hunting adult at least age 18 or older must accompany the youth hunter in the field. Shooting hours and all other usual regulations apply during this two-day deer season.

One of the usual regulations that some people, unfortunately, prefer to ignore is the requirement that big game hunters must wear a minimum of 400 square inches of hunter orange above the waist. Hunter orange requirements across the nation have done a lot to minimize tragic shooting accidents. I personally get irritated when I see so many magazines and TV hunting shows depicting hunters not wearing orange. Wearing an orange vest and cap may save your life, as well as help some other hunter avoid making a tragic mistake that could ruin their life as well.

On the blaze orange requirement, let’s note that archery hunters hunting during the general season must also observe the blaze orange rules. Personally, I think anyone who is out in the field during the firearms season is taking foolish chances if they’re not wearing orange, even if they’re not hunting.

The general firearms season also means that the firearms season for wolves will also be on. Wolf hunting may be controversial in some quarters, though I think many would agree that there are a lot of good reasons to have the season.

Certainly there’s no getting around the fact that wolves cause problems when they get around livestock. An Angus cow is certainly an easier animal for a pack of wolves to bring down than deer or elk. The number of times we’ve read of government trappers eradicating problem wolves is a sure indicator. Wolves are smart animals and it seems to me that when they learn that they are being hunted, they’ll also figure out that staying away from people gives them a better chance to survive.

My daughter, Erin, lives in California and relayed that a friend of hers was aghast that Montana and Idaho are having wolf seasons again. She had the impression that wolves were going to be hunted right in Yellowstone National Park, which certainly isn’t the case.

As of a week ago, a total of 18 wolves, out of a quota of 220, had been killed during the early seasons, including 4 in hunting district 313/316, an area of high mountain country directly north of Yellowstone National Park. That completed the harvest quota for that hunting district. If you’re hoping to fill that wolf tag, it would be a good idea to regularly check the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks website (fwp.mt.gov) to make sure the harvest quota for a specific hunting district hasn’t been completed.

Another reminder is to be careful about property boundaries. If you’re hunting private land in Montana you are required to have permission to be hunting there. That also applies to crossing private land to access public land.

Above all, enjoy the season. People across the country envy the hunting opportunities we have in Montana. For many, their concept of the hunt of a lifetime is something we take for granted.

Norwegians check out Montana

2011-10-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

“Do you need a license to buy ammunition?”

“No,” I replied. “All you need is money.”

That exchange was while I was showing a houseguest my gun cabinet. Our guests were relatives from Norway, Inger Lise and Robert Bjoerk. Inger Lise is the granddaughter of my father’s oldest sister, which makes her a cousin of sorts, a first cousin once removed, if I understand those technicalities.

They lived many years in the city of Trondheim but after retiring from jobs as an elementary teacher and manager for ISS Norway, part of a worldwide company that provides a variety of business management services, they bought a home on the Atlantic Coast.

Robert enjoys the outdoors, especially fishing, and has a boat docked just a four-minute drive from his house. He also enjoys hunting, though doesn’t often have the opportunity to do much hunting.

He owns a couple long guns, a double-barreled shotgun and a rifle, and mentioned that Norwegian law requires people to store firearms in a gun safe.

According to Wikipedia, hunting is popular in Norway, and civilians can freely own shotguns and semi-automatic and bolt action rifles. There is a total ban on automatic action firearms. There are some caliber restrictions on handguns, but as long as handguns are used for sports shooting, a recreational shooter can own up to four handguns.

To own firearms, Norwegians must obtain an ownership license and show a legitimate use for the firearm. Hunting and sport shooting are considered legitimate uses. Prospective owners get their license through the local police department, and must show they are “sober and responsible,” as well as not have a police record.

Incidentally, to get a hunting license, a person must successfully attend a 30-hour, 9-session class in firearm theory, firearm training, wildlife theory, and environmental protection. There is a good population of big game, including roe deer, red deer (similar to our elk), reindeer, and moose (which are called elk in Scandinavia). In addition there are grouse and ptarmigan for upland bird hunters, as well as waterfowl.

Norway has an enviable record for an almost non-existent rate of firearms homicides, especially compared to the United States, though the tragedy of this year’s mass homicide demonstrates the fact that no set of controls is foolproof.

On their visit, Robert and I took advantage of good weather for a day’s outing, first stopping at a shooting range. We were mainly plinking at tin cans, and Robert, who had mandatory military training in younger years, was a crack shot.

The next stop was on a Big Hole tributary creek where we caught some brook trout, destined to be appetizers for that evening’s dinner.

A lunch break on the Big Hole River was the next stop, where we enjoyed fall sunshine that made the day’s chilly breezes seem quite tolerable. We agreed that a ham sandwich on the banks of a trout stream is first class fare.

The Big Hole’s fish were not so cooperative, however. We fished a couple spots on our area’s premier river without either of us having a nibble on our flies. As we put fishing gear away for the trip home I asked Robert, “In Norway, do they ever say, ‘You should have been here last week’?”

Without missing a beat, he said, “Yes, fishing was much better last week. In fact, the fish were jumping out of the water. You didn’t even have to fish for them.”

While Robert and I enjoyed a day of shooting and fishing, our wives were busy on sewing and knitting projects and they fantasized about some of the fancy sewing machines now on the market.

At this point it became apparent there was a culture gap regarding one aspect of American fishing we’d chatted about a few days earlier: catch and release.

The women had been shopping for sewing and other craft items and Inger Lise said we shouldn’t worry about the expense. “It’s no different than all the money you spend on fishing,” adding with ridicule, “and then you just throw the fish back in the river.”

October is a great time to be in Montana's outdoors!

2011-10-05T18:48:00.000-07:00

Flicka with a pheasant from 2010

And now it’s October, and in my opinion, any outdoors-loving person who isn’t happy about that should probably have their Montana residency permit revoked.

What a wonderful time of year! In early October we have those wonderful fall colors that are worth a trip into the nearby mountains just to see the aspens and other trees at this fleeting moment of glory. It doesn’t last long, so don’t miss it.

Of course, leaf peeping is just a sample of what October has to offer.

We’ve already had a month of upland bird hunting and archery hunting though the reality is that it’s just starting to get good. For most of September it was really too warm for serious hunting. For those lucky archery hunters who managed to down an elk or deer, it would have been a race to get their animal taken care of in time. That situation will only improve.

Of course, this is the month when everything happens. The waterfowl season opened last Saturday and will run into January. Personally, I don’t worry too much about the ducks until the weather starts getting seriously cold, but ducks are on the move, with early migrating ducks already looking towards heading for wintering grounds.

That’s just a start. This coming Saturday, October 8, is the next major date for hunters, whether their preference is shotgun or rifle. The pheasant season and pronghorn antelope seasons both open on Saturday. Unfortunately, all indications are that pronghorn and pheasant populations are down across much of Montana because of a severe winter and cold, wet spring. Still, for those lucky hunters who drew a pronghorn tag and anyone who lives for the sight of a scolding rooster pheasant clawing for flight, it’s better to be out in the field at this time of year than to be anywhere else.

Of course, many people don’t recognize any hunting seasons other than the general deer and elk rifle seasons, and that opening day is Saturday, October 22, just over two weeks from now. It’s time to hurry up and check to see if your rifle is still sighted in. If you’re thinking of getting a new pair of boots for the big game season, the time to do it is now, so you can at least get a start on breaking those boots in before the fun begins. It’s not fun to be walking around with blisters. It’s even less fun to have to quit hunting because your feet hurt too much.

For anglers, many consider October as the best month for catching big trout. The catch is that you have to take time that you might rather use for chasing pheasants on the prairie or sneaking across a prickly pear cactus patch to get into a good shooting position for a buck pronghorn. Decisions, decisions.

If I seem to get carried away with the glories of October, I come by it naturally, in that I was born in October. It has always seemed right to celebrate the month, though the perspective is changing. I used to look forward to October because it meant I’d gained some new privilege, such as a driver’s license. Now I celebrate October because it means I survived another year and am still having fun

October is also the month when I first sampled the fun and challenges of hunting pheasants, which was my entry into that great big world of hunting. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to broaden my experiences over the years, though the sight and sounds of a flushing pheasant, preferably sniffed out of its hiding place by a good dog, still defines to me almost everything there is to the thrill and adventure of hunting.

Of course, it there’s a down side to October it’s the certain knowledge that winter is breathing down our necks. October, in our imagination, is all about clear, blue skies and brilliant fall colors. But, October can also mean early winter storms and sub-zero temperatures.

And, if it doesn’t happen in October it will in November.

On getting outwitted by ruffed grouse.

2011-09-28T21:03:00.000-07:00

I wish I had a dollar, no let’s make that five dollars to allow for inflation, for every magazine or calendar illustration I’ve seen showing a ruffed grouse sailing over a clearing in the forest with a hunter, with gun raised, and a dog at his side.

Flicka and the day's bag of grouse.

Over some 30 or more years of chasing after ruffed grouse I guess I have actually seen a few grouse take those flights across clearings, but they’re few and far between. Ruffed grouse survive by breaking rules, not imitating art.

Those cold rains in mid-September ushered in autumn. By the calendar it was still summer, but when it cleared there was a chill in the air along with clear blue skies after the rains washed out the smoke haze of recent weeks; in other words, the perfect time to check one of my ruffed grouse coverts.

This ruffed grouse walk took me over familiar terrain, a mountain hillside with patches of aspens interspersed with pine stands. I’ve been visiting this hillside every year for over 20 seasons. Sometimes I find grouse and sometimes I don’t. I even remember one year when there were a lot of grouse, but that was an exception.

Flicka, my Labrador retriever and hunting partner, was acting ‘birdy’ as she sniffed out bird scent along the ground in a clump of pines at the edge of the aspens. My shotgun was ready, but I wasn’t quick enough when a grouse flushed—not from the clump of pines Flicka was sniffing, but from another one 10 feet away. I caught just a glimpse of the bird before it disappeared into the trees.

From the sound of wings as the bird flew off, I didn’t think the bird went far. The trick was to find out just where the bird went.

We tramped through the aspens, Flicka occasionally finding tantalizing whiffs of scent, though nothing that resulted in a flushing grouse. After a couple wide circles, however, a grouse flushed from the top of a knoll, flying downhill through the trees. I got off a couple shots at the disappearing bird, but they weren’t good shots.

We walked down the hillside, again hoping to flush the grouse, optimistically thinking that the third time would be a charm.

We did find that bird a third time. This time it was up in the twisted branches of a pine tree that recently perished to a pine beetle attack. The bird flushed from high up the tree and disappeared without giving me a glimpse. We tried to get yet another flush but this time the grouse gave us the slip. We searched the area hoping to see it one more time, but this bird didn’t hang around any longer. Chalk up another score for ruffed grouse.

Some of my favorite places in southwest Montana are ruffed grouse coverts. Ruffed grouse and aspens go together like a horse and carriage. Aspen thickets are islands of color, sunshine and moisture in autumn, as aspens and underbrush turn from green, as they were in mid-September, to shades of yellow and orange, as they will be these next couple weeks. A month from now, after the leaves drop, the aspen thickets will be austere shades of brown and gray.

Ruffed grouse habitat is dynamic and always changing. In recent years it seemed like pines were taking over many of my grouse coverts. Then pine beetles came along and now new aspens are popping up.

Whatever the season, ruffed grouse depend on aspens for shelter and livelihood, and that means I keep coming back, and sometimes things work.

On that outing, after Flicka and I circled back to the truck and had a lunch break, we tried another spot. We hadn’t gotten far when I realized that Flicka had gone on point. I prepared for a flushing grouse and was ready when it took off. Another pine tree bravely sacrificed a branch, but enough #8 shot slipped through to drop the bird.

There are never guarantees but sometimes those meanders end with the makings of a gourmet dinner.

Fishing, not catching, is sometimes what it's all about.

2011-09-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

That's what's left of a pontoon boat on that rock. The Yellowstone can be unforgiving.

“Watch where the guides are going,” I thought, as I drove along on Interstate 90.

I was on my way to Red Lodge where I was going to help cover the annual convention of the Montana Tavern Association for their house organ, “Montana Tavern Times.” It’s a fun convention to cover and I’ve gotten to know a lot of neat people. Still, I was already looking forward to taking a couple hours on the return trip to stop and do some fishing, because I knew ahead of time that my batteries would need re-charging, and a couple hours of flyfishing would be the perfect way to do it.

So, when a couple SUVs towing drift boats passed me east of Livingston, I couldn’t help be curious about where they might be exiting off the freeway. As it turned out, they took the exit I had already been kind of planning to take. I figured that was a confirmation of my hunch.

The Yellowstone River in mid-September is a different river than it was for most of the summer of 2011. The big river was a muddy, roaring torrent most of the summer before the spring runoff period finally exhausted itself. Even in mid-August, when I made a trip to the upper Yellowstone to report on the Reel Recovery program (See August 24 edition), the river was still relatively high and just beginning to clear.

Now, the river is finally running clear and in the autumn sunshine it sparkles with blues and greens when you get distant glimpses of the water from the highway.

It’s a clear, sunny midday when I drive into the fishing access site I planned on earlier in the week. It’s still cool after a chilly night, but it’s warming quickly as I put on my waders and string up my flyrod.

As I walk downstream with the plan to work my way back up a series of riffles, multitudes of grasshoppers are buzzing around the shoreline willows and grasses, confirming my thought that I should try a hopper pattern. I’d even tied up some lavender hoppers, based on what I’d learned on the last trip.

I hoped to be on the river at the right place, the right time, and with the right fly this time. Tell that to the fish, however.

As I worked up the riffles, I cast my fake grasshopper toward the shallow edges and to the deeper water farther out. I caught a glimpse of one fish following the hopper’s drift down the current, but it decided that it wasn’t edible after all and disappeared.

After that refusal, I considered options. There were a few tricos in the air, though there didn’t seem to be enough to bring fish to the surface. There was an occasional mayfly or caddis, but again nothing that seemed to be attracting attention.

I tried another hopper pattern, one that had more hopper-like colors than lavender. I tried other dry flies. When those didn’t work I tried some nymphs.

As is often the case when fish aren’t cooperating, my mind wandered. I thought of my last evening of fishing over the Labor Day weekend when my last fish of the evening was a beautiful westslope cutthroat trout, a fish I figured made the weekend’s fishing a success. On this water I’d enjoy catching a Yellowstone cutthroat trout.

A rock in the middle of the river had an unusual decoration: the green cover of what had been a pontoon from a pontoon boat. It’s a vivid reminder that the Yellowstone River may look relatively placid in September, but we can’t forget that it can be an unforgiving foe at times, and I’m curious about the story of survival from the person who got shipwrecked.

Finally, under what is now a hot, blazing sun, I realize it’s time to quit fishing and get back on the road.

I felt disappointed the fish weren’t biting, but then I realized I had accomplished exactly what I’d set out to do. I’d spent a couple hours flyfishing and felt refreshed.

Blue Grouse Training Camp

2011-09-15T20:31:00.000-07:00

Flicka and the first grouse of 2011

It’s been a tough fall training camp, up on that western Montana mountain.

Trudging up and down those mountainsides, I couldn’t help thinking back to those long ago twice a day football practices back in my high school days. Those sweaty sessions under a steamy August sun were a long time ago, to be sure. In fact, I have to concede that the last time I put on cleats and pads, President Dwight Eisenhower was running for reelection, if that’s any indication.

Still, the goal of those practices: to get in good physical condition so that playing football games would seem easy in comparison, seemed altogether too much like the opening of the upland bird season over Labor Day weekend.

In recent years we’ve spent Labor Day weekends camping at a Forest Service campground convenient to both flyfishing and grouse hunting. There’s a Forest Service road that loops its way to near the top of a mountain and over the years I’ve established about five different areas that have blue grouse habitat. There are other areas on the mountain that look pretty much the same to me, but I never found grouse there. I guess you’d have to ask the grouse why they never go to these other spots. If you can find them, that is.

On opening day we drove up that mountain road before dawn and halfway up the mountain I spotted a covey of grouse on the road. The birds nervously moved off the road when Flicka, my Labrador retriever hunting partner, and I made our approach, but we managed to get shots at the flushing birds and dropped one of them. With one bird in hand we pounded the bush but the birds had scattered and didn’t want to be found.

At the top of the mountain we ran into another covey of grouse. I missed a shot at one bird, but another bird flew directly at me, about 15 feet off the ground. It’s an easy shot to miss, but I got this one. The bird folded, though its momentum carried it so that it actually crashed into and bounced off my leg. Flicka was at my side and caught it in midair on the bounce—an easy retrieve.

On another sagebrush ridge we put up just a couple birds that flushed at the edge of shooting range. I got off a couple shots but nothing dropped. We had friends coming to our camp for lunch that day so that ended that first day of hunting. I felt pretty good about getting a couple of those big, chunky birds.

In succeeding mornings, however, those grouse outfoxed Flicka and me at every turn. They’d flush when we were still 50 or so yards away. If we followed them into the timber they’d flush from the tops of trees, and I learned long ago the hard way that that’s about as tough a shot as they come.

I called the birds blue grouse, though if you look in the upland hunting regulations you’ll see the birds referred to as “dusky” grouse. In 2006, the American Ornithological Union designated blue grouse into two different strains. The grouse of inland mountains are now officially dusky grouse and the grouse of Pacific coastal mountains are “sooty” grouse. In the current issue of Montana Outdoors, writer Dave Carty wrote about hunting mountain grouse and used “dusky” throughout the article. He explained the official name change, though he acknowledges that when he’s talking to his hunting buddies, he’ll still call them blue grouse.

Whatever you call those grouse, don’t call them fool hens. While blue grouse, or dusky grouse, if you want to be correct, often have a reputation for innocence, I can take you trekking across a mountain where I know grouse are to be found, but after they’ve flushed at long distance, or flushed where a big tree screens their escape flight, you may start calling those grouse some new names, but fool hen won’t be one of them.

There may be fools on the mountain, but it’s the hunters, not the grouse.

Looking Back at September 11, 2001 - An Outdoors Perspective

2011-09-07T19:59:00.000-07:00

This coming weekend we will commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001.

It was one of those days that, like the day of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, are indelibly imprinted in our memories. It was one of those days we can remember where we were and what we were doing and with whom we were doing it. I can’t think of another day quite like it, when my wife and I both spent most of the day in front of a TV set, watching again and again, the sights of the airliner crashing into the second tower, and then the two World Trade Center towers collapsing.

After watching and listening to hours of endless coverage and interminable analysis, both my wife and I were totally numb by evening and we finally had to turn it all off and get some respite.

A couple days later, in an urgent search for less information, we hooked up the trailer and headed for the northern prairies and a couple days of sharp-tailed grouse hunting.

I had to go back and check my hunting journals as to what kind of hunting success I had that week. It was one of those trips when Candy, our Labrador retriever of those years, and I did a lot of walking across the grasslands but put up just a few grouse and I never pulled the trigger on my shotgun. From the success/failure aspects of the trip, the only productive part was, on the way home, an evening stop along the Missouri River south of Great Falls and catching some nice rainbow trout.

The most memorable part of the trip was what we didn’t see. We had beautiful weather that week, with lots of clear, blue skies and warm temperatures. What was missing in those clear skies was contrails.

Normally, those big prairie-country skies are always crisscrossed with contrails of various aircraft going over what many along both east and west coasts think of as ‘flyover country.’ That week, with all civilian aircraft grounded, there were no airplanes flying over flyover country.

I recently read a book of fishing stories, with one of the stories telling of the author taking a trip to a remote Canadian river, culminating with flying into an even more remote spike camp, with an appointment for the bush pilot to fly back and take him out on a specified date.

The appointed date came and went and nobody came. Finally, running out of supplies, the fisherman packed up what he could carry, and after a difficult trek through the mountains, made it back to base, where he belatedly learned about the events of September 11, 2001, and why the bush pilot wasn’t able to bring him out.

Many people had stories of epic cross-country trips to get home. Getting home, wherever that might have been, was the overwhelming goal for so many people that week.

A lot has happened these past ten years in the aftermath of that terrible day. We’ve gone to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and thousands of Americans and allied troops have made the supreme sacrifice. At last count, there were 4,792 military coalition deaths in Iraq and 2, 698 in Afghanistan (source: icasualties.org), plus the hundreds of thousands of other casualties. According to antiwar.com, the total American wounded are over 100,000, far more than the official figure of 33,125, and that doesn’t include a possible 300,000 or more Americans with undocumented brain injuries and concussions.

As of last week, the total cost of wars since 2001 is over $1.2 trillion, and that figure goes up about $10,000 every three seconds (costofwar.com).

Osama bin-Laden, the architect of 9-11, finally kept a belated appointment with destiny this spring, though the chain of mischief he set into motion keeps unfolding.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on national affairs and international relations. What I do know is that spending time on trout streams, mountains and prairies, carrying a flyrod or shotgun, is my sure grip on sanity in this insane world.

Did I mention that I love September?

2011-08-31T12:44:00.000-07:00

Flicka in search of grouse last September

The days are shorter and the mornings are getting chilly, though chilly mornings are the norm rather than the exception here in the mountains of western Montana.

Is this the end of summer? I don’t think so, though while early September may not be the end of summer, it is the beginning of the end of summer.

To my mind, however, tomorrow is New Years Day. I know you won’t find many calendars marking tomorrow as a holiday but it is to me, because that first day of September is the first day of the 2011 Montana hunting season.

The upland bird season for grouse of various kinds, along with Hungarian partridge and wild turkeys opens tomorrow on the first day of September. On Saturday, September 3, big game archery seasons begin. Note, however, that the pheasant season doesn’t begin until October 8 and waterfowl seasons have not yet been set. The deer and elk rifle seasons will begin on October 22, but that’s a long time from now, so we won’t worry about that for now.

Still, I look ahead to chilly dawns on top of a western Montana mountain. There’s a haze in the air from a distant fire smoldering away, and as usual there are some questions in my mind. Every year, it seems that the mountains are higher and steeper, and I have to pause more frequently to catch my breath.

Those thoughts are a given. The major question running through my mind will be whether we’ll find birds somewhere on this walk through the mountaintop sagebrush meadows.

We had a late winter and a cold, rainy and snowy spring. Did those grouse chicks chip their way out of their eggshell, back in June, to find a sunny, early summer day, or was their first peek at the world a late spring storm? The answers to that question on thousands of mountains and millions of acres of prairie add up to what kind of days Montana hunters will experience when they take their first walks of the year in search of upland birds.

While the question of what Flicka, my black Labrador retriever and faithful hunting partner and I will find is still to be answered, rest assured we will be out there taking those morning hikes. It’s what we do, and, good lord willing, we’ll keep doing it as long as we’re able.

While I mentally begin to focus on shotgunning and upland birds in coming days and weeks, it’s a focus that often shifts to trout and flyfishing. For many anglers, the summer of 2011 has been a difficult and frustrating season with prolonged periods of spring runoff.

Now, at the end of summer, rivers are in prime shape for angling. The fish are feisty and robust after chowing down during all those weeks of high water. Fishing may not be easy right now, though it may be rewarding if you’re on the water at the right time.

Tricos, those diminutive mayflies of late summer, make their spinner flights to lay eggs on the water in mid to late mornings. When conditions are right, fish go nuts over the millions of bugs coming to the water. If you enjoy fishing light tackle and tiny flies, this can be some of the most exciting fishing of the year. Using #20 flies on a 6X leader isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but it sure is fun when a good trout sips it in. Of course, for comic relief, this is also the season for hoppers. Take your choice.

In short, tomorrow is September and with early season hunting, late season flyfishing, ripening chokecherries and wild plums, there are more opportunities in the great outdoors than there is time in which to do it.

I kind of hate to see those sunsets getting earlier every evening and sunrises later every morning, but it’s the rhythm of the seasons and that rhythm beats with more urgency this time of year.

Did I mention that I love September?

Reel Recovery - Helping men fight cancer

2011-08-24T19:25:00.000-07:00

Signing the vest and adding strength upon strength

“This is a sacred moment,” Stan Golub, the executive director of Reel Recovery, said, as a group of men wrote their name on a flyfishing vest before starting a day of flyfishing along the Yellowstone River north of Yellowstone National Park.

Reel Recovery was founded in 2003 by a group of avid fly anglers inspired by their fishing buddy’s ongoing battle with brain cancer. It’s a national non-profit organization that conducts free flyfishing retreats for men recovering from life-threatening cancer. Combining flyfishing instruction with directed “courageous conversations,” the organization offers the men a time to share stories, learn new skills, form friendships and gain renewed hope as they confront the challenges of recovery.

One of the organization’s traditions is that they wear vests previously worn and signed by previous participants. “This is our legacy here,” Golub, said, “think of this as a river of strength. And remember that someone, a few years from now, will be wearing this vest and sharing your strength.”

Golub, who lives in Needham, Massachusetts, was one of the founders of the organization and is the organization’s only employee. The core of the program is a network of volunteers who organize retreats, facilitate discussions, and, of course, take participants fishing. This past week at a retreat held at Dome Mountain Ranch, a number of area fishing guides, and this reporter, took days off from guiding to become “fishing buddies” for participants.

I was a buddy for Josh, a computer programmer from Missoula, who is recovering from throat cancer. Last year he went through surgery and radiation for his cancer, losing several months of work as he coped with his illness. Josh, as it turns out, is an experienced angler, so didn’t need any instruction and when we went to a private pond on the ranch, did well, latching onto seven nice trout.

That afternoon, I was a buddy for Jim, a retired rocket scientist (really) from Hamilton, as we floated with Randy Kittelson, a Presbyterian minister and flyfishing fanatic from Denver. Randy was at the retreat as a facilitator, with a unique perspective, in that he first came to the program as a volunteer, and then as a participant after he came down with prostate cancer—his second serious bout with cancer. Unfortunately, Jim, a beginning angler, didn’t catch any fish though we didn’t feel bad about it. It seems that if you didn’t have the right fly, the fish weren’t hitting. The hot fly, it turns out, was a lavender-bodied grasshopper imitation.

Why trout would prefer a lavender hopper makes no sense. Surely they’ve never seen a real bug like that, but sometimes that’s how it works.

Reel Recovery, which initially received some money from the Lance Armstrong Foundation, held its first retreat in June 2003 in Loveland, Colorado, and did their second retreat in October of that year. In 2004, they held six retreats. In 2011, they’ll be holding 19 retreats in 14 states. Retreats are free for participants, and Reel Recovery gets funding from a number of foundations, corporations, Trout Unlimited chapters and fishing clubs, as well as local fundraisers.

Though participating in a Reel Recovery retreat is generally a one-time event, many past participants come back as volunteers, often acting as facilitators and starting retreats in states that previously hadn’t had retreats.

Of course, some people also get hooked on flyfishing and one facilitator remarked that he’d heard from the wife of a participant that her husband came home, went to a flyshop and bought one of everything. She was ecstatic. “He finally has a reason to get out of the house.”

“We encourage the men to stay in contact,” Golub said. “We hear that many of the guys get together regularly and they’ve become the best of friends.”

Participants go out, Golub concludes, “To have fun, get a break from their routine and to get a new perspective on dealing with cancer. Certainly, they get to know other people whom they can relate to in a special way.”

Finally, Reel Recovery’s motto: Be well; fish on.

For more information, they’re online at www.reelrecovery.org.

Evening flyfishing - a special time

2011-08-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

Evening shadows lengthen and the river bottoms come to life at the end of the day. An owl flies into a cottonwood tree to get a good lock at the anglers walking into its domain. At the end of a warm and sunny day, it’s time to put on a good helping of bug spray and go out in search of some of those fish that ignore anglers during the day.

Now that it’s mid-August, tactics that worked a few weeks ago probably aren’t as effective anymore. Pale Morning Dun mayfly hatches aren’t as prolific as they were a month ago and trout aren’t looking up at the water’s surface for their next bit of food with any reliability.

That doesn’t mean fishing isn’t good. It’s just time to switch gears and go fishing when the fish are feeding, which is about the time that everybody else gets off the river.

Our son, Kevin, and his family, have been camping and fishing with us the last few weekends, so Kevin took a walk with me through the mosquito haven that is the lower Big Hole River in search of fishing action.

Unlike the daytime hours, when the river is filled with float anglers and recreational floaters, the evening more often is a time for the solitary angler willing to brave mosquitoes and falling temperatures in hopes of finding trout on the feed.

There are never guarantees, of course. Still, when Kevin and I walked through the tall grasses and brush, we were filled with anticipation. We were heading for a spot that has rewarded us many times in the past, a bend in the river where we can wade the shallows and cast toward deeper water along the opposite bank.

Aquatic entomologists sometimes talk about an ‘evening drift,’ a time when mayfly nymphs let go of their rocky shelters on the stream bottom and go for a little trip. Fish, of course, take advantage of this chance for an evening snack, though sometimes those bits of aquatic food have a little sting, often in the form of a soft-hackled wet fly, part of the legacy of Syl Nemes, whose death I noted a month ago.

This evening, the action is slow in starting. In fact, I begin to wonder whether there will be any action. It somehow seems that when I’ve had hot action it was when the water is lower than it is this season of high water flows. I finally have a strike from a fish that grabs the fly and goes for a short run before shaking the hook.

I walk a little farther downstream and change flies and this one; a soft-hackled pheasant tail nymph seems to have some magic to it. I catch an energetic brown trout that puts up a good fight before I’m able to bring it in for the release. Then I get a substantially bigger brown that goes on one long run after another before tiring. A third fish follows that one.

By then it’s almost dark. The air temperature has dropped and I’m feeling chilled from wet-wading in the cool water, so it’s actually a relief to walk back through the trees and warm up a bit while we slap mosquitoes. We’ve done better on other occasions but we had enough action to make us happy.

We weren’t the only anglers on the river that evening. Earlier we’d passed a bait fisherman excited about a three-pound brown trout he’d caught a little earlier. He was gone when we came back but we heard the next day he’d caught several more browns, including a deep-bellied, nine-pound brown trout that I suspect might stop at a taxidermy shop along its way to a trophy wall.

Late evening and night fishing isn’t for everyone, though on a visit to Michigan a couple years ago I learned that there it’s almost a religion during early summer brown drake and ‘Hex’ hatches. Here in Montana it’s almost a given that you’ll have the river to yourself.

Just don’t forget the bug dope.

A look at the fishing in Ireland

2011-08-10T18:50:00.000-07:00

With An Rí Rá Montana Irish festival coming up this weekend I happened to think of a unique gift I received a couple years ago from Father Gregory Burns of Butte. Though I’m not a Catholic, Father Burns and I have had a cordial relationship going back a number of years. In fact, at the time I was retiring from my former career with the Social Security Administration, he suggested it was too bad that I wasn’t Catholic, as otherwise I’d be a good candidate for becoming a deacon in the Catholic Church.

A couple years ago, Father Burns gave me an Irish coin minted in 1963, which he’d acquired on one of his trips and thought that I should have it, because on one side of the coin it has the likeness of an Atlantic salmon. The other side has an Irish harp. As coin collectors know, the harp side is the obverse, or head side, and the salmon side is the reverse, or tail side. The coin is a “florin,” which was replaced in 1969 by the 10 pence coin.

The Atlantic salmon is depicted on the coin because the fishing industry, both sea fisheries and freshwater game fishing, is important to the Irish economy.

With Ireland’s cool, wet climate, there is a lot of water in Ireland and the various streams, rivers and lakes are the basis for a good fishery.

Many lakes have excellent pike fishing and every year anglers catch pike in the 20 to 30 pound range. These big pike, exactly the same as our American pike, are protected and it’s illegal to keep a pike of over 20 pounds if caught in a river or over 30 pounds if caught in a lake. The limit for pike is one per day. Unlike most angling in Ireland, anglers generally don’t need to pay for the privilege of pike fishing.

Brown trout are the native trout of Ireland and there are many miles of streams and rivers with a good trout fishery. In Ireland, most trout waters are privately owned or leased, so anglers have to pay for the privilege, though for a visitor, it may not be all that bad, as angling fees, according to the website, www.fishinginireland.com, run around €10 to €20 per day (that’s Euros, by the way). Some larger loughs (lakes) don’t require an access fee.

Ireland’s glamour fish are Atlantic salmon and sea trout and a large number of rivers and lakes are managed for salmon and sea trout. Sea trout are brown trout that have gone to sea, much like a steelhead, and return to fresh waters to spawn. Kirk Deeter, a field editor for Field & Stream magazine recently made a fishing trip to Ireland and wrote in the magazine’s blog site about fishing Lough Currane. Pointedly, he doesn’t tell of his personal angling success, though he does report on a ghillie (guide) who put a customer on an Irish record 13 pound, 5 ounce sea trout this past May.

Atlantic salmon have a couple peak periods of angling. In summer, grilse, or immature salmon, enter the rivers and offer excellent angling for three to six pound fish. Mature salmon return to Irish rivers beginning in autumn. A 57-pound salmon was caught in 1874 and it’s not likely that record will ever be broken. Only a few salmon of over 20 pounds are caught annually.

In addition to pike, trout and salmon there are also “coarse” fish in Ireland, with unfamiliar names to American anglers such as tench, roach, or rudd, plus the more familiar perch and carp. Though there are liberal bag limits for coarse fish, there are no closed seasons and most waters offer free fishing.

In addition to fresh water angling, there are abundant salt-water opportunities, whether it’s surfcasting along shorelines, or in small boats in sheltered bays and estuaries, or deep-sea fishing.

In short, there is a lot of good fishing to be had in Ireland, and for Irish visitors in Butte this weekend, I’d suggest they sample our fishing here in southwest Montana.

New Trend: the Locavore Hunter - and Welcome!

2011-08-03T18:33:00.000-07:00


A pair of sharptailed grouse from last year - the beginnings of a couple gourmet dinners.

The summer is flying by. Now that southwest Montana rivers are finally getting into good shape, it seems like the fishing season is just beginning. On the other hand, we look at the calendar and realize that the 2011 hunting season is just a few weeks away, with upland bird hunting beginning on September 1 and archery season on September 3.

Hunting was a hot topic at last month’s annual conference of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, held at Snowbird resort at Salt Lake City.

Keynote speaker Hank Shaw predicts a wave of new hunters coming on the scene, helping to reverse a decline in hunter numbers in many states. Shaw calls them “Adult Onset Hunters,” people who have not grown up in hunting families or in a hunting culture.

Shaw is a longtime political reporter who has gravitated towards a new career as a food writer and blogger, and he counts himself among this new wave of Adult Onset Hunters, people who are out there for the food. He says, “I’m a cook who hunts. We enjoy the experience, but at the end of the day, we want food on the plate.”

Shaw, who also describes himself as, “the omnivore who has solved his dilemma,” (a reference to the bestselling book, “Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan) is a person who enthusiastically looks for natural foods and writes about it at his blog, “Hunter Angler Gardener Cook” (http://honest-food.net). He also wrote a book on the topic, “Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the forgotten feast.” To indicate he’s serious about it, he reports that grackles, a bird that mostly annoys people, are great eating. “They’re seed eaters, and as a general principle, seed-eating birds are good eating.”

Shaw says he is continually running into prospective hunters at places not traditionally associated with hunting, such as food co-ops or on online forums, or at restaurants where there are chefs who feature game and foraged food. He asserts that there’s a whole new world of hunters out there and they’re eager for information on how to get started hunting, and then how to turn that bounty into food on the table. That wild bounty includes things such as starlings, jackrabbits and the like, as well as more mainstream wild game. His website also has many recipes for wild game and foraged food.

Shaw also suggests that state game agencies should offer additional hunter education classes geared for adults, as a beginning adult hunter may feel like a misfit in a class of 11 and 12 year-olds.

Jackson Landers is another hunting advocate who has made a reputation by teaching hunting basics to people who hadn’t been part of any hunting tradition but recognize wild game as an excellent source of locally grown, natural food. He regularly teaches classes on deer hunting, including field dressing animals, meat cutting and cooking. The New York Times produced a video about his classes, “Closer to the Bone,” in 2009, which can still be viewed online.

Landers recently completed a book, “Hunting Deer for Food,” which will be issued next month, and is working on another book project, “Eating Aliens,” about hunting and eating alien invasive species. He also has a website, “The Locavore Hunter.”

Landers grew up in a vegetarian household and never tasted meat until he was ten years old. He learned to enjoy eating meat and when, in his 20s, he inherited some guns, he took up hunting, and has turned that into a career.

Of his classes, Landers says, “I’ve had hundreds of people take my classes and they’ve become serious hunters.”

Landers does point out, however, that these new locavore hunters haven’t gotten much recognition, especially by the mainstream outdoor press, which generally focuses on lifelong hunters. He asserts that, “New hunters need the wisdom of old hunters; old hunters need these new hunters to maintain hunter numbers.”

Maintaining these hunter numbers is essential to preserving our hunting tradition as a mainstream, politically accepted means of outdoor recreation and, of course, meat in the freezer.

Welcome to the gang and bon appétit.

Mountain Creeks and Brook Trout

2011-07-27T17:48:00.000-07:00


Charley casting to brookies with Flicka supervising

Our southwestern Montana rivers are finally dropping. They’re still high by normal late July standards, but there finally seems to be a light at the end of the runoff tunnel.

Right now, conditions are about prime for floaters on the Big Hole River and if our last weekend on the river is an example, people are taking full advantage of water conditions more typical of late June than late July.

Still, I’d bet that we’re still a good week or so away from good wade-fishing, and if you do find a good spot to walk along the edges of the river, you’ll be facing a long parade of drift boats and rubber rafts coming your way.

An alternative might be to explore some of those many squiggly blue lines on topographical maps, those high country creeks that have been pouring all that water down to our rivers the last couple months. That reservoir of melting snow is finally diminishing and the creeks are dropping.

Our friend, Charley Storms of Evansville, Indiana, joined us this past weekend for camping and fishing. He and a cousin from Philadelphia had spent the week at an area fishing lodge, enjoying good float fishing, but when I suggested exploring some creeks, he was ready for new adventures.

The first creek we tried didn’t pan out, though the drive up the valley was worth the trip from the standpoint of wildflowers. The mountain meadows were a riot of color from a profusion of wildflowers. The creek, however, was still too high for flyfishing.

We moved to another creek and had some action, catching a couple fish plus getting a few more rises. Still, the lower part of the stream had more water than desirable, so we drove farther up the valley.

At higher elevations, conditions were about perfect. There was plenty of water, but it was easy wading up and down the creek. The biggest challenge was finding runs that weren’t choked with willows. By walking around, however, it was no problem to find runs and pools where there was casting room.

Creek fishing is flyfishing simplified. You don’t need fancy equipment or hundreds of different flies to match the hatches. In high country creeks, the growing season is short so fish can’t afford to pass up too many tidbits of food passing by. A small, bushy fly, perhaps one already chewed up on some other trip, is just about perfect.

For better or worse, most high country creeks are overrun with small brook trout. I think of them as the knapweed of trout. They’re not native to the West and they outcompete our native cutthroat. Ironically, on many eastern waters where brook trout are native, rainbow trout, originally imported from West Coast rivers, are the evil alien invaders. On the bright side, brook trout are abundant and if you’re hungry for a fish dinner, go ahead and fill your creel, and if you don’t have a creel a plastic grocery bag or forked willow stick will work almost as well.

I have a friend in Idaho, Chris Hunt, who is a writer and a staffer for Trout Unlimited. He has a website titled, www.eatmorebrooktrout.com, and a slogan, “Save the west; eat a brook trout.” If you need an endorsement for guilt-free fish munching, go no further.

The fish Charley and I caught weren’t trophies, unless you consider an 8-inch fish a trophy. Despite their diminutive size, these brookies are mature fish and one of them was even full of eggs developing for fall spawning.

The final reward for a fun-filled day of fishing, however, was back in camp. I spritzed the fish with olive oil, sprinkled them with salt and pepper and put them on the charcoal grill. In a few minutes the fish were perfectly done and we ate them as appetizers while venison steaks took their turn on the grill for our dinner’s main course.

I’m looking forward to fishing the Big Hole and other waters during what’s left of summer, but I’ll reserve more time for some of those headwaters creeks.

Webley & Scott - an old name returns to U.S. shotgun market

2011-07-20T18:35:00.000-07:00


Closeup view of the Webley & Scott Series 3000 over/under shotgun

“Are you ready to fall in love?”

That’s not the usual question I hear when walking up to the firing line on a trap range. I was at the Lee Kay Center, a public shooting facility in Salt Lake City, Utah, and operated by the Utah Division of Wildlife. It’s an outstanding facility, with trap, skeet, archery, airgun, rifle and pistol ranges. I was there with other outdoor writers from around the country in connection with this year’s annual conference of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, held this year at Snowbird.

People were skiing at Snowbird on the 4th of July, just before our conference started, though summer was in full bloom at the time of our conference.

Getting back to the question, however, the object of expected affection was a new shotgun just coming to U.S. markets, an over/under shotgun with an old name, Webley & Scott.

Webley & Scott, in various corporate identities, has been around since the 1790s. W. C. Scott & Sons made guns and gun components that ended up in a variety of classic shotguns back in the Victorian era. Webley & Son was known for revolvers and other sidearms. Among their customers was George Armstrong Custer, and it’s believed that Custer was carrying a Webley revolver at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

The companies merged in 1897 and Webley & Scott produced several models of handguns for the British military through both World Wars, as well as for police forces. Webley & Scott also manufactured various air rifles and pistols after 1920 when the UK began to strictly control civilian firearms.

Webley & Scott went through a number of corporate reorganizations and ownerships over the years, including the latest just a year ago, with the new management’s plan to bring the Webley & Scott name back to the American shotgunning market. Webley & Scott previously marketed a line of shotguns in the U.S. in the 1970s.

The new Webley & Scott guns are made in Turkey to W & S specifications. A lot of guns marketed in the U.S., incidentally, are made in Turkey. The main lines of guns are over/under double barrel shotguns in both 12 and 20-gauge actions. They come with interchangeable choke tubes and several configurations of barrel lengths and safety actions. The guns even come with a padded hard case. Even better, they come with a highly competitive price tag of around $1200 for the 900 series, or $2200 for the somewhat fancier 1200 series version.

They also had one 3000 series 20-gauge gun on hand, which I had only a chance to admire but not shoot. This model, which comes in both side-by-side and over/under configurations, is a sidelock gun, also available in 12-gauge, and comes with both fancy wood and metal work. The price tag is also a bit fancier at $6500, but as sidelocks go, it’s probably a bargain.

Do they shoot? Yes they do. I would have liked to have shot at a lot more clay pigeons than I did, but in my brief test they handled well and when I did my job, the gun did its job and the targets shattered. The guns weigh in at just over seven pounds and I’d sure like to see them whittle some weight off of that, though I concede they don’t weigh any more than most of their competition. The sidelock model is a slimmer 6.5 pounds.

I had a chance to chat with Derick Cole, president of the Webley & Scott U.S. branch. He said the only other people who have had a chance to give these guns a try were at a Pheasants Forever outing where everybody raved about them. We writers were just the second group to try them.

These guns are so new that they aren’t yet available at many retailers, though they’re busy talking to major sporting goods companies. At any rate, people interested in getting a good over/under shotgun without spending a ton of money might check them out now at www.webleyandscott.com.

Maybe I did fall in love.

Backyard Wildlife: There's a lot going on out there.

2011-07-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

One of the backyard cottontail rabbits that enjoy our garden

The sound of robins chirping is a cheerful sign of spring. When we hear the sound of robins in March we know that spring is here. Yes, the season is often elusive and we wonder whether those robins wish they’d stayed south a few weeks longer.

Yesterday, the air was filled with the sounds of robins, but these were shrieks of panic and anguish, not cheerful chirps of spring. Ascribing human emotions to birds is hazardous, but there was no mistaking these sounds. These robins were angry.

The robin shrieks were interspersed with ‘caws’ from a crow, evidently the focus of the robins’ anger.

All the noise and activity was taking place in a couple aspen trees at the back corner of our yard. Looking more closely, robins were darting in and out of the branches, and a couple times the crow flew off, escorted by dive-bombing robins intent on getting rid of this unwelcome intruder.

My black Lab, Flicka, and I walked down the alley to get a closer look at the action. Most of the drama had ended and the crow was nowhere in sight. At least I thought the drama was over until Flicka walked under the branches and out popped a half-grown baby robin, and then another. They were about the size of sparrows, not yet showing any orange on their chests, still brown and with thrush markings.

With these babies out in the open the adult robins renewed their angry calls and darting at Flicka, warning her to leave them alone. I called Flicka away from the baby robins and we left the scene, hoping these juveniles survived their little adventure.

The baby robins explain the little backyard drama. The crow had spotted the robin nest and elected to do a little raiding in search of a nice, juicy baby robin or two.

It was one of those backyard dramas that get played out on a daily basis, though usually not witnessed by humans. On a different scale it was similar to that told by friends of an acquaintance living just out of town near Seeley Lake. She had seen a white-tailed doe and fawn in her backyard, probably not an unusual sight in that community that is virtually overrun with deer.

A couple days later, however, she looked out and saw, to her horror, the mother deer running frantically back and forth, frantic but helpless as a grizzly bear dined on the fawn.

In both these cases, there is a natural inclination to interfere and come to the rescue of the baby robins or the whitetail fawn. Of course, yelling or throwing something at a crow is one thing. If you’re tempted to run off a hungry grizzly bear, you’d better think twice, lest you become the bear’s next meal.

When we become witnesses to these backyard dramas it’s usually best to let nature run its course. We may be inclined to think that robins and deer are good, but crows and grizzly bears are bad. Still, chances are the crows have young to feed and baby birds of one kind or another are an opportune source of food for a baby crow. Similarly, a grizzly bear at this time of year needs a lot of food to recover from winter hibernation, especially if it is nursing a pair of cubs.

There are many dramas taking place in back yards all the time. Almost on a daily basis, Flicka will freeze on point and if I look in the direction she’s facing there is usually a cottontail rabbit upwind sitting calmly in a patch of clover pretending it’s invisible. Then Flicka will begin to stalk the rabbit, going ever so slowly and cautiously, until she can’t stand it any longer and bursts into a run.

It’s almost a joke. The bunny scampers a few feet, pops through a fence or hedge and is safe, while my poor dog wonders where it went.

It reminds me of a quote attributed to Karl Marx: History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.

Syl Nemes, Mr. Soft-Hackle, remembered.

2011-07-06T15:30:00.000-07:00

Syl Nemes in 1998 on the Madison River

About a dozen years ago, I served as program chairman for the George Grant Chapter of Trout Unlimited and had the privilege of contacting people in the flyfishing world and talking them into sharing their expertise in flyfishing, just for the fun of it. No money, just fun.

A highlight was the evening Syl (short for Sylvester) Nemes did a presentation on his lifelong passion, soft-hackled flies. Al Troth of Dillon, another flyfishing legend, came to Butte for the evening and Al and Syl exchanged a number of viewpoints, some of which were rather pointed. Judging by the grins of people enjoying the exchanges between these two legendary characters of the sport, I knew that booking Syl Nemes was a home run.

The next day I met Syl and his wife, Hazel, for breakfast and the opportunity for an interview, and out of this conversation came an invitation to go fishing with Syl on the Madison River a couple weeks later. Subsequently I occasionally ran into Syl at fishing shows where he did flytying demonstrations or promoted new books.

It came as a shock when I belatedly learned that Syl Nemes died at his home in Bozeman on February 3, 2011, at age 88.

Syl grew up in Cleveland, Ohio where a barber introduced him to the basics of flyfishing and flytying. He enlisted in the Army at the beginning of WWII and in England met Hazel, his future English war bride, who waited anxiously as Syl went to Normandy, just four days after D Day, to direct Air Corps fighters in the push to Germany. He returned to England after nine months and married Hazel, bringing her to the U.S. after the war, where Syl went to Kent State University on the G.I. Bill.

Syl worked as a copywriter for major advertising agencies a number of years and also freelanced as a photojournalist, though when possible he arranged vacations and weekends around flyfishing, always using soft-hackled flies.

In 1975 he published his first book, “The Soft-Hackled Fly,” which re-introduced the all but forgotten English-style wet fly to American anglers.

In 1984, Syl and Hazel moved to Bozeman and, in retirement, built a life around flyfishing, designing new variations of soft-hackled flies, and writing more books and magazine articles promoting variations on soft-hackled flies. Syl became known worldwide for his work; there is even a flyfishing club in Japan that is named after him. In 2008, the Madison-Gallatin Chapter of Trout Unlimited in Bozeman honored Syl with their “Legends of the Headwaters” award.

In the brief time that I got to spend with Syl I learned to appreciate him as a humble and gentle man, and for his love of learning new wrinkles of entomology and fly design, including his 1998 book, “Spinners,” highlighting a then mostly-overlooked part of the mayfly life cycle, as well as demonstrating formidable skills in macro photography.

Syl could be a bit stubborn about his flies, however. On the day we fished together, he commented, “A fly company sent me a whole bag of bead heads and synthetic stuff for me to try out and design some new flies. They’re still sitting in the garage. I don’t want anything to do with that stuff.” Syl believed in the traditions of soft-hackled flies, and natural materials, such as silk and partridge feathers.

In an interview with the Bozeman Chronicle, Hazel commented, “Syl didn’t like to fish too much with people he didn’t know,” so memories of that afternoon on the Madison River seem all the more precious.

Hazel told me that in Syl’s last couple years he had mostly lost interest in fishing, possibly due to subtle changes in his health, though just last October a friend took him out for what turned out to be Syl’s last day of fishing, on a favorite stream, DePuy Spring Creek.

I have autographed copies of several of Syl’s books, including that first 1975 edition of “The Soft-Hackled Fly,” now a collector’s item, as well as some flies that he tied. They are treasured reminders of a memorable friend.

High Water - For Better or Worse

2011-06-29T19:59:00.000-07:00

The high water on area rivers is getting a little old, isn’t it? As we reached the summer solstice last week, a big question was how much more high water will we get once get warm weather starts melting the high mountain snowpack.

Another question is how fish are doing during the sustained high water.

According to an extensive report recently posted to the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks website, the fish are doing just fine, thank you. FWP’s Fisheries Bureau chief, Bruce Rich notes, "Fish are well adapted to survive flooding, though they can sometimes be stranded when high water recedes, depending on where they took refuge.”

Mark Lere, a Future Fisheries program coordinator adds, "In high water like we're seeing this year, fish generally move to the margins of the river for refuge—to backwater areas, or warmer, less turbid side channels or tributaries." As rivers go over their banks, some fish may move out into the floodplain, and then return to the backwaters and side channels when waters finally recede.

The high waters also give rivers and stream a good cleaning, leaving clean gravels for future fish spawning periods. As waters recede, and we have to have confidence that they will, someday, go down, some fish may get stranded in some backwater channels, though overall, the high waters will benefit fish in the long run.

The prairie streams of eastern Montana have also been having high waters and there are interesting things happening, especially with an endangered fish, the pallid sturgeon.

Biologists have been tracking radio-tagged pallid sturgeon and have found several sturgeon have moved up from the Fort Peck Reservoir and up the Milk River, including one male pallid sturgeon that has traveled upstream 36 river miles, the farthest they have documented the species. They have also located a mature female pallid sturgeon in the Milk River, which means there’s a possibility of the fish spawning in the Milk River, something that hasn’t happened for many years.

2010 was another high water year and FWP documented the best production of paddlefish in the Milk River and shovelnose sturgeon in the Missouri River in the last 11 years.

The high waters will have other effects, including some that we may not appreciate. A week ago we made trips to Missoula and to Miles City, and on the Clark Fork River, plus crossing the three forks of the Missouri, along with the Yellowstone, Bighorn and Tongue Rivers, we could see floodwaters spread out across riparian areas. When the waters eventually recede there will be pools of stagnant water virtually everywhere along the floodplains, and pools of stagnant water combined with warm summer temperatures translate to mosquitoes. There will be so many mosquitoes in the flooded areas we’ll have to come up with new terminology to describe the record swarms of those bugs we love to hate.

We might also note that the prairie pothole areas of northern Montana and North Dakota are likely to have fantastic waterfowl production this summer. We’re going to have a lot of ducks this fall. Those ducks, incidentally, will eat a lot of mosquito larvae, so go ducks!

We’re also closely following the flood in Minot, North Dakota, where our son, Kevin, and his family live.

I reported earlier on heavy rains and flooding when we were there during the Memorial Day weekend. At that time, the floodwaters on the Souris (Mouse) River crested at levels just below the flood of 1969. Levees held and residents began to breathe a little easier, even though they expected rural areas to stay under water into July.

On June 19, there were torrential rainstorms in southern Saskatchewan and suddenly new flood projections came out. In 1969 the river reached a level of 1554.5 feet above sea level. The record flood level happened in 1881 when the river reached 1558 feet. Hydrologists predicted a new record flood level of 1563 feet.

Kevin’s home is on high ground, thankfully. Nevertheless, we can’t avoid worrying about the 10,000 people who left their homes when water went over the dikes last Wednesday.

Arizona Wildfires and the Aldo Leopold Connection

2011-06-22T19:56:00.000-07:00

This summer a wildfire in eastern Arizona has blackened over 450,000 acres and is still growing.

A footnote to the fires is a connection to Aldo Leopold, the pioneering writer and naturalist. Leopold is considered the father of wildlife management, as well as a conservationist, forester, philosopher, educator and writer.

Leopold was among the original employees of the U.S. Forest Service and spent his early career in Arizona and New Mexico and was instrumental in designation of the Gila National Forest as a wilderness area in 1924.

He later transferred to Madison, Wisconsin to become assistant director of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory and later left the Forest Service to become a professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin, a first for the university and the nation.

In 1935, Leopold purchased a worn-out farm near Baraboo, Wisconsin and he and his family spent years at the farm, living in a rehabilitated chicken coop, nicknamed, “The Shack,” planting trees, restoring prairies and documenting changes on the farm.

Leopold wrote about the farm in his book, “A Sand County Almanac,” which was published posthumously in 1948. The book includes essays about his early years in Arizona, including, “On Top,” a story about White Mountain, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” and “Escudilla,” all describing areas in this year’s wildfires.

In “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold recalled an incident when he and another forester shot into a pack of wolves. He wrote, “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes…I was young then, and full of trigger-itch. I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean a hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

Leopold understood, long before many, the values of fire, predators and wilderness areas in the environment. While Leopold wrote many scientific articles, “A Sand County Almanac” was aimed at a more general audience. At the time of publication, the book drew little notice, but in the 1970s, a paperback edition turned into a surprise bestseller. The book has been translated into nine languages and is now considered one of the most influential environmental books of the 20th Century.

Aldo and Estella Leopold had five children, all of whom had significant careers in the natural sciences. A. Starker Leopold was a professor of Forestry and Conservation at the University of California-Berkeley. He died in 1983. Their second son, Luna Leopold, was the chief hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey and also taught at Berkeley. He died in 2006. A. Carl Leopold was a plant physiologist at Purdue University and later dean of the graduate school at the University of Nebraska. In retirement he did landmark research on the tropical forests of Costa Rica. He died in 2009.

The older of two daughters, Nina Leopold Bradley did research in the 1940s on lead poisoning of waterfowl, decades before the problem became generally recognized and had a long career as a writer and teacher. Her second husband, Charles Bradley, was a professor and administrator at Montana State University and one of the founders of the Bridger Bowl ski area. After his retirement, they moved back to Wisconsin to continue Aldo Leopold’s work, including establishing the Aldo Leopold Foundation. In 1988 the University of Wisconsin awarded honorary doctorates to both Charles and Nina in recognition of their work. Charles died in 2002 and Nina died just last month, at age 93.

Estella Leopold, age 84, is the last of the remarkable siblings. She is a professor emeritus of botany at the University of Washington. During a 20-year career with the U.S. Geological Survey she was instrumental in establishing the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in central Colorado. During her academic career she did pioneering research with fossil pollen and seeds. She continues as an active leader in the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

Aldo Leopold was a pioneer in environmental thinking and through his writings, family and foundation, has an enduring, and yes, even a fireproof legacy.

Salmonfly Time in Montana - if You're Brave Enough

2011-06-15T19:12:00.000-07:00


High water on Montana's Big Hole River. There is usually about 10 feet of clearance under this bridge.

Sometimes there’s nothing like opening up a fish’s tummy to find out what they’re eating. You may find surprises.

A couple weeks ago, when my son, Kevin, and I kept some North Dakota pike for dinner, we checked stomach contents to see what the fish had been eating. One pike had inch-long fish in its belly. That was no surprise, as pike love to eat other fish. Another fish, however, had white stringy-looking aquatic worms of some kind in its stomach. There have been other times when we’ve caught pike full of crayfish. We’ve also caught pike with bellies full of scuds, or what many think of as freshwater shrimp.

All of which demonstrates that northern pike are opportunistic feeders and there isn’t much in a pike’s neighborhood that they won’t eat, including baby muskrats and ducklings.

I seldom keep trout for dinner, so I usually don’t get that kind of information from trout I catch. Still, when I have a streamside chat with another angler it’s a good idea to pay attention when they provide post mortem information. A few weeks ago when camping on the Madison River, an angler from another campsite volunteered that he’d kept a couple fish, including a rainbow trout with a belly-full of salmonfly nymphs.

That was important news, a sign that salmon-flies, those stoneflies on steroids, were getting active in preparation for the annual transformation when Pteronarcys californica, or giant stonefly, leaves its home on the bottom of western rivers to crawl out of the water. Once out of the water, the insect climbs up streamside vegetation, such as willows or other brush, crawls out of its exoskeleton and emerge as a flying winged insect.

Fish feed on stonefly nymphs on a year-around basis, of course, as nymphs lose their grip on rocks and get picked off by alert fish. This time of year, however, those opportunities increase as nymphs migrate towards river shorelines, followed by trout in search of these big bites of protein.

The salmonfly emergence happens on many western rivers, though it’s not totally predictable just when those first nymphs will emerge from runoff-swollen rivers in search of a new identity and a literally once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to…shall we say, get lucky. Those female insects that don’t fall back into the river or get eaten by birds, and manage to mate, end their life cycle by flying back over the river to lay eggs along the water’s surface to start the next generation of giant stoneflies. It’s a cycle that has gone on for millions of years.

It’s an old tradition that on the Big Hole River, the salmonfly hatch begins on or about June 13, or Miners Union Day in Butte. On the other hand I’ve spotted adult salmon-flies on the Big Hole as early as Memorial Day and as late as the first week of July.

Just guessing, but this year the hatch will likely run late because of the cold spring we’ve had, as the hatch is triggered by a complex combination of water temperature and hours of daylight, or at least that’s how I understood the explanation that now-retired state fisheries biologist Dick Oswald gave me some years ago.

Another question is whether the Big Hole and other rivers with salmonfly hatches will be fishable when the big bugs emerge. Last week the amount of water rushing down the Big Hole River almost doubled to around 10,000 cubic feet per second as rains cut into the heavy mountain snowpack. There will, no doubt, be anglers out there floating the river during the high water, but for average boaters it’s downright dangerous in current conditions.

Still, the natural process continues and salmon-flies are emerging somewhere. In checking around I came across the website for Rock Creek Fisherman’s Mercantile, a flyshop near the mouth of Rock Creek. The shop reports the river is a roaring, chocolate torrent of water as it nears its confluence with the Clark Fork River. Still, salmon-flies were spotted on streamside bushes, preparing for the propagation of the species.

Life goes on, even if we’re not fishing.

Wind and Water on the North Dakota Prairies

2011-06-08T18:41:00.000-07:00


Flyfishing for northern pike is fun - and tasty.

Wind and water.

That sums up some our travel of the last couple weeks.

Last week I wrote about impending flooding on southwestern Montana streams. The cold weather around Memorial Day pretty much put the local flooding on hold, though flooding in other parts of Montana, particularly in Hardin and Roundup, made national news.

We took a road trip out of Montana, though that didn’t get us out of flooding areas. In fact, it put us right in the middle of flooding. We went to Minot, North Dakota for Memorial Day weekend to take in the festivities of a granddaughter’s graduation from high school. While we were there, it also seemed like a good idea to do some fishing on area lakes with our son, Kevin.

There are a lot of lakes in north central North Dakota, though there is always the question of whether the wind will let you put a boat on the water. Our first day of fishing was breezy, though there wasn’t any problem with boating, at least not on the smaller lake we fished. In an afternoon of fishing we caught a number of pike and invited a couple of them home for a fish dinner.

The next day was one of those windy prairie days. It didn’t keep us from fishing, though we elected to leave the boat at home. We’ve fished this lake a number of times over the years and there’s a concrete pier at the public access point on the lake where we’ve tied up Kevin’s boat in the past. With a couple winters of heavy snows, the lake level is up and the pier is under a foot of water. This actually made for a good fishing spot, as there was deep water easily accessible for casting streamers for pike.

Flyfishing for northern pike still seems like kind of a novelty in Midwestern states, even if it’s a trendy thing to do among a lot of fly anglers. In any event, flyfishing seemed the most effective way to catch pike on this trip, with a purple Wooly Bugger, which resembles a leech in the water, the hot fly.

While we spent several days fishing, the weather continued to be a hot topic. This past winter was a hard one, with heavy snows all across central North Dakota and on into Canada. Back in 1969, Minot had a major flood that dominated the national news. Since then, Minot built a system of dikes along the Souris River, which flows through the city, and flooding in the city seemed to become a thing of the past.

This spring there has been a long flooding season in rural areas both above and downstream from the city. Driving out of town, looking at flooded areas downstream from the city, Kevin remarked, “It’s been like this for a couple months already, and there’s no end in sight.” That week, City crews feverishly hauled dirt to build up the level of the dikes in town.

Over that weekend rain dominated the weather. Heavy rain fell the night before Memorial Day, though it stopped by midday. Kevin and I took another fishing trip, fishing through what the Irish might call a “soft rain.” We hit the road to go back to Minot when Kevin’s wife phoned, concerned about our being caught in the storm. “What storm?” he asked. A thunderstorm had rolled through Minot that afternoon, with heavy rain.

Coming back into town, we could see rivers of water pouring down road ditches and hilly draws. That evening another rainstorm pounded the area and the next day large areas of the city were evacuated in fears that the dikes would fail, following reports of 4 inches of rain in areas northwest of Minot.

Other areas of North Dakota were bracing for a deluge of water coming from Montana’s Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, and the night before we visited friends in Fargo, they had winds estimated at almost 100 mph.

Yes, this is the season for wind and water and Montana and the Dakotas are at the center of it all.

Spring flooding, and a look back at some historic Montana floods

2011-06-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

Mother Nature is, as usual, calling the shots this spring.

In the Mississippi River basin, Ol’ Man River is at its highest levels since the record floods of 1927. On the other hand, Texas and Oklahoma are in a severe drought and they’d like to have some of that water. Joplin, Missouri is cleaning-up following a devastating tornado last week, a storm that killed 116 people (at last count) and injured hundreds more.

Here in Montana people in river valleys are looking nervously at rising waters and wondering how high waters will rise. We have prime conditions for severe flooding this year, with a well above average snowpack and a cold spring that has kept that snowpack in place.

Last week there was flooding in eastern Montana, closing I-90 at Hardin, due to heavy rains that sent creeks over their banks., converging near the Little Bighorn Battlefield.

In western Montana, the big question is whether we’ll have either a heat wave or heavy rains to send all that snowpack down the mountains in one big surge of water.

Let’s take a look back at some historic Montana floods.

On June 19, 1938, a flash flood on Custer Creek near Terry, Montana, washed out a railroad bridge across the creek. When the Northern Pacific Olympic Special came through in the middle of the night, it crashed into the waters. 46 people were killed and many more were injured.

In 1997, Livingston experienced what was considered a 100-year flood in a scenario similar to this year. The mountains in the area had a snowpack of 200 percent of normal. In mid-May there was a heat wave with temps in the 80s, and that was followed by heavy rain.

Northwest Montana, on both sides of the Continental Divide, experienced what is considered Montana’s flood of the 20th Century in June 1964. Rainstorms on June 8 - 10 dumped as much as 14 inches of rain along the Divide in a 36 hour period, and streams that were already running high with snowmelt surged with water. Gibson Dam, on the upper Sun River, overflowed and floodwaters took out homes, roads and bridges all the way to Great Falls.

Farther north along the Divide, flooding on the Teton and Marias river systems destroyed an irrigation dam near Dupuyer, and caused massive damage on Blackfeet reservation communities of Heart Butte and Browning. In Glacier National Park, roads washed out, isolating Many Glacier hotel from Babb.

West of the Divide, the Middle Fork of the Flathead River went wild. The Flathead River at Columbia Falls crested at over 12 feet above flood stage. Areas up to a mile from the river were under four feet of water. Some 20,000 acres and several hundred homes along the Flathead River were flooded.

In a 2007 article in the Daily InterLake of Kalispell, reporter Heidi Gaiser noted one area that was hard hit in 1964, the community of Evergreen, along U.S. 2 northeast of Kalispell. Evergreen now has extensive commercial development in areas that went under water in 1964. As for possibilities of future flooding, Flathead County planner Tracy Sears-Tull said in that report, “It’s not a matter of if, but when it will happen.”

In all, the 1964 floods caused 30 deaths and inundated 20 percent of Montana’s surface area, which is a lot of real estate.

Flooding is, of course, a natural event. Floods cause problems when we humans encroach onto flood plains and build structures. Catastrophic flooding happens when dams fail, with the failure of the Teton River Dam in southeastern Idaho in 1976 as a classic example of dam failure, with consequent loss of life and property.

There are benefits to flooding, in that the waters enrich the soil over the floodplain, adding nutrients and organic matter, plus recharging aquifers. We can look at ancient Egypt where an entire civilization grew up and flourished, totally dependent on the benefits of the annual flooding of the Nile River.

Just the same, I’ll be looking forward to a month from now when waters recede and trout are taking dry flies.

Thoughts on Memorial Day

2011-05-25T20:01:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day weekend is coming up; the weekend most people across the country generally regard as the first holiday of the summer season. Here in southwest Montana, we’ve learned that, often as not, it’s the last holiday of the winter season.

So, if you’re planning on an outing this weekend, my advice is make sure to pack cold weather clothing, rain jackets, cocoa mix and makings for a big pot of chile, because the biggest challenge for the weekend will be keeping warm and dry.

Let’s hope I’m wrong.

And let’s not forget that a weekend of camping and fishing is not what Memorial Day is all about. Decoration Day, the forerunner of Memorial Day, was, in 1868, set aside to place flowers on graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. In 1873, New York was the first state to recognize the holiday and by 1890 it was recognized by all of the northern states. Southern states refused to acknowledge the day until after World War I, when the holiday changed from honoring Civil War dead to honoring Americans who died fighting in any war.

Traditionally, Memorial Day was observed on May 30. In 1971, the last Monday in May became the date for the observance.

A couple weeks ago we attended the funeral for a member of our church, a World War II veteran who survived 165 consecutive days of combat in the Philippines and lived to the age of 87, long enough to become a great-grandfather, something he likely didn’t even dare to dream about during those long-ago days when he was under fire.

During the service my mind wandered to those last survivors of the First World War. Frank Buckles, the last surviving American veteran of the Great War died this past February.

Just this month, Claude Choules, the last surviving combat veteran of the Great War died at age 110 on May 5. Mr. Choules was a seaman in the Royal Navy and witnessed the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow in Scotland. He stayed in the Royal Navy after the war and after a training assignment in Australia he transferred to the Royal Australian Navy and continued to serve until age 55.

In his 80s, Mr. Choules took a creative writing course with the plan to write family memoirs. He established some sort of record by publishing his autobiography at age 108. Despite a long record of naval service, in his later years he declared himself to be a pacifist and refused to participate in any events glorifying war.

While Claude Choules was the last surviving combat veteran, another Briton, Florence Green, also age 110, is the last service member of that war. Ms. Green was a waitress in the Women’s Royal Air Corps.

April marked the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, and I have to confess it made me feel old. I remember, during my high school years, the death of the last Civil War veteran, Albert Woolson, a drummer boy in that bloody conflict. I was a senior in college when the nation observed the centennial of the beginning of the war and the college orchestra did a concert of music from that era.

In the late 1960s, I had the opportunity to interview a centenarian who was a veteran of the Spanish-American War. He was a feisty old man who recalled military training camp, “We marched around a lot, but never went to Cuba; the war ended and they sent us home.” He was incensed because his auto insurance was canceled when he reached 100. “I’ve got a brand new Cadillac sitting in my garage and can’t use it,” he complained.

Now, we’re saying farewells to the heroes of my childhood, the veterans of World War II. Of the over 16 million Americans who answered the call, there are less than two million still living, survivors in their late 80s or early 90s.

While Memorial Day is set aside to honor the fallen, we honor those living veterans while we still can.

A funny thing happened on the river...

2011-05-18T19:55:00.000-07:00

“Have you been catching any fish?”

That’s usually a question I don’t mind answering. I may not be the greatest fisherman since St. Peter, but over the seasons I catch my share of fish and consider myself fairly competent. After all, I can tie flies, build rods, identify many aquatic insects, and occasionally I even get paid to share some angling expertise with an otherwise unsuspecting public.

Also, in recent years I’ve been participating in the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks fishing log program. During the year I record a few things about each Montana fishing outing and at the end of the year the statistical wizards in Helena enter the data into their computer system and generate angling statistics they share with the world. But that’s the rub: to make it work, I have to do my part by keeping track of each fishing outing.

So, by looking back at my fishing log I am frequently reminded that fishing isn’t always about catching fish. Sometimes it’s about learning humility.

Back in mid-March I took my first spring trip to running water, enjoying some sunshine but getting blown around by strong winds roaring down the Madison River’s Beartrap Canyon. It was still a nice day to be outside and I don’t expect to catch anything the first time out anyway—or so I tell myself when I don’t catch anything. Nevertheless, that first trip started a pattern, or so it seemed.

The next few trips were to my favorite trout stream, the Big Hole River, and learned that past angling success doesn’t mean anything, and that if you go fishing in early April, you’d better plan on nasty weather. On one of those days, storm clouds hung over the mountain ranges west of the river, though bright sunshine warmed me as Flicka, my faithful Labrador retriever, and I shared a sandwich while I put on waders and assembled my rod.

The sun was still shining when I stepped into the river’s icy waters and began casting flies into the river’s current. I had a couple bumps by fish hitting my fly—and just as quickly refusing it. At least I know there are fish out there, I told myself.

Then those storm clouds roared down the mountainside. At first there was a little drizzle in the air. That quickly changed to graupel, icy snow pellets that bounced off my jacket before being swallowed up by the river. In minutes that changed to wet, heavy snow that soaked my clothing and chilled my hands. Flicka and I beat a retreat back to the truck where I turned the heater on high until feeling returned. The storm then let up a bit so I found some gloves and returned to the stream for a few minutes before I finally concluded I wasn’t having fun and drove back home through the snowstorm.

Bad fishing luck continued, pretty much in lock step with continuing cold weather and icy waters, now beginning to get murky with the beginning of what will likely be a long runoff period.

Still, that’s no reason to quit fishing. On my last outing I returned to the Madison River. While the peaks on the Tobacco Root Mountains seem to have more snow than in mid-March the lowlands are turning green and many fields are freshly planted with this year’s planned crops. Unexpectedly, the winds along the river were relatively calm.

The fish continued to ignore my offerings. I tried several spots, all to no avail. I was ready to call it another unsuccessful outing when I noticed little mayflies flying all around, plus some rises on the water. I cast my line and was gratified by the take of a fish. That fish got off, though it stayed on long enough to qualify as a ‘long distance release.’ A few minutes later another fish struck and stayed on long enough for me to land it and send it back to the river.

I’d finally caught a couple fish. I declared victory and went home.

Going Green Pays Off in Bellingham

2011-05-13T13:35:00.000-07:00


Heading out for an evening sail on Bellingham Bay

Waders, rain jackets, rain hats. Sorry – no sun.”

So read the sign in front of a sporting goods store near Everett, Washington, though the cold, driving rain discouraged us from checking out specials on rain gear.

We were on our way to Bellingham, Washington for the annual spring conference of the Northwest Outdoor Writers Association, though to be honest, we were also looking for some spring weather. Of course, we were realistic enough to understand that if you head for the West Coast rain forest you’re likely to find rain.

We found rain, and people at local businesses were apologetic about the weather. They were also weary of cold, wet weather and were eager to get some warm sunshine. The skies did clear and we had a chance to enjoy some sunshine while we took advantage of opportunities to get away from hotel conference rooms and poke around this maritime city.

With bright sunshine to set things off, Bellingham looks mighty green right now, with lots of spring flowers to add colorful highlights. We also learned the city is green in other ways as well. We had a presentation by the director of a local non-profit, Sustainable Connections, an agency working to improve the local business climate and quality of life by emphasizing ‘green’ ways of doing business, including renewable energy sources, reducing waste (one business was featured for reducing waste by 90 percent), expanding local farming and similar efforts.

The efforts seem to be paying off and they’ve gotten a lot of recognition for it. The Environmental Protection Agency rates Bellingham as the nation’s number one Green Power Community. They also have the nation’s largest increase in public transit ridership. More to the point, perhaps, is their number two national rating for local retail vibrancy.

Sustainable Connections’ logo includes this slogan, “Think local, buy local, be local.”

A representative from the local Convention and Visitor Bureau boasted that the Bellingham area ranks in the nation’s top ten for clean air, health and happiness, bike ridership, and as a place to live. Though the city is known as a maritime center, agriculture is the area’s number one industry. In fact, the county raises 65 percent of the country’s red raspberries. For variety, the area also has the nation’s second largest numbers of artists, per capita, after Santa Fe, New Mexico.

All in all, Bellingham seems an attractive city, with its combination of scenery, outdoor recreation and bustling downtown area. It’s a good demonstration of how emphasizing so-called green values, such as renewable energy, reducing waste, and boosting local agriculture, contributes to a community’s economy and quality of life.

On the dry side of the Cascades is Wenatchee, which bills itself as the “Apple Capital of the World.” It’s quite a sight, right now, with miles and miles of apple orchards bursting into bloom. When I toss an apple into my hunting lunch next October I’ll have to keep in mind that last week I might have seen the blossom that produced the fruit.

We’ll close with a literary note. The New York Times ran a book review last week of “Evel, the High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel: American Showman, Daredevil, and Legend,” by Leigh Montville. It’s one of the more entertaining book reviews I’ve seen.

The reviewer, Dwight Martin, says “This book is, like Knievel’s life, slick, pulpy, eye-filling, exhaust-belching and in the end a bit boorish and irksome. Its ideal form would be a mass-market paperback flecked with glitter. It should come with a grape Slurpee, a little packet of Pop Rocks and a cocktail-size American flag to wave between your thumb and forefinger at weary moments.”

Evel Knievel, or Bobby, as he is still remembered by those who knew him before his high-flying daredevil days, was never dull, and always controversial, even here in his hometown. Judging by the Times review, this biography seems equal to the man of whom a San Francisco Examiner sports writer described before the Snake River Canyon jump, “The contest is Evel Knievel versus the canyon. The canyon is the sentimental favorite.”

Litter? Be part of the solution!

2011-05-04T18:42:00.000-07:00


Litter! Don't be a slob!

Remember the Seinfeld episode when Kramer and Newman filled a postal truck with cans and bottles to haul to Michigan and make a big killing with that state’s 10-cent deposit return? Naturally, that trip ended in disaster. The Seinfeld show was a comedy, and disaster is the foundation of a lot of comedy.

Still, they had the right idea. When you buy a beverage in Michigan you pay a 10-cent deposit and when you return the container for recycling you get your money back. That’s not exactly a new concept. A few years back that’s the way we bought beverages. We paid a deposit on the glass bottle and brought the empties back to the store and either got our deposit back or traded for the deposit on the next set of bottles. Kids looking to pick up some spare change could usually find it by picking up bottles.

Michigan gets a 90 percent return on cans and bottles. The rest of the country? The national average for aluminum cans runs around 50 percent and just 25 percent for plastic bottles. Aluminum can recycling peaked at 68 percent in 1992. So, what happens to those containers that don’t get recycled? Much of it ends up in our landfills where it lasts virtually forever.

The rest, sad to say, ends up as litter. A friend commented that her father takes a daily six-pack walk, meaning that he doesn’t come home until he’s collected at least half a dozen aluminum cans. I do sort of the same thing, as every time my dog and I take a walk I pick up aluminum cans, and the numbers of cans scattered on city streets is mind-boggling. From the middle of February to the middle of April I accumulated 31 pounds of aluminum, and that’s a big pile of aluminum. On the bright side, at the current price of 60 cents per pound, I got a nice payback for healthful exercise.

The trouble is, the cans I pick up in my neighborhood are trivial compared to the actual problem. A rural Butte resident called to suggest I write about the litter problem. “The roadsides around here are just covered with aluminum cans,” she said, adding that she frequently makes rounds to pick them up but when snow melts in the spring there’s a fresh crop of aluminum.

I told her I fully agree about the littering problem here in our area and that I’d written about it before. I agreed with her suggestion that I write another column about it, though I suspect litterbugs don’t know how to read.

Unfortunately, many of those litterbugs are juveniles illegally drinking beer and they’re chucking those cans out to get rid of the evidence. That’s one excuse. The truth, however, is that litterbugs are nothing but a bunch of slobs.

When I go for walks I often walk across an I-90 overpass and look down on the highway ditch and median and there are aluminum cans everywhere. Bless their hearts; some ‘adopt a highway’ group may pick them up, but that aluminum usually ends up in the landfill.

When I go fishing I walk along the river and find cans everywhere. A pet peeve is people who carefully pick up their cans and dump them in a fire ring. Maybe they think they’re being virtuous that way by not scattering litter. Sorry, you’re still a slob.

In the fall when I’m out hunting in the mountains or the prairies I often find aluminum cans out in the middle of nowhere. For heaven’s sakes, if you can carry a full can with 12 ounces of beverage in your daypack, why can’t you carry back an empty can that weighs next to nothing?

If you’re one of those slobs out joyriding, why not swing by one of the many recycling bins that are placed around Butte and put your cans there?

The late Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo once lamented, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

We have also met the solution, and it is us. Don’t be a slob.

The State of the Fishery in Southest Montana

2011-04-27T21:23:00.000-07:00

The lower Ruby River - runoff still on hold

Heavy snow falling outside reinforced a fact we already knew: 2011 is going to be another good water year. It also reinforced the reports Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks fisheries biologists made at last week’s annual George Grant Chapter of Trout Unlimited State of the Fisheries meeting.

If there was a common theme in the reports it was that after several years of healthy water flows on the area’s premier trout waters, fish populations are responding in terms of both numbers and quality. Here’s a brief rundown on the biologists’ reports.

Matt Jaeger reports that Clark Canyon Reservoir is poised for great fishing after several down years following extremely low pool levels in 2000 – 2005. The reservoir is now at full pool, and approaching flood levels this spring. There are numbers of trophy-class fish in the lake and fish stocks are being replenished by natural reproduction in feeder streams in addition to hatchery stocking.

After a number of years with sharply reduced winter flows from the Clark Canyon Dam, which had a significant negative impact on fish populations, Jaeger is hoping stronger stream flows will help rebuild the fishery. He’s also optimistic that stronger flows may blow out some sediment deposits from a tributary, Clark Canyon Creek. The outlook for 2011 is good.

Jaeger reported Poindexter Slough, the spring creek on the outskirts of Dillon, much of it on state land, has serious sediment problems and he hopes to divert some Beaverhead River flow to blow some sediment out. Still, Poindexter has incredible fish populations and is a real fish factory.

Travis Horton, Fisheries Manager for FWP Region 3, reports that rainbow trout numbers in the Jefferson River are up as a result of continuing good water flows and brown trout populations are stable.

Horton talked at some length about northern pike. Pike moved up the Missouri River from Canyon Ferry Reservoir and are now established in the river’s reservoir above Toston Dam. Biologists have found pike in the Gallatin and Jefferson Rivers, including upstream from Whitehall. Obviously, that means it’s entirely feasible for pike to next move into the lower Big Hole and threaten the Big Hole’s blue ribbon trout fishery.

Grayling recovery specialist Jim Magee reports that long-term projects are finally beginning to show some results in upper Big Hole tributaries. He also notes they have documented natural grayling reproduction in the upper Ruby River for the last two years.

Jim Olsen reported on a 2009 study estimating a total of 77,579 angler days on the Big Hole River. The majority, 43,199, were residents and 34,381 non-residents. While that’s a lot of fishing pressure, it’s nowhere near the Madison River, with 173,339 angler days, making it Montana’s most heavily fished river.

Olsen reported on 2010 shocking surveys on the Big Hole, indicating the highest trout densities, some 2,500 per mile, are in the Jerry Creek section of the river, in contrast to 1,500 per mile in the Melrose and Hogback areas. The Pennington Bridge area has the lowest trout numbers, with just 500 per mile. Olsen attributes the low numbers to poor spawning habitat in the lower river, though there is good adult fish habitat. Those fish counts don’t count juvenile fish (under 10 inches) or whitefish, which he notes, “are still the most abundant fish in the river.”

Olsen also notes that while the fish populations in the Jerry Creek area are high, the size of fish is smaller than in the lower river, indicating that fish populations are at or above carrying capacity, and “anglers shouldn’t worry about keeping and eating some of those fish.”

The last two years, FWP has been tagging trout in the Big Hole and early reports from anglers indicate that some fish are real travelers. An example is the 16-inch rainbow trout first tagged in 2009 in the Hogback area. An angler caught and released the fish on March 22, 2010 in the Hogback area. A little more than a month later, on April 26, 2010, another angler caught that same fish near the East Bank area some 50 miles upstream. That’s a tourist!

Saving Montana's Remaining Westslope Cutthroat Trout

2011-04-20T18:54:00.000-07:00

Déjà vu all over again?

No, though it’s too bad there wasn’t a way to change the name of that creek in the East Pioneer Mountains to something other than Cherry Creek.

This Cherry Creek is a stream that flows into the Big Hole River near Melrose, Montana. Most of the stream’s drainage is described as a “relatively pristine watershed.” Most of the stream is on either Forest Service or BLM land, so it’s accessible, with some effort, to the public, except for the lower end of the creek, which is on private land. Most angling takes place on a couple small headwaters lakes, Cherry Lake and Granite Lake, both of which have populations of hybridized westslope cutthroat trout.

Cherry Creek gets little if any fishing pressure because it’s small and has dense willows in riparian areas. It’s important in that until recently it held populations of pure westslope cutthroat trout. In 2005, according to an Environmental Assessment prepared by Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, non-hybridized cutthroat trout were still present in the stream. In 2008 and 2009, sampling indicated that rainbow trout had moved into the stream and were hybridizing with the native trout. In addition, brook trout had established a foothold in the stream.

FWP plans to chemically treat the Cherry Creek watershed to kill off all the fish in the stream and the two lakes and then restock with genetically pure westslope cutthroat trout. A second part of the project is to build a barrier at the lower end of the stream to prevent non-native fish from migrating back up the creek.

Construction of the barrier will take place this spring and the fish removal process would be done in late summer and fall of 2011. Similar projects are in the works on two other creeks: Dyce Creek, an upper Big Hole tributary near Wisdom, and McVey Creek, a tributary of Grasshopper Creek west of Dillon. Those two streams still have populations of genetically pure cutts, and the goal will be to get rid of competing brook trout and keep them out.

The déjà vu aspect is a look back an another Cherry Creek, a stream that flows into the lower Madison River—with a kicker: a big chunk of that creek’s watershed is owned by media mogul Ted Turner, America’s biggest landowner. That project went through a long round of public hearings, appeals, court appeals and downright bitter controversy. That project finally got started in 2003. It ended the way it started, in that when the biologists treated the last patch of water above the barrier in 2010, something went wrong and there was a fish kill in lower parts of the stream, triggering one last round of controversy.

So, aside from all the controversy, how did that project turn out?

Mike Vaughn, a fisheries biologist at the Bozeman office of Fish, Wildlife & Parks, described it as a multi-phase project starting with treatment of the upper ends of the watershed and beginning the restocking process until it was finally completed in 2010. The final results were totally satisfactory. “The westslope cutthroat trout are repopulating the stream and are thriving. We have a watershed with many miles of stream with westslope trout, and that’s mighty rare in this area.”

Last week’s hearings in Dillon and Butte were mostly peaceful, with the exception of Pollyana Thurmond, a Butte woman who came with a fistful of computer printouts ostensibly demonstrating dangers of the chemical rotenone, which the biologists on hand patiently tried to refute.

Westslope cutthroat trout are the official fish of Montana and at one time were found in the entire Missouri River watershed upstream from the Great Falls, occupying, at one time, 10,000 miles of streams. That is now reduced to a mere 400 miles of streams, mostly isolated populations scattered in headwater creeks.

FWP will accept comments on the projects through Sunday, April 24, though it is my hope the project continues. These native fish are an important part of our heritage and if we don’t act they could become extinct in Montana and that would be an even worse déjà vu.

Stanley Bogdan - Reel Builder

2011-04-13T19:54:00.000-07:00

The calendar’s pages had flipped from March to April a few days earlier though it still felt like winter as I stepped down from the shelf ice into the icy waters of the Big Hole River. On my last visit to my favorite fishing hole, the river’s sparkling water reflected a brilliant blue sky and the golden leaves of cottonwood trees along the shoreline.

On this spring day, the skies were overcast, and there was no sign of greenery, unless you were to look closely at the base of clumps of grass. A month from now the access area will likely be bustling with anglers putting gear together and getting ready for floating the river. Today, the only sounds are the murmur of the river, interspersed with the whisper of wind in the trees and an occasional Canada goose calling for its mate.

Missing from the sounds of the afternoon was the sound of a fly reel as a good-sized fish tears off line, fleeing from whatever is hanging in the corner of its jaw. These reels have their own individual songs, whether it’s a click, a whirr or a whisper. This afternoon all was quiet and the reel itself did nothing more than its basic function: to hold line.

Without taking an inventory I’d guess I have half a dozen fly reels that I use regularly, holding fly lines in different weights, plus a couple retired reels stuck away in a drawer collecting dust. There’s nothing particularly special about any of them other than sentimental value from years of happy angling memories.

None of those reels, unfortunately, are a Bogdan reel.

Stanley Bogdan, a machinist and son of Polish immigrants, began experimenting with designing fly reels sometime around 1940 and, in his one-person machine shop, started making them commercially in 1955. At first he sold his reels through Abercrombie & Fitch, the famous old New York City sporting goods store. After getting tired of giving the store a 40 percent cut of the reel’s price ($100) he eventually went on his own.

While Bogdan reels come in a number of models, the reels he built for Atlantic salmon fishing are what made him famous. Ted Williams, Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman, Jimmy Carter, and presidential adviser and economist Paul Volcker were among his customers. Bogdan invented a double brake system for his reels, resulting in a smooth drag for slowing down fish. The reel also has a unique whirring sound, described by one Bogdan owner as “the muted joy of exultation.”

Bogdan enthusiasts consider the reel to be a superb blend of superior engineering and esthetic brilliance and, simply, the finest fly reel ever made.

Bogdan reels don’t come cheap and they don’t come easily. To buy a Bogdan reel you put in your order and go on a two to three year waiting list. A new reel could range in price from around $1,500 for a lightweight trout reel to around $2,500 for a salmon reel. If you happen to find someone selling a used one you might pay double the price of a new one. In fact, in a 2009 feature article in Forbes magazine, Bogdan said he was so startled to see what used reels were selling for he decided to double the price of new reels. “Turned out to be the best move I ever made,” he told Forbes writer Monte Burke.

Stanley Bogdan sold his business in Ipswich, New Hampshire to his son, Stephen, in 1996 but he continued to work in the shop several days a week until his death, at age 92, on March 27.

If it’s any indication of his renown, the New York Times ran a lengthy obituary last week, recognition not often accorded to a somewhat crusty old New England machinist.

In addition to making reels, Bogdan was an accomplished and enthusiastic Atlantic salmon angler. Last September, at the age of 91, Stan Bogdan caught a 32-pound salmon on the Grand Cascapedia River in Quebec. His son, Stephen Bogdan, said, “I believe that was his last fish.”

From Skiing to Turkeys - Springtime in Montana

2011-04-06T19:34:00.000-07:00

The transition from winter to spring keeps dragging, though it’s a process that’s unstoppable, even as snowflakes drift down, seemingly almost daily.

Though it has been an outstanding ski season, ski hills are closing down. Discovery Basin closed last Sunday. Lost Trail Powder Mountain, west of Wisdom, closes this coming Sunday, April 10. Bridger Bowl, north of Bozeman, is extending the season through April 12, though they closed a few lifts on April 3. Maverick Mountain hadn’t posted a season ending date on their website as of press deadline. I’ve heard that Big Sky will be operating through the middle of April, so that will be the place to go in this part of Montana if you need that one last ski trip to tide you through the summer.

Appropriately, on the morning of March 25, which turned out to be my last ski trip of the season, the sound of robins chirping around the neighborhood greeted me when I stepped outside. It always seems like the robins make it to our part of the world prematurely, and that March arrival was a case in point, considering that we had snow showers daily for most of the following week.

Another sign of spring is that this Saturday, April 9, is the beginning of the Montana spring turkey hunting season, coinciding with another sign of spring, my annual gripe about again not being drawn for a Region 3 permit.

Out of curiosity, I contacted Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks to find out what the odds were. There were 35 general adult permits allotted for Region 3 and there were 359 entries for the drawing, making the odds roughly 1 in 10 for winning a permit. Those odds are a lot better than getting rich in the Powerball lottery, of course, though with those odds you’d think that after 15 years or so I might someday luck out.

This brings to mind a cartoon of a few years back showing a man in a hospital bed, legs raised in traction and tubes everywhere, with his wife at the bedside going through a stack of mail, saying, “Oh, here’s some good news. You got your elk tag.”

My math-minded adult children might give me a lecture in statistics demonstrating that in a true random drawing your chances of winning never improve. It is, after all, random. To which I might say, “Don’t try to make me feel better. It’s not working.” I’ll have to try to clear a few days on my calendar and maybe get away to points east where a special permit isn’t needed.

If we get tired of the slow progress of spring, continuing cool weather does mean that this year’s big load of snow in the high country is staying in place a little longer. One of the symptoms of climate change here in the northern mountain states has been earlier melting of snowpack, meaning the mountains are tinder dry by August, a common scenario in many recent seasons.

Cool weather also means that area rivers, such as the Big Hole, may be fishable for a little while longer, before serious spring runoff starts. April is the time for early hatches, such as the skwala stonefly and the baetis, or blue wing olive mayfly, depending on whether you like your bugs with a bit of Latin.

With occasional warm days or April showers happening, rivers can bounce up and down with surges of runoff and an excellent tool to help plan spring fishing is the U.S. Geological Survey water data website, which tracks stream flows at numerous gauging stations on Montana rivers and streams. It won’t tell you whether the fish are biting, but it will help you figure out if things are fishable, or if the water is likely to be high and muddy.

In any event, depending on your interests there are a lot of possibilities this month. Turkey hunting, flyfishing, early gardening, symphony concerts, and…there was something else, too, wasn’t there?.

Oh, file tax returns. You had to remind me.

Hunts with Morrie

2011-03-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

“Why don’t you write about hunting with Grampa?” That was a recent suggestion from my daughter, referring not to my father but to my father-in-law, Morrie, her personal hero, who died a dozen years ago. If he were still living he’d be 100 years old and would like nothing better than to tell some hunting stories. His father lived to past age 101, so the longevity genes were there, though in the end, Parkinson’s trumped longevity.

Morrie did plenty of hunting for probably 70 of his 88 years, but turkey hunting became a favorite in later years. He and his wife, Bernelda, now 95 and living in a Glendive nursing home, loved to pack up their pickup camper and head to the Long Pines area near Ekalaka, in southeastern Montana. They’d gotten acquainted with a rancher there and, as was the case literally hundreds of times, they got to be fast friends with the family.

We’d given him a box-type turkey call for Christmas one year and that spring, while camping in the pines, he was relaxing by the door of the camper practicing his turkey call. “You’d better look up,” Bernelda whispered to him, drawing his attention to a flock of turkeys gathered around, curious about turkey sounds coming from the camper. Wild turkey was on the menu the next family gathering.

Morrie grew up in a small northwestern North Dakota town where his father owned a general store, and hunting was a way of life. He often reminisced of a stormy October day when his father came to the high school and asked for Morrie to be excused for the afternoon. They went out to a cornfield and took shelter next to corn shocks and spent the afternoon shooting at ducks coming into the cornfield, with both shooting limits of something like 25 ducks each. Those limits seem almost unreal these days, but they offer a glimpse into days when flocks of ducks would literally darken the skies.

Morrie owned just one shotgun over his many years, a 20-gauge Winchester Model 12 pump action shotgun, and he was an example of the person competitive shooters learn to not bet against: the guy with just one gun. Morrie was a crack shot with any firearm and occasionally showed off by throwing a coin in the air and shooting it with a .22 rifle. Hitting a moving target with a shotgun was easy.

My wife tells of a fall day in her growing-up years when she accompanied her dad on a pheasant hunt. They were walking across a field when he stepped in a hole and lost his balance a bit and his shotgun accidentally discharged. He recovered his balance and with this startled look on his face said, “I think this is the first time this gun ever went off without hitting something.”

She remembers other outings, especially one when, after a picnic lunch, he climbed up on a straw pile and jumped off, doing a somersault before landing. She says, “I particularly remember his first putting his hands down to cover his pockets so he wouldn’t lose anything from them. Then my sister and I also did somersaults after he showed us how to do it.”

My wife also recalls when Morrie and her uncle had gone duck hunting and found some ducks caught in a sudden freeze, frozen into the ice on a pond. They chipped them free and brought the half-frozen but still living ducks home and took them in the house. The ducks revived as they thawed out and started running and quacking around the house, much to the delight of the children. “Mother wasn’t a happy camper about wild ducks in the living room,” my wife recalls with a smile, adding that they released the ducks after they’d recovered.

Morrie experienced the glory years of waterfowl and the WWII-era explosion of pheasant populations in eastern Montana. I’d give almost anything for the chance to have gone on some of those long-ago hunts.

Marrying his daughter turned out to be a pretty good deal, of course—though I still wish I had gotten his shotgun, too.

A First Time on the River!

2011-03-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

My fishing partner patiently waiting for me to catch a fish...or find something for her to eat.

The air temperature was 50˚, though the wind blowing down the Madison River’s Beartrap Canyon felt much colder as I stepped into the river’s icy waters.

There was nothing I could do about the wind. It certainly wasn’t a surprise. The only surprises about wind along the Madison River are days when it isn’t blowing.

Wind or no wind, it seemed important to take advantage of a relatively warm day and go fishing. My last fishing outing was back in October, a few days before the pheasant season began, which now seems ages ago. Flicka, my Labrador retriever, agreed. She watched me gather clothing and gear and started barking in excitement. We do daily retrieving sessions and take frequent long walks but that’s hardly a substitute for a real outing, if I interpreted her barks and body language correctly.

There was another reason for a fishing outing. When Santa Claus stopped at our house at Christmas he dropped off a new fly rod along with other goodies and that rod has been talking to me lately, suggesting it was time to head for a river and give it a good baptism.

That baptism turned out to be more literal than figurative. As I stepped into the water something distracted me and I accidentally dropped that new rod into the river. I dropped a rod in the Big Hole River a couple years ago and was horrified to see the current sweep it away. This time there was no problem. The water was crystal clear and calm at the edge of the river. I just picked it up and shook it off. No harm done.

I wish I could tell tales of splashy rises and scrappy fish putting a good bend on the new rod but that story will wait for another outing. The fish simply weren’t biting. According to other anglers, there was some action happening before the wind came up but the fun came to a rapid halt when the wind began to blow.

Catching fish is better than not catching fish but we’ll make up for it as the weather warms up and fish get more active. The new rod works, my waders didn’t leak and I still remember how to use a fly rod. I’ve had worse outings.

Flicka enjoyed the outing, keeping company with me in the icy river, checking shoreline brush patches for interesting scents and, finally, sitting on the bank and patiently watching for some reason to get excited.

When we walked back to the truck for a snack and a chance to warm my feet Flicka had a chance to romp with another angler’s English setter, and then another setter that came running across the parking lot to join the two dogs. Two setters and a pointing Lab, I mused, what hunting stories they might be able to tell each other if they had the gift of speech.

Perhaps it’s for the best that we humans can’t always interpret a dog’s stories. If Flicka started telling about how I stumble around in the fields, looking in the wrong directions when birds get up, and missing easy shots, there would be no end to the hush money she’d be able to extort.

Fortunately, dogs are of a higher character than most humans and until they learn to write or talk, our secrets are safe.

This interim period between hunting and flyfishing has seemed like a long drag, especially with unrelenting news from Congress and the legislature (Montana and several other states as well) that makes a person wonder if there is hope for the future.

That’s why it often seems essential to get outside and stand in a river and concentrate on a task that on its merits seems a waste of time.

John Voelker, the late Michigan jurist and writer, probably better known by his penname of Robert Traver, probably said it best. “I fish…not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant—and not nearly so much fun.”

Notes on Spring - and St. Patrick's Day

2011-03-16T19:21:00.000-07:00

It’s spring! Perhaps not according to the calendar, but last week I went in search of spring and found the first shoots of tulips emerging from the ground after a long winter of dormancy. The emergence was about a week and a half behind schedule but I’ll take it.

This year, spring, or more precisely, the vernal equinox, will officially happen at 5:21 p.m., MDT, on Sunday, March 20. As it happens, there is a full moon on the evening of Saturday, March 19. That explains why Easter, this year, will fall on April 24, which is just about as late as it can get.

Easter, according to centuries-long tradition, is observed the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

The last time Easter fell on April 24 was in 1859 and it won’t happen again until 2095. The latest possible date is April 25, which last occurred in 1943, and will happen again in 2038. This year, Orthodox churches will observe Easter on the same date as the western churches

Other signs of spring? Unless you slept through it, we went on daylight time this past Sunday, and we’ll remain on daylight time until Sunday, November 6. If you’ve been annoyed these last few days by people wondering why you’re always an hour late for everything you may want to check your alarm clock.

For added confusion, we should note that March 1 is considered the first day of meteorological spring. Meteorological spring goes back to 1780 when an early organization for meteorology (study of weather) designated March 1 as the first day of spring, grouping each season into three calendar months. That actually goes back to the ancient Roman calendar in which the year began on March 1, which was also considered the first day of spring.

Actually, meteorological seasons make more sense than marking the seasons based on equinoxes and solstices. This way, summer begins on June 1, autumn on September 1, and winter on December 1. In Europe, for example, the summer solstice isn’t the beginning of summer; that shortest night of the year is Mid-Summer’s Night.

Of course, tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, that annual celebration of Irish heritage and nonsense. Most of Montana’s colleges and universities are on spring break this week and that’s known to be a factor in raising the nonsense level in Butte’s celebration. Personally I’ve often tried to make a point to either go skiing or fishing on St. Patrick’s Day, depending on the weather. It’s safer that way.

Nevertheless, we’ll have corned beef and cabbage for dinner and maybe we’ll tell an Irish joke or two. Here’s one you might enjoy.

An Irishman, Kevin, and an American, Clint, are sitting in the bar at Cork Airport supping Guinness.

“I've come to meet my brother,” says Kevin. “He's due to fly in from Chicago in an hour's time. It's his first trip home in 40 years.”

“Will you be able to recognize him?” asks Clint.

“I'm sure I won't,” responds Kevin, “after all, he's been away for a long time.”

“I wonder if he'll recognize you?” questions Clint.

“Of course he will,” replies Kevin. “Sure, an' I haven't been away at all.”

A lot of Irish stories have a touch of gallows humor, likely a way Irish people tried to cope with the many hardships of life in Ireland, such as the poverty and starvation during the potato famine years. Between famine and the English, death was often close. So, I’ll close with this one.

Dermot McCann opened the morning newspaper and was dumbfounded to read in the obituary column that he had died. He quickly phoned his best friend Reilly. “Did ye see the paper?' asked Dermot. “They say I died.”

”Yes, I saw it,” replied Reilly. “And where did you say you’re calling from?”

Time to get your new fishing license!

2011-03-09T19:39:00.000-08:00

If you want to go fishing in March, you'd better get a license!

The first day of March came and, unusually, I didn’t have any big urge to go fishing. The garlic and tulips along the south side of our house hadn’t sent up any green shoots. If those courageous plants thought it was too cold, it was too early to go flyfishing.

Rest assured, the fishing season won’t wait much longer.

Whether the fishing urge is to find open water for early flyfishing or ice fishing before the ice deteriorates, there is an important first step, and that’s to go to an office of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks or to a local license vendor, or on-line, to get properly licensed before heading out to hit the water.

Our 2010 Conservation License and all those various hunting and fishing endorsements expired at the end of February and if we go fishing on or after March 1 we need a 2011 license to be legal.

As a brief review, an $8 Conservation License is required for all resident anglers age 12 and older. For youth age 12 – 14, or age 62+ seniors, that’s all that’s needed. For everybody else, age 15 – 61, an $18 fishing license is required, though there is a two-day resident license for just $5. The Resident Sportsman and Youth Sportsman licenses include fishing.

At the same time you purchase your 2011 Conservation and fishing license you can also purchase hunting licenses, including elk, deer and upland birds, for the coming year as well. As a special reminder, with winter still dominating the landscape it may not seem possible, but the spring wild turkey season begins just a month from now, on Saturday, April 9. If you’re hoping to hunt turkeys in western Montana you have to put your name in a drawing for a special permit, and the deadline for that is tomorrow, March 10.

I hate to mention that special drawing deadline. I’d just as soon keep it a secret so that my odds of drawing a permit improve.

The Montana Senate Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation Committee would have heard testimony yesterday, March 8, on HB 309, the bill that threatens public access to almost all of Montana’s rivers and streams. Presumably there should still be time to phone and leave a message with legislators that you oppose this terrible piece of legislation. The phone number is 406-444-4800, and you can leave a message for one or more state senators.

This time of year I always look forward to a long season of fishing on our rivers and streams. The Big Hole River often seems like a home away from home and there are a lot of mosquito families depending on us to keep them fed and happy in coming months. Let’s hope Montana citizens make their voices heard, and heard loudly, to preserve public access to those waters.

In this column we’ve followed the dwindling number of veterans of World War I.

There is a new grave in Arlington National Cemetery for America’s last doughboy, Frank Buckles, who died February 27 at his home in West Virginia at the age of 110.

Mr. Buckles was only 16 years old when he enlisted in the U.S Army in 1917. In an archived NPR interview, Mr. Buckles insisted he didn’t lie when he enlisted, but did admit to “misrepresenting” his age. After enlisting, Mr. Buckles volunteered to be an ambulance driver, which was promised to be the fastest way to get to France.

After the war, Buckles worked for steamship companies and happened to be in Manila when Japanese forces occupied the Philippines at the beginning of WWII. He was imprisoned until liberation in February 1945. After retirement he continued to run cattle on his West Virginia farm and was still driving a tractor until age 106.

According to the New York Times there are just two remaining veterans of the Great War, Claude Choules, a British Royal Navy veteran living in Australia and Florence Green, of Britain’s Women’s Royal Air Force, living in England.

Rest in peace, Corporal Buckles and greet Marine Private Mike Mansfield for us.

Help Stop HB 309 and Preserve Public Access to Montana Rivers

2011-03-02T19:34:00.000-08:00

This is what's at stake with HB 309.

“We’ve gone 27 years with the Montana Stream Access Law without a problem. All of a sudden we’ve got a problem.” Scott Reynolds, Ramsey, a speaker opening a meeting last week hosted by the George Grant Chapter of Trout Unlimited. TU sponsored the meeting to inform the public of potential problems with House Bill 309.

Rep. Jeffrey Welborn (R-Dillon) sponsored HB 309. Ostensibly, the bill would reverse a 2008 Montana Supreme Court ruling that Mitchell Slough, a 16-mile side channel of the Bitterroot River, is open to the public under the Stream Access Law.

The reality, according to Reynolds, is that, based on discussions with water law lawyers and hydrologists, the proposed law would have the effect of redefining most of Montana’s rivers and streams as ditches and thus not open to public access. If this sounds surreal, Reynolds adds, “We didn’t dream this up. It’s a real problem.”

This opinion is supported by testimony at the House Agricultural Committee on January 27 by Bob Lane, Chief Legal Counsel of Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. Lane said, “HB 309 almost completely repeals the public’s right to recreate on rivers and streams: by making any stream or river a private stream or river where the return flows from irrigation are the majority of the flow; and by privatizing side-channels of braided rivers and streams.” Lanes goes on to say “almost all rivers and streams in Montana, except those in wilderness areas and the headwaters of streams on Forest Service land, could no longer by used by the public. HB 309 not only doesn’t work, it just doesn’t make any sense.”

Speakers displayed aerial maps of portions of the Big Hole and Jefferson Rivers citing various diversions, head gates and ditches, all representing potential access problems for anglers and floaters. The dam on the Beaverhead River forming Clark Canyon Reservoir was built for irrigation and flood control. Under HB 309, the entire Beaverhead River could be off limits.

An unidentified woman asked, “My brother-in-law owns property on the Boulder River. We camp and fish there. It’s downstream from a diversion structure on other property. Does that mean we wouldn’t be able to use the stream? We couldn’t let our kids play in the water?”

Speakers said her fears were justified.

Is there a need for legislation to prevent anglers from trespassing on irrigation ditches? FWP Counsel Lanes asserts, “FWP recognizes the rights of landowners to not have their property rights burdened by the public attempting to recreate in irrigation ditches. The stream access statute does precisely this and there is no need to clarify its precise language.”

Al Luebeck, a Butte resident and former legislator sees the influence of money. “A lot of ranches are being bought by out of state people and they’re the ones behind this bill.” Noting that the bill passed the House in party line voting, Luebeck suggests, “Ask your Republican friends what is going on. This is a betrayal of Montana citizens.”

Other speakers, including Steve Luebeck and Bob Olson, president of the local TU chapter, both Butte residents, advocate citizen action. Specific steps include contacting local state senators Steve Gallus and Jim Keane, members of the Senate Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation committee, as well as all state senators.

Second, they urge a big turnout of citizens before the Senate committee when they hold hearings in room 303 at the state capitol at 3 p.m. on March 8 (subject to change).

For people with a Facebook account, Montana Coalition for Stream Access has created a Facebook page, and changes and new developments will be posted on the page. Chris Bradley of The Stonefly fly shop suggested that people without computer access could contact their store to get the latest news on the bill as well as information on car pools to go to Helena.

Tony Schoonen of Ramsay, a grizzled veteran of the legislative battles to enact the Stream Access Law years ago commented on the law having survived numerous legal challenges, adding, “They couldn’t kill the law in the courts. Now they want to turn all our rivers into ditches. Everybody better get on that Twitter—whatever the heck that is.”

Congress (and Montana Legislature) Against the Public Good

2011-02-23T20:04:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman doesn’t get many mentions in outdoors columns, but it is usually worthwhile to pay attention to what he says. .

Krugman is an economist at Princeton University with a long list of credentials, with a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics at the top of the list. He’s also an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and a voice for rational thought. Last week he commented on the House Republicans’ proposals for cutting spending Federal spending. He writes, “Uncharacteristically, they failed to accompany the release with a catchy slogan. So I’d like to propose one: Eat the future.”

Krugman goes on to explain that while many people give lip service to the notion of cutting government expenditures, it turns out, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center, Americans really want more, not less, spending on most things, including education and Medicare. This leads to the Republicans’ dilemma. They promised to deliver $100 million in spending cuts. “Yet the public opposes cuts in programs it likes—and it likes almost everything. What’s a politician to do?”

Krugman says, “The answer, once you think about it, is obvious: sacrifice the future.” That explains proposed cuts in childhood nutrition programs, nuclear non-proliferation activities, and IRS tax enforcement. Krugman points out that one terrorist nuke assembled from former Soviet nuclear materials could ruin your whole day, and then asks, “Why cut $578 million from the IRS enforcement budget? Letting tax cheats run wild doesn’t exactly serve the cause of deficit reduction.”

Yes, eat the future.

The same thing is happening in the Montana legislature, where legislators want to cut funding for education and tobacco-use prevention, to name just a couple areas.

Yes, eat the future.

Back to the national level, and relating to the outdoors, Ducks Unlimited directs attention to proposed $2 billion cuts in conservation programs including cutting $47 million in funding for North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA) grants. These cuts, according to Dale Hall, the head of Ducks Unlimited, “could imperil waterfowl populations and the future of the waterfowl hunting tradition in America.”

Yes. Eat the future.

NAWCA grants, when coupled with private sector matching funds, is the primary source of funding for the North American Waterfowl Management Plan that generated more than $3 billion in habitat projects across North America the last 20 years. NAWCA grants have helped conserve more than 20 million acres of habitat. The proposed cuts will prohibit Clean Water Act protections in important wetlands, and adversely affect funding for Fish & Wildlife Service land acquisitions for waterfowl conservation.

Hall sums it up, “If these cuts and actions take place, waterfowl, waterfowl hunters and wetlands conservation would lose in a big way…these actions would adversely affect all of us who care about, and have funded, wetlands and waterfowl conservation. We should remember conservation in America pays for itself through the economic return from hunters, anglers and other outdoor enthusiasts.”

In short, cuts will harm the environment and wildlife now and our children and grandchildren will pay the price in terms of less waterfowl and other wildlife. Eat the future.

While I’m on a rant I have to comment on one of the worst bills in the current session of the Montana Legislature.

House Bill 309, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Wellborn (R-Dillon) is an example of poorly drafted legislation that has the potential to affect anglers all over Montana.

The bill presumably was intended to reverse the Montana Supreme Court decision of last year, which ruled Mitchell Slough was a side channel of the Bitterroot River and thus open to public access. Unfortunately, the bill, as drafted, would essentially define any waterway that gets irrigation return flows as a ditch and thus not open under Montana’s stream access laws.

Montana anglers screamed foul when the bill became known. Nevertheless, the bill sailed right through the House. Angling and other recreationist groups hope to kill or amend the bill in the Senate. Butte’s representatives in the House all voted against the bill, including, to his credit, freshman Republican legislator Max Yates.

Let’s hope that in 2012, citizens remember legislators who support the common good and those who so cheerfully eat the future.

The Great Backyard Bird Count for 2011

2011-02-16T19:56:00.000-08:00

Here’s a sure-fire cure for cabin fever, an opportunity to get out of the house and get involved in a science project that’s easy, fun and important.

Yes, it’s time, once again, for the Great Backyard Bird Count, the annual cooperative project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Audubon Society, and Bird Studies Canada. The object of the Bird Count is to get a snapshot of North American birds and where they are in mid-February, in the weeks before spring migrations. The study period, as always, is this weekend, February 18 – 21, the Washington’s Birthday holiday weekend.

According to sponsors of the Bird Count, bird populations are constantly changing. No single scientist or team of scientists can realistically keep track of the complicated patterns of bird movement, or how the various bird species range expands or shrinks over time. The information accumulated in this citizens’ project goes into a massive bird database called the Avian Knowledge Network, which now holds some 36 million records of bird observations.

It’s easy to participate. It’s simply a matter of making a point to count birds for at least 15 minutes on one or more days of the study. If you have a bird feeder you could do it from the window of your house, or take a walk in your neighborhood or in a park. However you do it, just keep track of the different birds you found and their numbers. Then log onto the internet to www.birdcount.org and submit your list of birds identified and counted.

There are tips and instructions, including videos, slide shows, forms, and other helpful information at www.birdsource.org. If you’re a shutterbug, there is also a photography contest.

Last year in Montana, volunteer observers reported 121 species of birds. Canada geese and mallard ducks were the most widely reported birds, an indication of how well waterfowl are adapted to northern winters as well as how they adapt to urban areas. In addition to waterfowl, observers noted game birds such as pheasants, partridge, ruffed grouse, wild turkeys and even California quail. Other common birds included crows, ravens, chickadees, nuthatches, Bohemian waxwings and various sparrows.

You don’t have to be an expert or a birdwatcher to participate. Just do it because it’s fun.

As this is the Washington’s Birthday holiday weekend, or Presidents Day, as some call it, let’s have a little history lesson about another president, Andrew Jackson.

Recently some Montana legislators have talked about ‘nullification,’ asserting some sort of right for Montana to opt out of Federal legislation such as health care, or going off on tangents such as defining citizenship contrary to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and conveniently ignoring a basic principle that federal law trumps state law.

This is an old argument that precipitated a national crisis during the presidency of President Jackson. Jackson’s first term Vice President, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, raised the issue over a tariff law considered to be harmful to southern states. Calhoun’s home state of South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union over the issue.

Calhoun understood that secession would likely ruin his own presidential ambitions, so he came up with the theory that a state could declare a law “null and void within the limits of the State.”

Calhoun and Jackson vehemently disagreed. Jackson dropped Calhoun from the ticket in the 1832 election. In Congress, prominent leaders entered the debate, including the likes of Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, and a new Vice President, Martin Van Buren.

South Carolina’s tariff dispute with the federal government finally ended with legislative compromise so there was no final resolution to the question of nullification, though the controversy contributed to South Carolina’s eventual secession and the Civil War.

Andrew Jackson was a study in contradictions. He was a strong believer in rights for the common man, even though he was a slave owner. He was a strong supporter of states’ rights though his presidency’s most important achievement was preserving the union through the nullification crisis. He summed up his guiding principle simply:

“Our Federal Union—it must be preserved.”

Things to do during those winter doldrums

2011-02-09T18:59:00.000-08:00

The Super Bowl is over, the end to a seemingly endless football season. It’s now almost a month since that last hunting outing of the season and with subzero weather dominating this past week, flyfishing seems a long way off, and I’d rather go skiing than stand out on a frozen lake, looking down at a hole in the ice and waiting for a trout to jiggle a bobber.

Skiing is great fun and good exercise, but it isn’t hunting and it isn’t fishing.

Yes, this is the awkward time of the year and it is challenging to keep connected to the outdoors during this period. That doesn’t mean we should succumb to seasonal affective disorder and go into full-blown depression. There are too many things to do.

Something that’s easy to put off is to clean up equipment from the past hunting season. The last couple weekends I cleaned hunting boots and put a good dressing on them to keep the leather supple, so that when the next seasons starts my boots won’t hurt when I put them on for the first time.

Another aspect of the process is to give guns a good cleaning with those brass bore brushes and mops so those gun barrels gleam, inside and out. Don’t forget to take a close look at the wood on those guns and touch up the finish as needed. I did that last weekend and was dismayed to see a chip in the walnut next to the receiver of my pet 20-gauge over/under shotgun. I haven’t quite figured out how I’ll repair it.

While spring fishing seems a long way off, it’s not as long as you think and this is a good time to check fishing equipment and make any necessary repairs.

Above all, this is the flytying season. It’s time to look back and ask yourself what were the more productive flies you used last season and then start replacing flies that ended up in streamside pine trees.

Every year when I get back on the streams I open some of the fly boxes in my vest and make a vow that next winter I’ll just throw everything out and start all over again and start the next fishing season with all new flies. At the least, I should go through those jumbled up and matted globs of hooks, feathers and hair, and at least organize them in a meaningful way.

When I look at some other anglers’ fly boxes and see immaculate rows of flies, all perfectly tied and organized, I want to go behind a tree when I get ready to fish so they won’t see what a mess I have. Then reality sets in and I face the reality that I’m not an organized person. That jumbled up, matted glob of flies in my fly boxes is, in its way, a reflection of my corner of the room in our house that I laughingly call an office.

I’m one of those people that uses the floor as part of my filing system, with a folder of bills to pay, press kits from last year’s writers conferences, catalogs, clippings of articles I’ve written and clippings of other articles that I hope will inspire me.

If it seems hopeless I’ll claim in my defense that I usually find things I’m looking for, and that goes for both my office and my flies.

If frigid weather keeps us indoors it’s still important to get outside and do something, such as take the dog for a walk. I need the exercise and so does the dog. It’s also important to get some sunshine. Medical researchers have learned that we need a lot of sunshine to help our bodies manufacture vitamin D, an important factor in maintaining health.

Next week I’ll suggest another project for an outing in your backyard or neighborhood. In the meantime, don’t weaken. Spring is coming. Every day is a bit longer than the day before. Go browse a gardening catalog and dream.

Groundhog Day Perspectives

2011-02-02T18:59:00.000-08:00

A Montana bald eagle looking for lunch (see story below)

If Candlemas will be fair and bright
Winter will have another fight.
If Candlemas be cloud and rain
Winter will be gone and not come again. (Scottish poem)

Last summer, at the annual conference of the Outdoor Writers Association of America at Rochester MN we had an outing at a Boy Scout camp. The camp is built on and around an old farm and while walking to another event I spotted a furry animal in a patch of grass. A woodchuck!

Woodchuck are also called groundhogs and today, February 2, is Groundhog Day. Early this morning in Punxatawney, Pennsylvania and a surprisingly large number of other communities, there were special observances of Groundhog Day. According to ancient traditions going back to pre-Christian Europe, the weather on February 2 predicts how much longer winter will hang around.

Romans believed the weather on the first few days of February would predict future weather, though they looked to hedgehogs as the predictor. Celtic people had a festival of Imbolc, held on February 1, with similar weather traditions.

The early Christian church established February 2 as a religious holiday observing two events of which one was the ritual of purification for Mary. The other was the presentation of Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem, 40 days after his birth.

Candlemas, literally, the Mass of Candles, observing the presentation of Jesus as a “Light to lighten the gentiles (one of many versions),” was a day when people traditionally brought a year’s supply of candles to church to be blessed.

Candlemas is midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox and the early Christian church merged many older traditions into church holidays, so some of the Roman and Celtic beliefs about predicting weather continued.

In the U.S., Pennsylvania Dutch, or more accurately, German settlers imported the Candlemas tradition and gave groundhogs the role hedgehogs played in Europe.

The groundhog, or woodchuck, is a ground squirrel and part of a group of rodents called marmots. It is common in eastern and central states. Groundhogs typically weigh between 4 and 9 pounds, though in areas with few predators and rich feed are known to get over 30 pounds. Their main diet is grasses, or alfalfa when available, but they also eat bugs, grasshoppers or other small animals.

Groundhogs dig burrows for shelter, usually with multiple entrances. They may also dig a separate winter burrow for hibernation. In much of their range groundhogs hibernate from October until March or April, so in reality if Punxatawney Phil were a wild woodchuck he’d normally be sound asleep on February 2.

An intriguing fact about woodchucks is if they are injected with a special strain of Hepatitis B, they are at 100 percent risk for developing liver cancer, thus making them valuable for research on Hepatitis B and liver cancer.

We don’t have woodchucks here in Montana, though there are any number of Woodchuck Trails and similar places. Two other marmots call Montana home, however. The yellow-bellied marmot ranges across most of the Rocky Mountain states and is often called a rock chuck to distinguish it from its eastern cousin. The hoary marmot, which gets its name from its long, gray guard hairs, generally lives high in the mountains, above tree line.

Last summer, after getting home from Minnesota, I spotted a road-killed yellow-bellied marmot near the upper Big Hole River. A bald eagle was perching on a rocky cliff overlooking the highway, making some plaintive noises. I took the hint and picked up the marmot and threw it over the guardrail so the eagle could eat it safely (I know—what a mensch).

A week later, while touring Glacier National Park, we watched several hoary marmots moving around the Logan Pass Visitor Center, optimistically looking for edible goodies between the building and the deep snowdrifts.

That’s a personal record; seeing all three of these marmots in just a couple weeks. Still, I’ll bet none of them can predict Montana’s weather. In any event, if you wake them up on February 2 to ask, you might not like their answer.

One Montana Hunter's View of the Tucson Shootings

2011-01-26T19:20:00.000-08:00

The shooting tragedy in Tucson at a public “meet your congressional representative” event where six people were killed and many more wounded, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), again raises complex questions about handguns, gun controls and associated issues.

I’ve held off commenting for a couple weeks while facts emerge about the incident. Obviously, that hasn’t prevented others from making instant judgments.

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik of Pima County jumped into the fray early when he made remarks about “vitriolic rhetoric” being a factor in the shooting, a reference to the 2010 political campaign in which Rep. Giffords’ congressional district was the target in a representation of telescopic sights. I agree with the sheriff’s opinion about the tone of rhetoric in last year’s political campaigns, though as facts emerged it seems certain the gunman was not politically motivated.

Rush Limbaugh, as always the epitome of rational comment, ranted that Sheriff Dupnik should be recalled for suggesting that the rhetoric should be toned down.

An off the wall reaction to the shooting was the report that on the Monday after the Saturday shooting, Arizona firearms dealers had a 60 percent increase in handgun sales, presumably by buyers fearing the shooting would lead to gun control legislation.

The National Rifle Association has been strangely quiet. Their website, even two weeks after the shooting, shows only a statement of sympathy and concern to victims and families.

Other organizations are less subdued. Gun Owners of America, an organization that makes the NRA seem moderate, issued statements on their website that the incident only demonstrates that more people should be carrying handguns, and specifically defending large capacity magazines for those handguns.

That thinking was reflected by some Montana legislators who said the incident demonstrates that legislators should be allowed to carry concealed weapons in the state capitol (guns are not now allowed in the capitol building). They cited a story of a gunman who invaded a Utah legislative session, only to be greeted by half a dozen legislators pointing pistols at him. A good story, though the Utah senate president says it’s bunkum.

Speaking of bunkum, Tea Party darling Sarah Palin went off on a rant against people who suggested that gun sight images on political ads were inappropriate. She carried on at length to convince Palinistas that she was the real victim in the whole affair. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson says Palin’s insistence on portraying herself as a martyr reminds him of Eva Peron, and that she should find a good balcony for her next address.

There are ironies in the case. The gunman committed the carnage with a 9 mm. Glock semiautomatic pistol. Rep. Giffords, herself, has been supportive of gun rights and reportedly has a 9 mm. Glock of her own.

An undisputed fact is that the alleged shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was well known by many to be mentally ill, a sad and lonely person slipping into insanity. In that respect he has a lot in common with other perpetrators of mass killings. Yet he was able to purchase his Glock without difficulty, even buying more ammunition the morning of the shooting.

Loughner is another illustration of the health care system’s failures to recognize and treat people falling off the deep end. If we had really been paying attention we would have gotten him into a treatment program and, as a further step, sent law enforcement agencies to impound firearms he might own until he recovered.

Secondly, and I write this as an long-time firearms owner and user, we need to put some realistic controls on gun sales that would put meaningful barriers in the way of people like Loughner. Don’t hold your breath on that one, though. The gun lobby either owns or has so successfully intimidated so many members of Congress that it’ll never happen. You don’t have to look any farther than Montana’s Congressional delegation for examples of the owned and/or gutless.

If I sound extreme, just ask yourself this question: How many mass murders and dead children must we tolerate?

Winter Ice Jams and One Last Duck Hunt

2011-01-19T19:20:00.000-08:00

The last retrieve of the season.

“Something we hydrologists occasionally forget is that water isn’t always a liquid.”

That was something a now-deceased hydrologist and friend of a neighbor liked to point out concerning the occasional problems that frozen water, better known as ice, causes. Recent ice jams at Twin Bridges and Ennis are cases in point.

This time of year, I frequently go through the community of Twin Bridges on my way to and from some of my duck hunting spots (and that is as specific as I’ll get as to just where I hunt those ducks). As always, it’s interesting to see what happens when winter hits western Montana and some of those rivers, such as the Jefferson and Beaverhead, start freezing.

The town of Twin Bridges was built right on the banks of the Beaverhead, including some businesses and the local high school that are just feet away from the river. Fortunately, the banks on the other side of the river are a bit lower so when there’s high water, the river can spread out without causing catastrophic damage.

A couple weeks ago I went through and everything looked normal. The river was flowing along with patches of slush ice on the surface. On the west side of the river there is a small park and rest area on the north side of the highway and the Madison County Fairgrounds on the south side. Every December a low spot in that little park is flooded to create an outdoor skating rink.

In most years skating doesn’t last long, as there are usually warm spells in early January that turn the rink into slush. If you’re a skater, you have to get out there and enjoy it during the short period before the ice melts.

It was a surprise when the flooding on the Beaverhead due to ice jams downstream from Twin Bridges became the hot news a couple weeks ago. The flooding would have happened a day after I was there when everything looked normal.

My last duck trip of the season came after several days of warm weather gave the ice a chance to break up and let the water recede, though subzero weather had returned on that hunting day. In the morning the river was running pretty much normally. By noon, the ice floes had merged again and the water was again rising.

Ironically, the skating rink was closed, this time because the park was iced over. The ice rink was under a couple feet of water and new ice. Benches poking up above the ice marked where skaters might have taken a break a couple weeks earlier. The good news was that the ice rink was dramatically larger than usual. The bad news, of course, is that the new ice is unsafe; otherwise there’d be enough ice for an Olympic racing oval.

All this underscores problems humans create when they build communities next to rivers, seemingly without worrying about what might happen when streams go over their banks.

If those ice floes cause problems, they also create opportunities. In fact, when it comes to duck hunting, I depend on river ice to move ducks off the rivers and onto the warm water spring creeks I hunt.

As the season winds down duck numbers drop as more and more ducks decide there must be better places to spend the winter than Montana. Still, on that last mid-January hunt Flicka, my faithful Labrador retriever, and I managed to get within shooting range of a small bunch of ducks and Flicka happily swam across a warm pond to retrieve one last drake mallard to end our season. After a couple minutes, Flicka was frosted with ice that formed on her coat in the zero degree temperatures. I doubt she even noticed that it was cold outside.

The hunting season is over. It has been a long time since those hot days of early September to January’s deep freeze, but it went all too quickly. It’s time to clean guns and equipment and put things away for the season. It’s time, and I’m content.

Just try convincing Flicka

Mallards on Montana's Frozen Tundra

2011-01-12T18:45:00.000-08:00

Flick retrieving a winter mallard

The frozen tundra is an over-used term, often describing late season football fields, particularly after the frozen, subzero NFL championship game in Green Bay in 1967. Still, as Flicka and I trudged our way across the snowy field, I couldn’t help but think frozen tundra.

A couple months earlier, the field was tall, green alfalfa. In January, that green field had been grazed down and this morning, after recent snowfalls and steady winds, the snow was an untracked arctic expanse. The wind put an extra edge to the subzero temperatures.

Hank, a neighbor when we lived in North Dakota, liked to hunt but he steadfastly refused to hunt ducks. “It’s too cold,” he’d whine. Yes, we’d have some chilly days when hunting ducks, but it would still be in October. Hunting ducks in eastern North Dakota was an October game because you could almost depend on a hard freeze in early November, and after the little potholes froze up the ducks didn’t have much choice but to get back in the air and resume journeys south.

I don’t know what Hank would say about trudging across frozen fields on frigid January mornings. He was around, but probably too young to appreciate at the time that his hometown of Parshall, North Dakota, set that state’s record low temperature of -60° F, set one frigid morning in February 1936, in a winter that set records for cold temperatures all over. By that standard, this January morning was shirtsleeve weather.

While it’s cold, billows of steam mark where a warm water creek goes across the field. On cold winter nights the warm water spring creeks of southwest Montana draw ducks like a magnet, with warm water, aquatic vegetation and a layer of tropical air just above the water’s surface. Still, after a week of cold weather, the question would be whether ducks were still in residence or if they had moved on.

I made a couple trips to this ranch in mid-December when things worked as they should and when Flicka, my black Labrador retriever and I approached the creek hundreds of mallards would flush. It’s a memorable sight, with the vivid blue and white markings of drake mallards sparkling in the morning sun.

Not this morning, however. As we approached the creek nothing happened. The ducks hadn’t come in to relax in their warm water spa, or at least not this one.

There are other ranches and other creeks, however.

On an approach to another creek we didn’t see ducks, though a red fox exploded out of creek-side cover and hightailed it for the hills. At another spot, a jackrabbit hopped away in a casual lope. At another creek the springs weren’t warm enough to keep the creek from freezing.

There was one creek left. Flicka and I made a wide swing across the field before making an approach to the creek near a line of willows. The snow near the creek was deep and powdery, where the brush slowed the wind and the snow could settle out. At first I didn’t think there were any ducks here either, but then a dozen mallards flushed from about 20 yards away. I tried to pick out a drake and then missed with my shot. Then another mallard drake left the water and this time I connected.

Flicka floundered a bit in the deep snow to get to the duck but she found the duck and brought it to me.

Occasionally, I wonder about some of these late season outings, driving an hour or so to get to these ranches where I have permission to hunt, and then trudging across snow-covered fields on the off chance there are still some ducks around and that I’ll be able to get within shotgunning range. Certainly, if I attempt calculating the cost of those roast duck dinners in coming months it’s hard to justify.

As of today, there are just a couple days left in the waterfowl season. I’d better get out and take one more look. It’s a long time until September.

An end to pheasant season and farewell to an angler

2011-01-05T18:38:00.000-08:00

Flicka with pheasants from a more productive hunt

Flicka and I approached a clump on willows along a creek. A pheasant flushed from the other side of the willows, followed a second later by another pheasant. I raised my gun but held off from shooting as the willows screened my view of the birds. As the first pheasant got out of range I could finally see some colors on the bird. It was a rooster after all.

I suppose I might have thought a few nasty thoughts about that pheasant, but it would have been a waste of time. The pheasant, after all, was simply doing what it needed to do, and that was to stay alive until spring when it could finally pay attention to what he really needed to do: attend to the propagation of the species.

Earlier, another rooster pheasant flushed from a sagebrush patch. I raised my gun and, again, put it down without shooting. The bird got up just out of range and shooting would have been futile. Or would it? That question plagued me the rest of the day. Maybe if I’d been quicker I might have had a chance.

I made a point of getting out for my last pheasant outing of the 2010 season before a well-predicted winter storm hit western Montana last week. Certainly I’ve hunted pheasants in falling snow and frigid temps over the years but it seemed logical to get out on a relatively pleasant day.

The pheasant season closed at sundown on New Year’s Day. Of the general hunting seasons all there’s left at this point is waterfowl and that season is shrinking rapidly.

In the Pacific Flyway areas of Montana, generally west of a line from Havre to Livingston, the duck and goose seasons will close on January 14. In the Central Flyway area of Montana, the duck season closes tomorrow, January 6, though goose hunting will continue until the 14th. Then we enter that awkward time of the year between the end of the hunting season and the beginning of the serious flyfishing part of the year.

Fortunately in Montana, there are ways to fill that time, such as skiing, flytying, ice fishing, rabbit hunting, or bird watching.

Before going into that interim season I need to return to 2010 to note the passing of a prominent personality of the flyfishing world.

Tom Helegeson described flyfishing as “Standing in the water, waiting for something good to happen.”

Tom was a college classmate at St. Olaf College years ago. After 50 years I can remember only one class we had together but I’ll always remember how, for Tom, the process of putting words together for writing or speaking came both easily and naturally.

After graduating, Tom put in a three-year stint in the Marine Corps and then began a long career in journalism as a reporter and editor with the Minneapolis Star. Somewhere along the line he picked up a flyrod and as his wife, Julie, said, “From the moment he picked up his first flyrod, I never had his undivided attention.”

He left his newspaper career in the 1980s to open Bright Waters, a fly shop in Minneapolis. He used this base for teaching flyfishing classes and leading trips to Alaska and other flyfishing destinations. He even created a sportsman’s show, the Great Waters Fly Fishing Expo, to feature and promote flyfishing in the Midwest.

In 1994, Tom launched a magazine, Midwest Fly Fishing, to highlight the many flyfishing opportunities of the Midwest, as well as to promote conservation of fishing waters. In a newspaper interview he said anglers must be stewards and caretakers. “There needs to be a new spirit in this country about conservation. It’s bigger than trout streams. It involves how we live and how we treat each other.”

Tom Helgeson died of cancer on November 12, 2010. Chris Wood, president of Trout Unlimited, paid tribute to Tom as a generous, passionate and visionary person who understood the benefits of protecting and recovering the health of our lands and waters.

Rest in peace, Tom.

-30-

A Last Visit with 2010

2010-12-29T18:20:00.000-08:00

Ding-Dong!

The sound of the doorbell interrupted the football game. A grizzled old man, shivering in the cold, stood at the door. He certainly wasn’t dressed for winter. He was wearing a pair of patched chest-high fishing waders and a fishing vest, and a beat-up old hat with bedraggled flies affixed to the felt crown.

“Hello. Umm, can I help you?” I said.

“Would you let me come in and get warm? I’ve been traveling a long time.” His voice was raspy, likely from too many years of bad cigars and cheap whiskey, and too many seasons rattling around Montana.

“Do I know you? I don’t think we’ve met, have we?”

“You should know me,” he replied a bit testily. “I came in last January 1, and we’ve traveled together the last 363 days. I don’t have much time left, so come on, take a little mercy on a tired old man.”

I invited him into the house, settling him into a comfortable chair in front of the fireplace and went into the kitchen to make a couple mugs of hot chocolate. He had dozed off but woke up with a smile as I handed him the steaming mug. “Ah, that’s good,” he sighed after sipping the rich chocolate, laced with a bit of rum.

There wasn’t resemblance in the old man’s face compared to that newborn baby of last New Year’s Day. He’d obviously seen a lot more than football games. “I hate to say this, old timer, but you look like you’ve had a hard time of it. You look almost as bad as Brett Favre did after last week’s game with the Bears. And, what’s with the fishing get-up? I thought you were supposed to be wearing long white robes and carrying a scythe.”

“Oh, that’s so 20th Century,” he said with a scornful frown. “Actually, I made a quick stop to make a few casts on the Big Hole but my favorite spot was frozen solid. I did find some open water, and then slipped and took a dunk in the river. Wow! I didn’t think it was possible to get that cold.” He gestured at the firewood. I took the hint and put another chunk of pine on the fire.

Sipping hot chocolate he began reminiscing as he warmed. “Well, it’s been quite a ride, going around the world every day. You see a lot of crazy people doing crazy things. Shucks, just the United States had enough going to keep any year busy. That Gulf oil spill, for one. What a mess. If you think I look pretty rough, that had a lot to it.

“And then there’s that war in Afghanistan. It happened before I came on board but that General McChrystal sure sold your president a bill of goods on expanding the war over there. And then he had the nerve to ‘dis’ him. I thought the president let him off easy, letting him retire. He should have busted him to private and put him in an infantry platoon. “

I had to interrupt him at this point. “Haven’t you had enough of politics and problems? Didn’t you have any fun on your trip?”

He thought a moment and smiled as he reminisced about flyfishing in Montana when he had a chance. Then he started laughing. “I had a lot of fun up in Alaska, watching Sarah Palin trying to shoot a caribou for that TV show. She emptied one gun shooting holes in the air. Hadn’t she ever heard of sighting in a rifle before hunting? And then that stupid caribou; he just kept running back and forth. Every chance I get I go to a computer and watch it on You Tube. What a phony!”

He finished his cocoa and reluctantly got back on his feet. “Much obliged for the chance to warm up, but time to get back on the road. A couple more trips and I can retire.”

“Do you have some advice for the new kid, 2011?”

“Nope. Just keep his head down when he’s in Alaska.”

Merry Christmas from Montana

2010-12-22T18:26:00.000-08:00

Flicka and I wish you a Merry Christmas from Montana

‘Twas a couple nights before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring, except for the writer pacing the floor, disturbing even the mouse.

“Will you shut down that computer and call it a night?” asked—no, demanded, the writer’s wife. Staying up late, staring at the computer, didn’t seem normal. Now, if he had fallen asleep in the recliner while watching the Kumquat Bowl, or some other ridiculous football game, that would be more typical.

“I’m sorry, dear,” the writer responded, sipping stale coffee. “I’m having a terrible time with my Christmas column. My deadline is tomorrow—and you know how the editor is when my copy is late.”

“So why do you always wait until the last minute to get started? You’ve had all week.”

“I was hoping to have more to write about,” he responded sleepily.

“Write about your last hunting trip. Isn’t that what you usually do?”

“I guess, now that you mention it.” He sipped his coffee and added, “But it’s easier when I have something positive to tell about. It’s difficult when the trip is a failure.”

“This certainly wasn’t the first time you went hunting and didn’t come home with any game. What’s the big deal?”

The writer pondered her question as he poured himself another cup of coffee and mentally reviewed that last pheasant outing.

It was a mild morning when he left to hunt a ranch an hour’s drive away. It was a ranch he usually put off hunting until the late season because the pheasants generally hang out in this big, marshy creek bottom, with thick willows along the creek, with patches of cattails and marsh grass. There are springs that feed the marsh and he liked to wait until cold weather froze all the water and it would be easier to get around.

East of the Continental Divide the weather looked nice, with bright sunshine reflecting off the snow. The wind, however, was roaring down the eastern slopes. The snow was crusted from recent thaws; otherwise there would be a lot of drifting.

He trudged through sagebrush above the creek, noting pheasant tracks in the snow. The birds are around, he thought, and they’ve been out feeding. With the wind, he figured the pheasants would be in heavier cover. With his black Lab leading the way he wandered around in the tangled willows and other trees before coming out to the marshy area. He hadn’t gone far when he broke through the ice and water seeped in over his boot tops.

The treacherous ice didn’t bother the dog. She scampered across the marsh, plowing her way through the cattails, and then went into a big patch of tall grasses next to the creek. A whitetail buck scampered out, followed by a hen pheasant flying to safety, and then a doe and half-grown fawn.

He tried to work himself to where the dog was, but the brush was too thick to get through. The dog put up a few more pheasants from inside the willows. All he could do was think bad thoughts as he heard pheasants fly away. Finally, after slipping on some solid ice, making a hard landing on his hip and elbow, and following that with breaking through more ice, he decided that this trip wasn’t much fun. He and his puzzled dog limped back through the snow to the truck and went home.

Telling the story to his wife he concluded, “See? That’s not much to write about.”

The wife smiled consolingly, but reminded him, “So it wasn’t your best hunt. So what! Just think how lucky you are. You have good places to hunt. You put up some pheasants and you saw lots of other wildlife. It’s Christmas time and you’ve been hunting since the beginning of September. We have game in the freezer.

“Why don’t you just write that you’re having a good hunting season and wish everybody a Merry Christmas? It can’t be that difficult.“

And so the house eventually grew quiet, though the mouse wondered, “So what was all that about?”

No Respect from Canada Geese

2010-12-15T19:20:00.000-08:00

“I get no respect, I tell you. The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I’d be honest.”

The late comedian, Rodney Dangerfield, made a pretty good living as the poor schlemiel nobody respected.

I’ve had reason to understand how he felt, even if it wasn’t like his one liner about a girl telling him, “Come on over, nobody’s home.” “So I went over, and sure enough, nobody was home.”

I get no respect from Canada geese.

On a recent hunting outing I drove down a pasture trail towards a spring creek in search of ducks. The trail is right along the rancher’s property line, and on the other side of the fence were about 300 Canada geese feeding in a field.

Did the geese take off when Flicka, my Labrador retriever, and I left the truck, with me carrying a shotgun? Not at all. They continued feeding, unperturbed. They didn’t ignore me; for every goose with its head down in the snow looking for green shoots, there were probably three geese that had their heads up, ready to sound the alarm in the unlikely event I would suddenly pose some sort of threat to them.

These geese not only weren’t worried about legitimate threats from hunters, they also apparently knew they were out of shotgun range in case some hunter rushed the fence with shotgun blazing. They were all around 100 to 150 yards from the fenceline, far from where any pellets from a shotgun shell could do any damage.

Back in late October I had a similar day when I was hunting pheasants in North Dakota. I was hunting on public land and there were several hundred Canada geese peacefully feeding in a barley field across the road from where I was hunting. If they were bothered by a gun-totin’ hunter from Montana, they sure didn’t show it.

Canada geese are a big success story when it comes to survival and recovery. A century ago, Canada geese were relatively rare and one subspecies, the giant Canada goose, was considered extinct until the 1950s when a small flock of giants was found near Rochester, Minnesota.

Canada geese are in no danger these days. Canada geese can be found almost anywhere in North America, and they have definitely found a niche in and around urban area parks and golf courses, including Butte, of course, where geese keep both the Country Club and municipal golf course fairways well fertilized.

Canada geese have reached Europe on their own, joining Canada geese that were introduced over the years. In the 17th Century, explorer Samuel de Champlain shipped several pairs of geese to France as a gift to King Louis XIII. Not to be outdone, English colonists sent geese to King James II. More recently, Canada geese were introduced into New Zealand. In all these areas Canada geese often earn a new status as pests.

Canada geese are valued by waterfowl hunters, many of whom specialize in trying to lure flocks of geese to come to open fields where hunters, wearing various shades of camouflage, shiver by decoys in the pre-dawn darkness in hopes geese will fly into range. I confess that goose hunting requires a level of commitment above and beyond what I’m willing to give.

Still, Montana is prime hunting territory for Canada geese. They’re along just about every river in the state, and the numbers of geese are impressive, especially along the Yellowstone River in eastern Montana. Driving the I-90/I-94 corridor in early winter, the flights of geese in the air resemble flights of B-17s taking off from England back in the ‘40s.

Occasionally I’ll get a shooting opportunity when I’m hunting ducks, though it doesn’t happen often. Geese are sharp-eyed and suspicious of any ground movement.

Personally, if I were to choose a hunting spot without regard to legal niceties, I’d just take my shotgun to the tennis courts at Stodden Park in early autumn. I’ve even wondered if there was some way to make a tennis racket that incorporates a 10-gauge shotgun.

Then I’d get some respect.

Ruffed Grouse Habitat - Always Changing

2010-12-09T09:01:00.000-08:00

Ruffed grouse coverts have a special place in my heart. Ever since I first got hooked on hunting ruffed grouse something like 35 years ago I’ve built a mental collection of patches of woodland that shelter and nurture ruffed grouse and other wildlife. It hasn’t always been easy, as I had to come up with a new collection of coverts when my last job transfer brought us to Montana 22 seasons ago, and I had to say goodbye to old haunts in North Dakota.

The term, ‘covert,’ incidentally, the word used to describe ruffed grouse hangouts, is defined in my dictionary as a hiding place, or a thicket affording cover for game. The emphasis is on the first syllable, to distinguish it from covert (with emphasis on second syllable), as in a spy mission.

It’s another example of why our English language is confusing. Adding to the confusion is that covert can be pronounced with a silent ‘t.’ In fact; some writers have come to even drop that ‘t’ and just use the word, ‘cover,’ to describe ruffed grouse hangouts.

My collection of grouse coverts is more than scattered aspen-covered hillsides and creek bottoms. They’re the repository of memories from many hunts over the years and the Labrador retrievers who shared those hunts and, of course, the ruffed grouse, that wonderful game bird that stubbornly ekes out a hardscrabble living in the thickets.

Grouse coverts are dynamic places in constant change. Ruffed grouse thrive in forested areas with a variety of habitat, with a mixture of different age classes of aspens and brushy cover, along with access to denser forest for refuge from severe weather or predators. As the forest matures, conifers take over, shading out aspens and ground cover. Eventually, as far as ruffed grouse are concerned, the forest becomes a virtual desert.

One grouse area and one of the more productive, as far as numbers of grouse flushed—which does not always translate to shots fired or birds on the dinner table, was approaching that climax stage, though with another wrinkle: mountain pine beetle. The last couple years I often thought that the area needed a controlled burn or a logging operation to clear out dead and dying pine trees and to revitalize the habitat.

On a snowy November day I made my annual visit to the covert and saw that a well-publicized logging operation on the Mt. Haggin Wildlife Management Area was, in fact, on this grouse covert. It was quite a change; with formerly dense stands of trees now pretty much gone and with aspen trees the main survivor.

One question in my mind was answered when Flicka, my Labrador retriever, put up a grouse from a hillside that had not been logged. I managed to scratch the bird down on my second shot. Flicka was retrieving the bird when another grouse flushed from in front of her. Flicka forgot about the grouse in her mouth to chase after the bird in the air. We later flushed another grouse from aspens in the logged-over area. In spite of a couple months of putting up with logging operations, the grouse are still in residence.

I subscribe to a newsletter, “Grouse Tales – the Official Newsletter of the Loyal Order of Dedicated Grouse Hunters.” In a recent issue one person wrote of trying to find a certain clear-cut area in Michigan and asking a Forest Service employee for directions. The Forest Service person pointed out it wasn’t a clear-cut; it was an aspen regeneration area. As they continued the conversation, every time the person said clear-cut, the forester corrected him, “It’s aspen regeneration.”

In fact, studies have shown that ruffed grouse love those old clear-cut—excuse me, aspen regeneration areas, especially in the 5 – 15 year period following the logging operation. It’ll be interesting to see how this area recovers in coming seasons and whether the grouse have a population boom.

For now, the covert is blanketed in snow, and after the grouse season closes next week, the only predators the grouse need worry about will be those with talons or jaws.

Montana's Big Game Season Ends

2010-12-01T19:33:00.000-08:00

Here I am with my deer. It's not a trophy deer, but really good eating.

As usual, it’s one of those good news/bad news deals. The bad news is that the big game hunting season is over. The good news, or at least a bit of relief, is that the big game season is over.

The 2010 general big game hunting season pretty much ran to form, and so did the weather. Those two things usually go hand-in-hand. The season opened with some early winter weather, and then we had an extended period of mild weather, and then winter came back with a vengeance, with sub-zero temps and blizzard conditions during Thanksgiving week.

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks reported outstanding hunting success in southwest Montana the next to last weekend of the season with large numbers of deer and elk coming through FWP game checking stations. The last weekend of hunting happened after my deadline for this issue of the Weekly, but for hunters able to escape Thanksgiving tables and football games long enough to get up in the high country and hunt, there were rewards.

Personally, I had a perfect big game hunting season. I left home at midday on a snowy and drizzly afternoon, spotted some white-tailed deer at 3 p.m. and fired my rifle once. Within an hour we had the deer dressed out and loaded for the trip home.

As some readers may recall from some previous columns, there are traditions among the Native Americans of North America that the animal the hunter is meant to take will offer themselves to the hunter. Scoff if you wish, but every year personal experience seems to reinforce that tradition. Taking it a step further, that bond between hunter and game animal means the hunter needs to exercise a higher level of responsibility.

That responsibility includes the obligations to hunt in an ethical manner, observing game laws and regulations, and then, when the magical moment happens and the animal is in your sights, to shoot carefully so that the animal will die quickly and with minimal suffering.

On my hunt, my friend John Jacobson, and I discussed this magic, even sacred, moment of the hunt and I commented that while we don’t celebrate the deer’s death, “I am happy that I did my part of the hunt well and that the deer didn’t suffer.” I know this all too well from some past experiences when I didn’t do my part of the hunt as I should have. Some of those memories still come back to haunt me.

The venison is now stashed away in the freezer and will be the centerpiece of a number of meals in coming months, though one small whitetail doesn’t amount to a lot of meat, sorry to say. Still, each meal will be an occasion to celebrate that gray November day when we reaffirmed those ancient bonds between hunters and wildlife.

While the big game season is now over, there are many more hunting opportunities in coming weeks.

The mountain grouse season, which includes blue (dusky), ruffed and spruce grouse, runs for a couple more weeks before it closes on December 15. Other upland game seasons, including pheasants, partridge, and sharp-tailed grouse, run through New Years Day, and waterfowl seasons extend almost to mid-January. Sage grouse hunting ended November 1.

If my idea of a perfect big game hunting season means firing my rifle just once, the perfect season for the shotgunner is when we do a lot of shooting during the four and a half months of the Montana upland bird and waterfowl seasons. By that standard I’ve had a good hunting season, but need more outings to make it a great season. I’m hoping weather and road conditions will be good enough to get in those late season hunting days.

Flicka, my Labrador retriever and always-enthusiastic hunting partner, is depending on me to help her get out for these late season hunts. She has also been reminding me that we lost out on some hunting opportunities because we went traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday.

I’d better make it up to her.

Thanksgiving Thoughts

2010-11-24T18:12:00.000-08:00

There’s nothing like a good snowfall to put me in the mood for Thanksgiving. The weather systems that moved across western Montana last week put a good cover of snow on the landscape and we’re thankful for that. Here in the semi-arid West we depend on winter snows to give us water through the rest of the year; water for irrigation, drinking, wildlife, fish, fishing and boating. Precipitation is always good in Montana. Occasionally it comes at inconvenient times, of course, but it’s always good.

A good snowfall also puts a cap on the autumn season so we can move on to winter. I remember a farmer friend back in North Dakota who was thankful when a good snowstorm finally came after an extended period of mild weather. “I can finally get a little time off,” he said. “As long as the ground was bare I kept tinkering around with stuff. None of it was important, but since I could do it I kept on doing it.”

Thanksgiving comes at a good time. We’re approaching the end of the hunting seasons and many of us have harvested wild game and have put this bounty of nature in the freezer to help feed our families over the coming months.

When the Pilgrims and their Native American neighbors celebrated that first thanksgiving dinner in 1621, most of the food on the menu was wild game, including venison, turkey, ducks, geese, swans, fish, lobster and clams, plus wild berries and fruit. Pumpkin and squash would have been among the limited crops available for the dinner.

Hunting and fishing made that first Thanksgiving dinner possible. Indeed, hunting and fishing is the only way that tiny band of ill-prepared immigrants to this cold New England coastal area could have survived, and that was mostly due to the kindness of the Wampanoag Indian tribe who shared their food and hunting skills to help them survive their first winter. Incidentally, there are now about 2,300 surviving Wampanoag people, compared to the estimated 6,500 people at the time the Pilgrims came to Plymouth. In the 1600s, the native peoples of Massachusetts were pushed out of their homes, exposed to disease and killed in warfare. By the end of that century they had all but disappeared.

It’s almost 400 years since that first Thanksgiving and it’s good we still set a day aside to give thanks. Here are a few of the things for which I’m thankful this year.

I’m grateful for the gifts of family. Our children, their spouses, and our grandchildren give us hope and confidence for the future. They make us proud.

I’m grateful for the wild things of our creation. They fill the skies, the earth and the waters and give us food, a sense of wonder and a delight for the eyes. I’m grateful for the many people who work so hard to make sure that wild things continue to be a part of our lives.

I’m grateful for Montana Tech head football coach Bob Green. Coach Green is a total class act and has been through his career as a coach and mentor of young men who play football, study engineering and sciences – and graduate. I wish Bob and his wife, Pam, nothing but the best as he begins retirement. Football season in this part of the world is going to be a lot duller without him. I will share a bit of advice, however. Coach, there is life after football.

I’m grateful for the people who till the soil, produce crops, raise livestock, and produce the food for us on Thanksgiving Day and every other day of the year. Feeding the world is a noble profession.

I’m thankful for the men and women in our armed forces that serve our country so faithfully. My biggest wish is that our nation can find a way to world peace and bring you home. In the meantime, we’re grateful for your continuing service.

And to all of you, who read this column, may you and your families have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.

Pheasants in the North Dakota Oil Patch

2010-11-17T19:13:00.000-08:00

Flicka bringing in a pheasant that didn't get away.

“Those are industrial strength pheasants,” I told Flicka, as a rooster pheasant flushed from the edge of the shelterbelt—the wrong side of the shelterbelt—well screened from my view except for a fleeting glance as it flew off to safety. Another pheasant had given us the slip.

Flicka, my Labrador retriever and always-enthusiastic hunting partner, and I were hunting pheasants on Wildlife Management Areas along the shores of Lakes Sakakawea, the big Missouri River impoundment in western North Dakota. I’ve hunted that area off and on around 30 years, and we’ve been making trips there regularly in recent years so that Kevin, our son who lives in Minot, and I can hunt together.

The area has been undergoing rapid change in the last few years. Some of those changes are natural and others are industrial.

The area is smack dab in the middle of the Bakken Formation oil patch of western North Dakota and eastern Montana, and the pace of development is almost mind-boggling. Almost everywhere you look you can see derricks, indicating where new wells are being drilled, site preparation where wells are going to be drilled, oil wells that are pumping, and occasional flames indicating where natural gas is being flared off. The number of natural gas flares is less than a year or so ago, as the oil companies have built natural gas pipelines to capture the gas and send it to market.

Another indicator of change is the volume of heavy truck traffic, with tanker trucks, heavy equipment movers and gravel hauling trucks fanning out across the countryside. While farming operations continue next to the oil wells it’s easy to see that energy is the driving force in western North Dakota.

Energy creates other impacts. Schools in a couple communities have put up apartments and houses specifically to provide their teachers with subsidized housing. With the influx of oil workers, housing in many small towns is at a premium.

For better or worse, Mother Nature has drastically changed the lakeshore hunting areas. The drought cycle of a few years ago resulted in low lake levels. While that hurt fisheries and boating it also created vast expanses of wildlife habitat as weeds, brush patches and groves of trees took hold, creating a paradise full of white-tailed deer, pheasants and waterfowl.

After just a couple years with heavy runoff the big impoundment is virtually full, as is the Ft. Peck impoundment in Montana, and some pheasant hotspots of a few years ago are now under 40 feet of water. In fact, lake levels increased 13 feet over the course of this past summer, going from 1837 feet above sea level in March to 1850 feet in July. Right now, the Corps of Engineers is dumping water from the reservoir at the rate of 30,000 cubic feet per second to lower lake levels to make room for next year’s runoff. Water is still coming in at the rate of 20,000 cfs, so it takes awhile to reduce the lake level, which stood at 1845 feet on October 31.

On October 31, while other people were getting ready for Halloween, Kevin and I were out walking along the lakeshore into a bitterly cold south wind, watching the surf roll in. Lines of driftwood above the current shoreline mark this year’s high water mark, while offshore, drowned trees are still standing in deep water. On this Halloween, the pheasants played all the tricks and, except for the sandwiches we’d packed for the day, we got none of the treats.

A couple days earlier I’d hunted by myself and collected a three-bird limit in relatively short order. The pheasants seemed to be bunched up in sheltered areas following an early snowstorm that roared through a couple days earlier.

After a couple days of warm sunshine the pheasants, especially those big gaudy roosters, seemed to have scattered and were hard to find. Who knows, maybe some of them strolled over to that new oilrig operating just a few hundred yards from the wildlife management area and hired on as roughnecks.

Some Notes on Veterans Day

2010-11-10T19:20:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, November 11, is Veteran’s Day, the annual tribute to the veterans of our armed forces who have sacrificed in so many ways to protect our country and freedoms.

The holiday originally was Armistice Day, commemorating that 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month, November 11, 1918, when World War I, or the Great War, as it was called for years, finally limped to an exhausted end. While the war didn’t officially end until June 28, 1919 when the various governments signed the Treaty of Versailles in Paris, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation designating November 11, 1919 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day to honor “the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory…”

In 1926, Congress passed a resolution designating Armistice Day as a day “to be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”

It was not until 1938 when a law was passed to designate the 11th of November as an official holiday. In 1954, a decade after an even more horrible war, World War II, and just after the Korean War, Congress amended the law to change Armistice Day to Veterans Day, a piece of legislation signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower, the five star general who commanded the allied forces in Europe to end the European part of that war.

For several years, Veterans Day was observed on the fourth Monday of October, following the 1968 legislation establishing a number of three-day weekends. When that law took effect in 1971 it was clear that not everybody agreed with the change. In 1975, President Gerald Ford signed legislation to put Veterans Day back to November 11, beginning in 1978.

In most countries of the British Commonwealth, November 11 is observed as Remembrance Day, and British military units begin their observances with a bugle call, the Last Post, which usually signals day’s end. Similar to Taps, the Last Post is a part of military funerals in Commonwealth countries. Another tradition in the Commonwealth nations is to observe two minutes of silence at 11 a.m.

Armistice or Remembrance Day is not a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland. In July Ireland observes a National Day of Commemoration for Irish men and women who died in past wars or in service with United Nations Peacekeeping Forces. Still, in Dublin there is the National War Memorial Gardens, a memorial dedicated to the memory of the 49,400 Irish soldiers serving in the British armed forces who lost their lives in the Great War. Remembrance Sunday, the Sunday closest to November 11, is marked by ecumenical ceremonies at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.

Long time readers might recall that I’ve had a long-held interest in World War I. In recent years there have been a number of books, fiction and non-fiction, published about the conflict.

The most recent book is “Fall of Giants,” by Ken Follett, a novel and the first volume of a planned trilogy about the 20th Century. It’s a heavy book, almost 1,000 pages long, about people and events leading to the war, significant events during the war and, finally, the end and aftermath of that war. Follett is a best-selling author with a long list of novels. This planned trilogy will definitely be a major achievement in his long writing career. I just finished reading it and while that book may be hard to pick up, it’s even harder to put down.

The battle of the Somme, a multi-month battle, with over a million casualties, including over 300,000 deaths, on both sides of the conflict after repeated fruitless battles, probably represents, more than other battles, the tragedy and futility of trench warfare. A recent book is a non-fiction volume by Peter Hart, “The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front.” And, yes, the Somme is a significant event in the Follett novel, as well.

Next week I’ll get back to fall hunting, but let’s take time tomorrow to honor the legacy of our nation’s veterans.

It's November and the Seasons Are Progressing

2010-11-04T19:52:00.000-07:00

The Bounty Under a Cold, Late Autumn Sky

“Don’t go to Montana or Idaho. The wolves have gotten all the elk and deer. There’s nothing left.”

This spring our son, who lives in North Dakota, reported on attending a sportsmen’s show and that was the message blared out by a person promoting his business of booking hunts in Canada. Right now I think a lot of Montana hunters would say the guy was full of beans.

Opening weekend of the big game rifle season is just a small part of the season but if the initial reports from game checking stations hold up this could be a great hunting season. Certainly the heavy snow that pelted the high mountain peaks is a positive factor in hunting success on the opening weekend. That snow can also make hunting difficult when it comes to navigating some of those back country roads, but it also forces deer and elk to lower elevations where hunters have a better chance of finding them.

The big question is what will the weather do as we progress through the season? Certainly we’ve had other years when stormy opening weekends turned into mild and sunny Novembers, better for flyfishing than big game hunting. If nothing else, with the election campaign ending yesterday the weather should be cooling off. There will be a lot less hot air blowing around.

If you’re looking for some new hunting territory, you may be interested in knowing that the new Spotted Dog Wildlife Management Area near Deer Lodge is open to hunting this season. While there was some controversy as to whether the state should have acquired the property in the first place, it’s a done deal and the area is an important acquisition to the public lands open to hunting. More information is available at the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks website at http://fwp.mt.gov. You can download interim regulations for the area as well as a map.

While elk and deer are getting a lot of attention this time of year let’s not forget that there are a lot of other hunting opportunities right now.

I always figure that right now is a good time to go pheasant hunting. Now that we’re almost a month into the season a lot of the people who were out tramping pheasant country in early October are now up in the mountains looking for elk or might have even quit hunting for the year. This means that some landowners will be more receptive to a polite request for hunting permission. In addition, as hunting pressure eases pheasants may be returning to some of the high quality game habitat on public land areas.

Last month I spent several days in and around the Freezeout Lake Wildlife Management Area near Fairfield, Montana. There is some great pheasant habitat in areas of the complex, with brushy shelterbelts, food plots and about as much grassland as you care to walk. The birds get pushed hard in the first few weeks of the season, but things get better.

Mountain grouse kind of get forgotten as we get into the late autumn, but right now is a prime time for hunting ruffed grouse. In Midwest and eastern states ruffed grouse get a lot of hunting attention. Here in Montana hunters often ignore these wonderful game birds. Granted, it isn’t always easy hunting, climbing up and down mountain foothills and wandering the aspen thickets. With leaves off the trees, however, it’s slightly easier to find the birds and to follow their flights through the forest.

If you’re out in search of upland birds, however, don’t forget to wear blaze orange clothing. It’s just about the most important thing you can do to stay safe.

The waterfowl season has been open for a month but I always figure the best hunting is yet to come as some of these winter weather systems sweep across the western Canadian provinces and the northern prairies of Montana. Each storm means fresh flights of ducks and geese heading for southwestern Montana.

As usual, the biggest problem is finding time to do it all. Good luck!

I Say Vote 'No" on I-161

2010-10-27T19:16:00.000-07:00

The cock pheasant flushed from the edge of a patch of cattails and took to the air. I swung my shotgun along the pheasant’s flight path and pulled the trigger. The pheasant kept on flying for parts unknown.

I apologized to Flicka, my Labrador retriever. She’d been working the cover and finding the birds. She figures I should do my job and give her a pheasant to retrieve. Sometimes it works that way. This time I fell down on the job. Fortunately, Flicka is forgiving—as long as we’re looking for more birds she’s willing to overlook my lapses.

We were hunting on a farm along the Rocky Mountain Front. It’s a place I’ve hunted many tines and I treasure the memories I’ve stored up from many walks across the fields, as well as the three different Labs who have shared these walks. Also treasured are lively discussions over the kitchen table with the elderly couple that made their home on the farm for so many years. They’re gone now, too, but the bond of friendship continues with their adult children who continue to reside there.

Like many good hunting properties around Montana, the hunting isn’t free, though in this case the price of hunting is some good conversation.

I treasure this and some other farms and ranches where I have hunted over the years. At a time when many hunters are struggling to find a place to hunt it’s good to know there are places where I’m welcome to hunt. In fact, they often call to find out when I’m coming.

Nevertheless I still mourn the loss of some other farms and ranches where I used to hunt. One of those, a farm along the Yellowstone River in eastern Montana, was a pheasant paradise. It was often tough hunting because of impenetrable brush and thorns in spots, but it seldom failed to produce pheasants.

Several years ago the owners elected to start charging their hunters a trespass fee. That’s when I stopped going there. Before taking that step they also considered leasing the hunting rights to a local outfitter, but they ultimately decided to charge a trespass fee so as to maintain direct control of the hunting.

Losing the privilege of hunting on that farm still hurts though I don’t blame them for making changes in their policies. Making a living on a farm or ranch is a tough proposition, what with the high costs of production and a razor thin profit margin. If there has been a lot of turnover in farm and ranch ownership the last couple decades, the cold, harsh realities of agricultural economics are usually at the root of change. It’s no wonder many operators have resorted to charging trespass fees or leasing hunting rights.

That’s also at the heart of an initiative on the Montana ballot this election season. Initiative No 161 (I-161) is one of the few initiatives to pass the hurdles to get on the ballot. Two weeks ago, Rick Foote, the editor of the Weekly, wrote a detailed analysis of the measure and its pros and cons. I won’t go into that detail other than to briefly summarize the provisions of the measure. In short, I-161 would end a program of outfitter-sponsored licenses for elk and deer. Under this program non-residents pay a premium price for a big game hunting license when they book a hunt with a Montana outfitter

If the measure passes, all non-residents wanting to hunt in Montana would have to enter the general drawing for elk or deer license and pay higher fees, as well.

Backers of the measure assert that abolition of the outfitter-sponsored license will reverse that trend of landowners leasing hunting rights to outfitters and, thus, improve hunting opportunities for Montana residents.

Personally, I’m not convinced that I-161’s backers have made their case. I doubt that this measure, if passed, would roll things back to those good old days. As far as I’m concerned it’s agricultural economics that forces farmers and ranchers to seek additional revenue by leasing hunting rights and I-161 doesn’t change that.

I’m voting no.

Montana's Big Game Season Begins

2010-10-20T19:19:00.000-07:00

For Montana hunters the big day is just about here. If we’ve been out there we probably have a few grouse in the freezer and these last couple weeks have been chasing waterfowl, pheasants and antelope. A lot of hunters have been taking advantage of the archery season.

Yet, that’s all a warm-up. On this Saturday, October 23, the 2010 general elk and deer season begins at sunrise and runs through Sunday, November 28, the Sunday after Thanksgiving Day. For many Montanans, this is the hunting season, or at least the only season that really counts.

And that season beginning date of Saturday, October 23, is not a typographical error. That’s right, the big game hunting seasons now open on Saturday, at the beginning of the weekend.

I don’t know how far back that traditional Sunday opening day goes back. The Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks website simply notes it as “recent memory.” My Montana hunting memory goes back 40 years when the big game general season opened at sunrise on a Sunday morning and the pheasant season would open at noon. It was a long-held tradition, though it always struck me as a little crazy, in that the combination of deer and pheasant hunters all out at the same time was almost a guarantee for hunting accidents, or so it seemed.

Certainly, a segment of the hunting public cheering this change will be many clergymen who, over the years, have looked over their congregation on opening day Sunday mornings and noted all the absentees—while also feeling a little jealous because they couldn’t go hunting until they’d preached sermons and prayed their last prayer. This year they can go out on opening day with everybody else and if they’re lucky they can conduct Sunday services while their deer or elk is cooling, waiting to be turned into steaks and roasts.

While we’re on the topic of big game hunting, FWP reminds hunters to follow common sense rules if they use an Off Highway Vehicle when hunting. For example, whether you’re hunting Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management or State wildlife management areas the rule is the same when it comes to using an ATV or other OHV. It’s unlawful to drive the vehicle off designated public roads or trails. If you’re hunting on private land, don’t drive off-trail unless the landowner has already given you the okay. Unauthorized use of an ATV, spreading weeds as you go, is a good way to lose your welcome at a hunting spot.

The rules for off-trail use on public lands don’t have an exception for retrieving game. Yes, it can be a real challenge dragging out a big deer or elk, but it’s still illegal to drive off designated roads and trails.

You likely don’t have to look far to see where people have violated the rules. Last month I noted a 4-wheeler track heading up a mountain meadow. Last year I noted a spot where people had been running circles with ATVs next to their archery hunting camp. They left ruts and bare tracks where they’d gone. A year later those scars are still there. It takes a long time for Nature to heal.

Don’t forget that it’s necessary to have permission to hunt on private land in Montana. This permission may be granted in person or by phone, or by posting of land as open to hunting. There are nine million acres of private land open to public hunting through the Block Management program. Don’t forget to follow the rules of getting permission slips, either through personal contact or at a designated sign-in box. If you haven’t followed the rules you don’t have permission.

Above all, be sure to wear hunter orange clothing during the big game season. When the countryside is full of hunters you want to be visible.

While there are always caveats about responsible hunting, let’s remember what a great time of year this is. People from all over the world envy us when it comes to hunting opportunities. Be safe, be legal, and have a great hunt!

Puffballs - a Bonus to a Ruffed Grouse Outing

2010-10-18T08:10:00.000-07:00


A Woodland Prize - a softball-sized puffball

I thought it would be a deal she couldn’t refuse.

On a September weekend of camping, fishing and grouse hunting, I suggested to my wife, “Why don’t you come along with your mushroom field guide and pick mushrooms while Flicka and I look for grouse?”

After the soaking rains of early September followed by relatively mild and sunny weather there has been an explosion of mushrooms in the mountain woodlands. They’re growing on stumps or emerging from decomposing leaf litter in the aspen thickets. I’m pretty sure a lot of them are edible, though a guideline you ignore at your own risk is to never eat a wild mushroom unless you’re certain about its identity.

My wife has the advantage here. She studied mycology (the study of fungi) as part of her college biology major and understands the scientific lingo when a guidebook discusses the identifying characteristics of mushrooms.

While I though it was a great offer, she still passed it up. Go figure.

So I wander the forest, looking at thousands of mushrooms and wonder about them.

On the other hand there are some mushrooms that are not only edible; they’re easy to identify. In spring and early summer morel mushrooms are treasures when you can find them.

Puffballs are edible mushroom that are easy to find and identify. In fact I often have puffballs growing in my yard, though they’re usually too small—marble-sized—to make picking worth the effort. Usually when I pick them they’re golf ball sized.

On an early October hunt I could hardly believe it when I looked down and spotted a softball-sized puffball. “It’s going to be all mushy,” I told myself, not wanting to get too excited about my find. I gave it a squeeze and it was nice and firm, just the way a good mushroom should be. I added it to my game bag and continued on my way.

While that softball-sized puffball was a prize it’s far from a trophy. I’ve seen them as large as a basketball and they get bigger than that. The trick is getting a large puffball that’s still fit to eat. According to a couple internet sources, when the puffball flesh is soft or looks yellowish or green, it’s no longer edible. In its final phase the puffball flesh dries and if you step on it a puff of powder comes out. Each of those little grains of powder is a spore capable of starting a new puffball. The number of spores in a giant puffball can be trillions. That’s a lot.

Perhaps if I left that puffball where it was, next year the whole hillside might have been covered with puffballs. We’ll never know because after bringing it home we sliced it and fried it in butter. That mushroom is gone.

While the puffball was a treat, it was just a bonus to the outing. Ruffed grouse were the goal of the trip and when Flicka and I finished our hike up and down the hills we had flushed several grouse and gotten two of them.

After we finished the hunt I drove on to the Big Hole River. After a late lunch in the shade of a golden cottonwood tree I rigged up a flyrod and waded up the river. It was mid-afternoon and the main dry fly action of the day was over. One trout came up and looked at my fly and turned away.

A couple minutes later another trout wasn’t so fussy and took the fly. This trout wasn’t a bit happy about being fooled into taking an artificial bug but after a few minutes I was able to bring it to hand long enough to unhook it and send it back to get a little bigger, though to tell the truth a 20-inch brown trout is just fine as it is.

We’d had a real western Montana day. A pleasant walk through the aspens on a golden October day, two ruffed grouse, a giant puffball and a 20-inch brown trout.

I love living here.

Montana Pheasant and Antelope Seasons Open

2010-10-06T19:50:00.000-07:00

A memory from the 2009 pheasant season.

The autumn season is progressing rapidly. While we had warm, sunny weather at the end of September, days keep getting shorter.

A sure sign of changing seasons is the colorful autumn foliage, both in cities and the mountains and river bottoms.

Quaking aspens, an icon of autumn in the Rocky Mountains, reached their peak last week, though there are still isolated clumps of aspens still holding on to their leaves, and some that are probably just changing colors. Aspens spread by cloning themselves and there’s no better indication of that than to look at a hillside this time of year and to see how clumps of aspen trees change colors. At any given time we might see aspens that are a bright yellow or orange, while other clumps of trees have shed their leaves and others are still green. Those clumps of aspens are made up of a number of trees but they’re still basically one big organism. They’re pretty amazing trees.

If you’re thinking of a fall color tour I’d do it this weekend as the colors are probably past their peak in the mountains, while the cottonwood groves in the river areas are just approaching their peak.

Either way, hopefully we’ll avoid that deep freeze cold front that robbed us of our fall colors last year when trees all over Montana froze their leaves before really changing color.

This weekend is a big weekend for Montana hunters.

The pheasant season opens on Saturday, October 9. Some people get excited about elk and deer. It’s pheasants that pop up in my dreams this time of the fall. There’s something about the sight of a pheasant exploding from a patch of brush that never fails to stir my senses, and I hope it never does.

While the pheasant isn’t native to North America, this import from China has certainly found a good home here in America’s heartland. They’re a bird at home in cornfields, wheat and barley stubble, wetlands, river bottoms and anywhere else they can find food and shelter.

Pheasant hunting is always a challenge. Pheasants may have no more brains than a barnyard chicken, but these birds develop an acute sense for what’s going on in their neighborhood. Pheasants are seldom caught by surprise. It’s figuring out what they are going to do that makes them so fascinating. Some birds are expert at hiding, hoping hunters and other predators will walk by without finding them. Then other birds will simply bug out, either on foot or on wing, as soon as they sense unwelcome company.

A good bird dog with a trained sense of smell is an invaluable partner when it comes to productive pheasant hunting. A good dog will find where birds are hiding and, almost more importantly, will find where a pheasant fell after a successful shot. A rooster pheasant is a gaudy, bright colored bird but it’s amazing how it can disappear into a little clump of grass or weeds.

The pheasant season runs through New Year’s Day, so there will be many opportunities in the next couple months to chase these wonderful birds.

The Montana pronghorn antelope season also opens on October 9 and runs through November 14.

According to Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, Montana is second only to Wyoming in pronghorn populations, so if you needed another reason to be happy about living in Montana, there you are.

While pronghorn populations are thriving in most of southwestern Montana, hunters heading for southeast Montana, usually a mecca for pronghorns, may have a little more challenge this year. Pronghorn populations are down after tough winters the last couple years. In the Miles City area, FWP estimates populations are down 37 percent from a couple years ago.

Whether you’re looking for pheasants or pronghorn this weekend, keep in mind that it is always necessary to have permission to hunt private land in Montana. On the other hand, there are some 9 million acres of land open to hunters through the Block Management Program. Do your homework and you may find some hunting treasures in the Treasure State.

An Appointment with Sharptails

2010-09-30T13:36:00.000-07:00


Taking Time to Smell the Wildflowers

"Sorry. I have an appointment with some sharptails at Loma.”

I had been in Havre covering the annual convention of the Montana Tavern Association and was having breakfast with Paul Tash of Butte, publisher of the association’s publication, Tavern Times. Though I had completed my last interviews and taken my last photo, Paul jokingly suggested I could stay for just one more meeting.

No. I had that other appointment, though I wondered whether the grouse had gotten the memo.

My destination for my hunt was a tract of public land on a high prairie ridge separating the Marias and Teton Rivers on one side and the Missouri River on the other. It’s an area rich in history. In June 1805 the Lewis & Clark expedition paused to stop and figure out which stream was the true Missouri.

Off in the distance is a kiosk on top of a hill marking the point where Meriwether Lewis stopped, after an eight-mile walk before breakfast, to look over the countryside and decide which way to go, finally deciding on the south fork.

Over succeeding years the area had an early trading post, one of the first railroad lines and an infamous battle in 1870 in which American soldiers attacked a band of Piegans huddled in winter camp along the Marias. 173 Indians, mostly women and children, were killed in the pre-dawn attack still remembered as the Marias Massacre.

Over the years, countless steamboats, keelboats and smaller craft passed through the area to and from Fort Benton, head of navigation on the Missouri. These days it’s a popular launching area for floating the Missouri River.

For several years we had taken annual trips here to hunt sharp-tailed grouse. The last time was in September 2001, just a few days after the terrorist attacks on the 11th. Looking back in my journals I’m reminded that the only grouse I saw were a few that flushed wild. I never fired a shot and the most memorable part of the trip was the silence in the skies, with all civilian air travel suspended.

That was nine years and one dog ago, though the difficult part of this day’s hunt was that Flicka, my faithful Labrador retriever, was home in Butte. If there were sharptails on this prairie, would I find them without the help of a dog’s nose?

The only guarantee, when you set off on a walk across the prairie, is that you’ll have a nice long walk and plenty of time to think, especially when not keeping track of a bird dog.

I’m struck by the abundant wildflowers, particularly black-eyed Susans, blooming in the grassland. At a series of long, brushy draws connecting the benchland prairie with the river bottoms, mule deer pop out of their beds in the brush patches. The mulies, some five in all, look fat and sassy after a summer of easy living. One of the deer sports an impressive spread of antlers.

By now, my saunter across the grassland has taken about two hours and the only birds I’ve seen are meadowlarks. “Where are the grouse?” I wonder. I’d better do some more back and forth walking to cover some more of the grassland.

My question is answered when a covey of about 20 grouse flush from a low spot. I pick a bird from the covey and swing my gun on it and shoot. The bird drops, and to my surprise a second bird also drops. I’ve gotten what’s called a “Scotch double” on the flush. I’m so surprised that I forget to try to pick off another bird from the rapidly disappearing covey, missing an opportunity for a rare triple (with a double-barrel shotgun) on a covey rise.

Fortunately the downed birds fall in thin cover and I retrieve them without difficulty and it’s just a ten-minute walk back to where I started the hunt. Even with the heft of the birds in the back of my vest I have a little extra bounce in my steps.

It meant a long walk across the prairie, but we’d kept our appointment.

A Fun Afternoon of Trapshooting in Havre, Montana

2010-09-22T18:49:00.000-07:00

Last week I wrote about missing grouse in the opening weekend of the hunting season and that I would be doing some clay pigeon shooting to get my shooting eye back in training.

I was in Havre, Montana most of last week covering the annual convention of the Montana Tavern Association for Tavern Times, the monthly newspaper of the tavern association. The convention opens with a golf tournament and a shotgunning event. Last year we enjoyed a round of sporting clays at a facility at Polson. This year the shooting event was at the Havre Trap Club.

The Havre Trap Club has an active program, with regular registered shoots, shooting leagues and fun events., as well as some special events, such as the special shoot for the Tavern Association.

A guest shooter for the afternoon was Max Erickson, owner of Erickson Financial Services of Havre and a sponsor of the shooting event. Max is a Butte native, the son of Len and Mona Erickson.

Max demonstrates that when participating in shooting sports presents some challenges, there are ways to meet those challenges.

Max has complications from diabetes. He has some mobility issues, so he shoots from a chair, which is not particularly unusual in the trapshooting world. A more serious complication is a vision loss in his right eye. Actually, that’s a variation on a relatively common problem in shotgunning: a master eye that is at odds with the body. Many shotgunners are right-handed but have a left master eye, or have a cross-dominance problem, in other words.

There are different solutions to the cross-dominance problem. Some shooters simply close their left eye, or even put some translucent tape across the left lens of their glasses to force the right eye to take over.

The loss of vision in one eye complicates things, as closing the left eye won’t solve the problem. Max tried shooting left-handed but that didn’t prove to be satisfactory. A local gunsmith came up with a solution in the form of a secondary gun muzzle, about an inch long, attached to the left side of the end of his shotgun. This gives him a secondary reference on which his left eye can focus in tracking flying targets.

It’s not perfect, but as some members of the Havre Trap Club related he now normally misses around four targets in a 25-shot round of trap, whereas when he tried shooting left-handed, he’d hit about four targets. In the competitive world of trapshooting, that won’t win many trophies. On the other hand, for a recreational shooter it’s the difference between acute frustration and enjoyment.

On the topic of trapshooting, the Havre Trap Club went out of their way to create a fun program for the convention shooters. We shot a couple rounds of standard trap for loosening up as well as to help work up an appetite for lunch.

Later they came up with games to test shooting and reflexes. We lined up at the firing line and divided into groups of three. The first person would call for the target and shoot. If he missed the second person could shoot and if he missed the third person could shoot. It’s trickier than it sounds. If a person shot after the target had already been broken, or shot out of turn, he’d earn a disqualification point. It didn’t take long before most of the shooters became bystanders while Max Erickson and Ralph Ferraro, a Bozeman restaurateur, were the last ones shooting with Ferraro finally prevailing.

I’ll modestly mention that in a second heat your reporter ended up as the winner.

Still the main thing to the shooting event was to have fun and we succeeded in a big way. Another bonus is that we had a good refresher course in shotgunning and that should pay dividends in grouse and pheasant hunts this fall. During the afternoon we each went through about six boxes of shotgun shells and I’d bet most of us don’t go through that many shells in a full season of shooting.

The Art and Frustration of Shooting Flying

2010-09-16T18:25:00.000-07:00

Flicka and our first grouse of 2010

Standing New Year’s Resolution No. 3: Go shoot some clay pigeons before the next upland bird hunting season rolls around.

Alas, that resolution, along with those resolutions to go on a diet and become a better human being, is one that gets forgotten on January 2.

Then, when September rolls around and those first grouse flush, I’m reminded about that neglected resolution. The birds are in the air and instead of picking out a bird and focusing on it, I’m poking my shotgun in the general direction of the grouse and shooting.

Shooting at flying grouse, or clay pigeons for that matter, is a lot like playing tennis. One of Butte’s tennis aficionados occasionally reiterates her Three Rules of Tennis. 1. Keep your eye on the ball. 2. Keep your eye on the ball. 3. Keep your eye on that danged ball!

Ignoring those rules of tennis generally translates into taking an ineffective poke at the ball or what tennis commentators refer to as an “unforced error.” Baseball coaches give similar advice to both batters and fielders, and football coaches give that advice to pass receivers. Keep your eye on the ball.

The same goes for shooting. Keep your eye on the bird.

Fortunately, there’s nothing like missing some shots to reinforce the need to keep your eye on the bird. Things do get better.

On those first walks for grouse at the beginning of the Labor Day weekend there was mostly frustration.

First of all, on the mountain where Flicka, my Labrador retriever, were searching for blue grouse, there was evidently poor reproduction. Last year, hunting the same mountain, there were five separate areas where it seemed I could reliably find blue grouse. This year, just one of those spots, a long sagebrush ridge, had a covey of grouse. In any event, when Flicka finally had a chance to go on point, when the birds flushed I poked my gun in their general direction when I fired and, predictably, nothing fell.

Later that day we took a walk up a brushy creek bottom in search of ruffed grouse. A grouse flushed and I had what should have been an easy straightaway shot. Again, I poked in the general direction and nothing fell. Flicka, bless her heart, went over in the optimistic hope that there would be something for her to retrieve, but her hopes were again dashed.

A few minutes later four ruffed grouse flushed and I swung on the birds, but when I pulled the trigger nothing happened. I had neglected to flip the safety to the ‘fire’ position. That’s a pretty basic error in gun handling.

The next morning we returned to that sagebrush ridge. Flicka, bless her heart, picked up the scent of the grouse and several grouse flushed from a brush patch. I missed what should have been an easy shot at the first bird to get up. I quickly reloaded and a couple more birds took off. This time I concentrated on the grouse and kept swinging on it, even after I missed the first shot. With the second shot from my over/under shotgun, the bird dropped. Flicka made the retrieve and I happily put the first bird of the season in the back of my vest.

A few minutes later I had a shot at another grouse and dropped it with my first shot.

The morning’s hunt ended with a vest pocket holding two blue grouse and a handful of fired shotgun hulls. It was one of those mornings where it felt like déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra once famously said. When I got into my first bunches of birds last year I did a lot of shooting before we actually put some birds in the freezer.

I take comfort in knowing that things get better after getting those misses out of the system. That shotgun starts feeling like an old friend again and shooting at flying targets, whether feathers or clay, gets to be fun.

Nevertheless, I did shoot some clay pigeons this week. Better late than never.

Trico Time in Montana

2010-09-08T19:57:00.000-07:00

My Lab Flicka sitting on a rock in the middle of the river keeping an eye on the action

It’s mid-morning and the pool of water below the riffle looks calm. It looks calm but looks can be deceiving. The surface of the water is calm but the mayhem is about to start.

While I don’t see any fish rising I tie on a small dry fly and cast it out on the water. There’s a dimple on the water’s surface and I tighten the line; a nice fish is on the other end and it’s not at all happy about that little hook in the corner of its jaw. After a short but splashy fight I draw the fish up close so I can unhook it and send it back to the water.

For the last couple weeks I’ve been spending time on the Big Hole River following the trico hatch, that late summer blizzard of tiny mayflies that get the trout in a brief feeding frenzy just about every morning.

The trico, short for Ttrichorythodes, is tiny but prolific. As is the case with most aquatic insects, that last stage of life as an adult flying insect is brief. The bug emerges from the water in the early morning hours and in the next few hours will change from a dun to a spinner, breed in mid-air in a swarm of many thousands of bugs and then return to the water to lay eggs and die. At that point its mission in life is complete. It became an adult flying insect and procreated.

The insects feed the fish in all its life forms but it’s that final stage, the spinner fall, which triggers the feeding frenzy, though there was a time when fly anglers occasionally looked at the trico hatch as the “white curse” because they really hadn’t come to an understanding of this tiny bug and how to fish for trout during the trico season.

The sheer numbers of flying insects in the air is more than most of us can imagine. Swarms of tricos fly over the river in a visible cloud. Gusts of wind will scatter the swarms and it’s almost like a snowstorm.

On this particular morning at 10:30 the mating swarms hadn’t shown up yet but the fish were waiting and eager to nibble on anything small and dry. While I unhooked that first fish I could see some tricos in the air and at the same time I could see the rings on the water’s surface where fish were sipping in the little bits of protein. As they got into it there were rises all over the pool, with splashy rises becoming common as the trout got caught up in the moment.

On that last weekend in August I fished the same pool on two successive mornings and on the first morning I caught mostly rainbow trout. The second morning I caught mostly brown trout. Of course it’s hard to fish the trico spinner fall without catching whitefish. Whitefish really seem to love sipping in those tricos and sometimes it’ll seem as if there are nothing but whitefish in the river. On an earlier weekend I fished another stretch of the Big Hole and whitefish, along with a few yearling grayling, furnished almost all of the action.

On some waters trout are notoriously selective about taking flies that are a close match to the real thing. That means flies that seem almost microscopic, especially for those of us well advanced into the bifocal generation. Personally, I find tying flies on #24 hooks more trouble than it’s worth, and trying to thread the end of my tippet into the eye of the hook almost impossible.

On the Big Hole, at least, I can usually get away with using larger flies, if you call a fly on a #18 hook large. On this particular morning I started with a standard #18 Adams. After several fish the fly looked pretty tattered but as long as it floated it caught fish.

Elk and upland birds are taking over the spotlight right now, but don’t forget the trout. There’s a lot of fun going on.

Montana's Hunting Outlook for 2010

2010-09-01T19:48:00.000-07:00

The aspens in Montana's mountain country will be turning golden in a few weeks.

The upland bird hunting seasons opened today at sunrise and the archery deer and elk season will open on Saturday. As we plan early hunting outings, what are the prospects for success?

According to a phone interview with Rick Northrup, upland bird coordinator for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks in Helena, the overall prospects for bird populations are good for most upland game birds, with some localized exceptions.

Northrup explained that the projections of bird populations are based on a combination of looking at 2009 hunter harvest statistics, adding in data for weather conditions during late spring and early summer when birds are trying to lay and hatch eggs and get the chicks through their first couple weeks. Finally, they add in about 30 years of weather data, hunter harvest data and try to correlate all those statistics into projections for brood survival. He sums up, “We’re trying to be scientific.”

In Region 3, which includes much of southwest Montana, FWP predicts bird populations to be similar to 2009 with the exception of the southern portions of Beaverhead, Madison and Gallatin Counties, which had severe cold and precipitation conditions during the crucial nesting period. Otherwise, hunters should find average bird populations among mountain grouse, sage grouse and Hungarian partridge. The pheasant season doesn’t open until October, but bird populations should be similar to 2009, when the pheasant harvest was slightly above average.

The northwest and northeast corners of Montana are exceptions to the generally optimistic outlook for relatively healthy bird populations. Northwest Montana had severe weather conditions this spring that affected nesting success.

Northeast Montana, a popular destination for pheasant hunters, had a severe winter in 2008-2009. Pheasant hunter success in 2009 was just 41 percent of average and sharp-tailed grouse success was 74 percent of average. The 2009-2010 winter and 2010 spring conditions were better than a year ago, but putting it in sports terminology, this is a rebuilding year.

Some areas of the Rocky Mountain Front had severe weather in late April 2009 that caused pheasant and partridge deaths, and lower fall populations. There should be some improvement in 2010 populations.

While FWP makes projections based on those complex factors, the best idea is to put on those boots and see what’s out there in the areas you like to hunt. That’s what I’m going to do.

In other hunting news, FWP has tentatively sent dates for the waterfowl seasons. In both the Central and Pacific Flyway areas of Montana, duck and goose hunting will begin on October 2. In addition there will be a combined Youth Waterfowl Season and Youth Pheasant Season on September 25 and 26. These special youth seasons are statewide and are to encourage younger hunters to get involved with hunting. Youth are classed as age 11 -15, legally licensed and accompanied by a non-hunting adult age 18 or older.

For archery hunters looking for early season elk, as well as rifle hunters looking ahead to October, Vanna Boccadori, a big game wildlife biologist at the FWP Butte office says, “It’s a good year for elk. We had spring rains and summer rains, the grass is belly-deep all over in our area.

“The calf counts are good, and last year’s spike bulls are raghorns this year. We had good recruitment among this class of elk.”

On the other hand, she reports mule deer numbers are down and “They are generally depressed around Montana—it’s one of those periodic cycles, and it’s reflected in a cut in numbers of B Tags available in Region 3.” She also reports pronghorn antelope numbers are up and for a little variety she mentions, “We’ve had a lot of black bear sightings. People who still have a bear tag left over after the spring season should take it along just in case. And, as usual, whitetail deer are thriving.”

The important thing, as always, is that the hunting seasons start this week. Whether you carry a shotgun or archery equipment, our time, the best time of the year in Montana, is finally here. But don’t forget your fishing rod.

Hunting Season Almost Here

2010-08-26T13:09:00.000-07:00

Flicka and a blue grouse from opening of 2009 hunting season.

So, what happened to summer? By the calendar, of course, it’s still summer and will be for almost another month.

By the calendar, however, September 1 is a week from today and by my standards that means fall, because that is when the hunting seasons begin.

Yes, one week from today the upland bird hunting seasons begin, and time to get the shotgun out of the cabinet and make those long walks across the prairies, sagebrush meadows and mountainsides of Montana in search of mountain grouse, sharp-tailed grouse, sage grouse and Hungarian partridge. The pheasant season will open October 9, and while some seasons close a bit earlier, it means we can go chase birds of one kind or another until New Year’s Day, and then, presumably, we’ll still have a couple weeks of late waterfowling before the 2010 general hunting seasons finally close.

The archery seasons for deer and elk open a week from Saturday, on September 4. The archery seasons, in general, run through October 17, and then the rifle season, which for many Montanans is hunting season, opens October 23, running through November 28. A newer wrinkle in the hunting season calendar is a youth deer season, which will be on October 21, and 22.

Of course, don’t rely on me when making your hunting plans for the coming months. Pick up a copy of the various hunting regulations at license vendors, sporting goods stores, or online at http://fwp.mt.gov.

This has always been a special time of the year for me and most people for whom hunting is ingrained as an important part of life, and it is especially true for those of us who keep a hunting dog twelve months out of the year in order to have a canine partner during the hunting season.

At our house, Flicka, our black Labrador retriever, is definitely getting anxious for those first hunting outings of the fall season. She demands and gets daily retrieving sessions, and she wades and swims the trout streams when we’re fishing, but that’s just fun and games and the things she does just to be with her people. Finding bird scent, pointing, flushing, and when things work right, retrieving is what she lives for. For that matter, the fun of following a dog across a mountain meadow and watching it do what it was born to do has come to be almost more important than the shooting and occasionally bringing home a bag of birds.

Flicka, for those of you who have followed her adventures since she was a pup, just celebrated her fifth birthday earlier this month. She’s in this all too short prime of life, the fleeting period between obnoxious puppyhood and the inevitable geriatric period of life. She’s the seasoned veteran of many hunts since her initiation to hunting in early winter of 2005. Yet, she has lots of energy and stamina for as many days of hunting as we can fit in during the season. The uncomfortable truth of the matter is that she likely has more reason to worry about my keeping up with her as we start another season.

While we make that mental adjustment to hunting season, we shouldn’t forget that there is still a lot of fishing to do. In fact many people would suggest that the best flyfishing of the year is in the fall. The best thing is that it’s perfectly feasible to have it all. We can hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon and evening. Cast and blast, as it’s called.

Chokecherries are now just about ripe. The tourist season is about over, so campgrounds will be all but deserted much of the time—at least after we get past the upcoming Labor Day weekend. Hunting seasons are about to start and fishing is good. The weather is great—at least some of the time at least. Yup, early fall is great. Get out there and enjoy it while it lasts.

The best time of the year is here.

Life Among the Ants

2010-08-24T14:11:00.000-07:00

Nature is full of drama—scenes of love and life played out daily in nature, such as sharp-tailed grouse doing a mating dance in springtime, or in autumn, mountain sheep rams banging heads together to sort out issues of dominance and submission.

Some scenes are best viewed with a macro lens.

Our son, Kevin, and his family, have been with us the last couple weeks, and Kevin and I have been fishing and floating on the Big Hole River. On our last outing, we pulled into shore at midday and we found a log in the shade of a cottonwood tree for a lunch break.

After finishing my sandwich I glanced down at my feet and saw one of those dramas playing out. A few flakes of bread crust dropped to the ground while we were eating and ants were gathering to make sure this precious windfall of food wouldn’t go to waste. In fact, it was the sight of a large flake of crust moving on the ground that first caught my eye. Large is a subjective description of course. In this case, a flake ¼” by 1/8” was large, considering the size of the ants which were a diminutive 1/16” long.

A group of ants, possibly around a dozen, were working on this shred of bread crust. There was plenty of help on the team to move the bounty, though they had to move the crust over an obstacle course of twigs, shreds of leaves and other debris. One ant showed off super strength. This one had a tiny flake of crust and the ant scurried across a little patch of bare ground, like a kindergartner carrying a sheet of Styrofoam across a playground.

Ants are one of our most widespread creatures and are native to every continent except Antarctica, and a few large islands, such as Greenland. Over 12,000 ant species have been classified, though entomologists estimate there are at least 22,000 species.

Ants communicate with each other by pheromones, chemical signals ants transmit, which other ants are able to pick up with their antennae. That is how all those ants knew to come scurrying to team up to salvage my breadcrumbs.

While the ants working at my feet were tiny and inoffensive, there are other ants capable of being far more than uninvited guests at a picnic. One afternoon while we were camping I was cooking dinner on the charcoal grill. While turning burgers, it suddenly felt like my legs were on fire. A swarm of fire ants were on my legs and actively attacking. Naturally, I jumped back and brushed the ants off my legs, though the toxins associated with their bites continued to irritate for hours.

If we look closely, we often see ants crawling along riverbanks, or on streamside rocks. Naturally, some of those ants fall in the water where fish often scarf them up when they get the opportunity. There are many flies designed to resemble ants and it’s a good idea to keep a few ant patterns in the fly box. Personally, I don’t often remember to use them until I conclude nothing else is working. Still, they have saved fishing days often enough to keep them in mind, especially if I’m fishing along a rocky shoreline, or downstream from an irrigation diversion structure.

Rarely, we may see swarms of flying ants along the river. Once, when fishing the Yellowstone River, I wasn’t catching anything while Kevin was constantly into fish. I asked him what kind of fly he was using, and he said he’d seen a swarm of flying ants while walking to the water and was using an ant pattern. A couple summers ago, while camping on the Big Hole I saw swarms of flying ants just about the time dinner was ready. If I’d been thinking, I would have told my wife to put dinner on hold while I checked for a feeding frenzy.

That, of course, might have led to another kind of drama. Guess I’ll just imagine what might have been and not push my luck.

The white spot in the above photo is that bread crust. If you look closely you may be able to see a couple ants.

The Big Blackfoot River

2010-08-12T07:22:00.000-07:00

The dry fly drifted along the quiet current. A splashy rise interrupted the drift, and the sound that’s music to most anglers’ ears—the screech of a reel as a good fish tears out line—sang out. The trout, most likely a westslope cutthroat trout, made several more runs before it slipped the hook. I couldn’t help laughing as I checked to make sure the trout didn’t break off the fly. It hadn’t, so I blew on the fly to help it dry and then resumed casting.

While catching fish was my immediate goal, another sound, a low-pitched roar, started to assert a different priority.

I was fishing the Blackfoot River, the river of Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It.” A number of times my wife and I have driven through the beautiful Blackfoot valley and we keep thinking that we really should spend a little time there and do some fishing and camping on the river. We finally looked at the calendar and decided that if we were going to do it, this weekend was the time.
We set up camp at a Fishing Access Site on the river’s banks, just inside the Missoula County line, and in the evening I caught several cutthroat trout as the sun dipped below the western mountains.

The next day we drove to a fishing access site upstream from our campground, where I launched my pontoon boat for a float trip back to camp. As it happened, I caught my best fish of the day, a 16-inch or so cutthroat trout, in a quiet pool just out from the launch site. While the fishing for the rest of the float wasn’t as exciting, it was still a pleasant float through a scenic area.

After getting back to camp, we did some touring, taking a trip to the top of the mountains and the old ghost town of Garnet, where we marveled at the hardy miners and their families who somehow followed the colors of gold dust all the way to the mountain tops and established a community up there, with some 1000 people living there with just 13 saloons to keep them happy, during the camp’s heyday. Garnet is now managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which is doing important work to keep the ghost town’s buildings stable and preventing their further decay into the mountainside.

Leaving the mountains, we checked out another takeout site on the Blackfoot, where the Clearwater River flows into the Blackfoot. My wife encouraged me to float that section the next day.

It’s just about the prettiest float you’d imagine, following the river through one scenic spot after another, and fishing likely looking spots.

But then there’s that stretch of water where there’s this roaring sound coming from downstream.

As I approached the end of the run I could see what was coming. The canyon narrows and squeezes the river from about 50 yards wide to about 10 yards wide, with the water plunging through a series of boulder-studded rapids. I pulled the boat over to the side to take a look at where I should go and it looked like straight down the middle was the route to follow. Reminding myself that a bunch of teenagers with inner tubes had gone ahead of me an hour earlier I headed into the current.

It’s a wild ride through the rapids, without much time to plan on a route through the whitewater. All those floats I’ve taken down the Big Hole were gently placid compared to this canyon. I could only guess at what these rapids are like during high water, though the sight of a green canoe, bent inside out and wrapped around one of those big boulders, was a pretty good hint at the power of the river early in the season.

It’s good to know that these little pontoon boats are stable and maneuverable in fast water, though I couldn’t help thinking as I approached the takeout site that at my advancing age it’s a shame to have wasted all that adrenalin on boating.

An Outdoors Agenda for August

2010-08-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

The summer season keeps racing along. It seems like it was just last week when we were covering the garden against late spring frosts, and now it’s August and it won’t be long before we’re covering our gardens against early fall frosts. Flathead cherries are now available, and it’s an addiction, I must confess. As a matter of fact, if you were to do a soil analysis in my backyard, you’d likely find that, within spitting distance of the back door, cherry pits are the primary component in the soil.

Going a little farther afield, or further up the mountain, to be specific, huckleberries, those wonderful berries that define the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, are ripe and ready for picking.

Closer to home, in buggy riparian areas along many of our rivers and streams, gooseberries and currants are ripe. If you can stand the mosquitoes and the thorns, you have the makings for good jams and jellies.

Chokecherries, our most abundant wild fruit in Montana, won’t be ripe in this area until the end of August or early September, so just be patient.

Something I eagerly anticipate in August fishing is the trico (for Trichorythodes) hatch. Tricos are tiny, little mayflies (they’re so small, they need two adjectives) that make their appearance on our rivers about this time of year. They’re so small it’s easy to ignore them, but the important thing is, the fish don’t. In fact, fish dote on tricos and feed actively on them.

When tricos are at their peak during mid to late August, you can often see clouds of these little bugs flying over the river as they get ready for their egg-laying flights to the water. When the bugs do hit the water trout and whitefish pull up to the table and start eating.

I often fish some slow-moving pools on the Big Hole during the trico hatch and it often seems whitefish are going crazy over tricos. And they are, but sometimes it’s browns and rainbows that are sipping in the tiny treats.

The trico hatch keeps happening well into September, so there will be lots of opportunities to get in on some of that great dry fly fishing. Just remember to think tiny and delicate. I usually use #18 or #20 hooks for tying imitations, and some go as small as a #24 hook. You may also want to put on a size 7X tippet at the end of your leader. Like I say, think tiny and delicate.

The trico hatch, or spinner fall, if you want to be technical, seems to happen around mid to late morning hours. It’s definitely not something you can set your watch by; all you can do is get out on the stream in the morning and hope to be there when it happens and the fish start feeding. If you don’t get out on the stream until afternoon, chances are you’ll miss the whole thing and you’ll be wondering why the fish aren’t’ biting.

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico now seems, finally, to be capped though it’s going to take a long time to clean up the environmental damage created by the catastrophe.

For better or worse, the oil spill mess has brought renewed attention to the endangered wetlands of the Gulf Coast.

In a partial response, the Department of Interior, in cooperation with Ducks Unlimited and sporting goods retailer Bass Pro Shops, is releasing a special Duck Stamp envelope, or cachet, to be sold to waterfowl hunters, birders, collectors and others to raise money to purchase Gulf Coast wetlands to be included in federal wildlife refuges.

The envelope, or cachet, as it’s called by stamp collectors, bears a silk rendering of a photograph of Florida’s St. Mark’s National Wildlife Refuge and the 2010 Duck Stamp, a painting of an American widgeon by Robert Beadle of Maryland.

The cachet and stamp sells for $25, or just $10 more than the Duck Stamp alone. It can be purchased at post offices, at Bass Pro Shops stores, on-line at www.duckstamp.com, or by phone at 1-800-852-4897.

Flyfishing in Mid-summer

2010-07-28T18:19:00.000-07:00

It’s high summer—that brief period of the year with dependably warm days, lots of sunshine and, for the most part, cool nights so we can get our homes cooled off before the heat of the next day.

It’s the time of the year when my garden finally does some serious growing, with tomatoes and chile pepper plants responding to warm temperatures after surviving through our normally cold June weather. Now it’s a race to actually produce some fruit before the frosts of September.

It’s a wonderful time for fishing on area streams and rivers. These last couple weekends have seen hordes of people enjoying mid-summer floating and fishing on the Big Hole, though I suspect the numbers of floaters will be declining as river levels keep dropping. This past weekend my pontoon boat was hitting bottom going through riffles and next time I will likely be dragging the boat.

As for catching fish, as pleasant as it is to sleep in on some of these cool mornings and to enjoy a leisurely morning, my advice to fellow anglers is to get with the program and get out on the river before the sun gets too high in the sky.

On my last few outings on the Big Hole, it seemed like the most productive time to be on the water was from around 9:30 to 11 a.m. There are lots of Pale Morning Dun mayflies getting fish appetites going. These mayflies, PMDs for short, are at the heart of mid-summer fishing action. Whether still in the nymph stage of life, or an emerging adult, or finally, an egg-laying insect in its last stage of life, these aquatic insects feed a lot of trout and keep fly tiers and flyshops happy and busy.

Of course, being on the water at the right time and with the right fly doesn’t mean you’ll catch fish. Trout are frustrating that way. They don’t always understand that they are supposed to agree with our thoughts of which are the right flies. All I can say is that if fish seem to be feeding but are refusing your flies, put on something different, probably a smaller imitation. It might also be time to tie on a fresh tippet, and possibly a lighter one, at the end of your leader.

You might occasionally try a different tactic. The long, drag-free float of a dry fly is the ideal we’re supposed to achieve. On my last outing, I was working a run and getting some long floats, but not getting many rises. On one of those drifts I let the fly reach the end of a drift and just as the fly was about to drag across the current I gave the rod a jerk, pulling the fly underwater. Just then, a brown trout hit the fly. That trout’s feeding station was evidently at the bottom of the run where it was picking off insects sinking beneath the water’s surface. It was the best trout of the morning.

While we enjoy these warm and sunny midsummer days, the earlier sunsets are a warning that the season is progressing. While floating the Big Hole I spotted a family of Canada geese. There were a dozen juvenile goslings, now about three fourths grown and developing adult plumage, and escorted by a parent goose. After watching me wading the shallows and fishing, the adult goose decided to give the kids a flying lesson. One by one, the juvenile geese started flapping and taking to the air. A few crash-landed on the runway, but got back up and successfully took to the air on a second try.

In short, while these late July days are hot and sunny, these summer days are numbered and the next season is coming. Whether we’re ready or not, five weeks from today is the first day of September, along with new and renewed opportunities in the outdoors.

Still, let’s not rush the season. For now we’ll concentrate on putting on sunscreen and bug spray and trying to catch fish on little dry flies and celebrating being out there.

Southwest Montana - Beautiful but Buggy

2010-07-22T12:28:00.001-07:00

It’s the beauty of the Big Hole that hits you first, this time of year. With late snows and June rains, the whole area is lush and green. Stream banks and riparian areas are a riot of colors: vivid reds, yellows, and purples, of wildflowers in bloom. The mountain peaks are still snow-capped, to better set off the green of the valleys.

If you’re looking for scenery, right now is a perfect time for a day outing along the Big Hole Valley. Be sure to get off on some mountain road to better see the wildflowers.

Still, if you leave your automobile, whether to take a walk or to wet a line in the river, don’t forget the insect repellant. The beauty of the Big Hole may strike you first, but the second thing will be the mosquitoes.

The Big Hole is a perennial producer of major mosquito hatches. That’s nothing new. Those irrigated hay meadows along the river are prime producers of mosquitoes. This year, however, we have a bumper crop of those annoying insects. It’s no surprise. When all those rains came in June there was standing water everywhere, and each puddle of water is a potential mosquito hatchery, and all it takes is a few days of warm weather for mosquito larvae to transform themselves into an adult, winged insect.

Naturally, it’s the female of the species that’s the troublemaker. Male mosquitoes are mild-mannered, inoffensive vegetarians, happy to sniff and sip from the wildflowers. Those female mosquitoes are the vicious bloodsuckers that torment all warm-blooded animals.

“Just ignore them,” is the advice a long-time reader once passed along. He recalled a long ago summer job when, then just a teenager, he worked at a northern Minnesota fishing camp and got that advice from his mentor, a weathered old Finlander. Probably not bad advice—if you’re able to stand it. My mosquito tolerance is fairly well developed from years of walking through boggy river bottoms in search of trout, or giving one of my Labrador retrievers some retrieving work in a wetland. Nevertheless, there is a limit to tolerance.

There are, of course, bug repellants, and over the last 40 years, or so, DEET has been the chemical component in the more popular repellants. According to an on-line article on WebMD, repellants with 23.8 percent DEET are effective for about five hours. Still, I remember our friend, Doug, who took my friend, Charley, and I under his wing in Michigan last year. He looked at our can of repellant with 25 percent DEET and chortled, “Haw, haw, haw. our mosquitoes think that’s candy!”

There are other repellants as well, with some of the old ones based on citronella, cedar, and peppermint, to name a few. Some people rely on Avon Skin So Soft. A few years ago at a conference I got some samples of a geranium-based repellant. It does work, though its effectiveness, in my mind, is measured in minutes rather than hours.

In the last few years some clothing companies have come out with apparel products that repel insects, though Santa Claus hasn’t brought any yet, so I can’t back up any claims.

Of course, another irritating part (pun intended) of the mosquito problem is that some people seem to attract skeeters more than others. According to researchers, genetics account for 85 percent of susceptibility to mosquitoes. Also, people with high concentrations of steroids or cholesterol on their skin surface, and people who produce excess amounts of certain acids, such as uric acid attract mosquitoes, apparently because these substances trigger mosquitoes’ sense of smell.

People giving off large amounts of carbon dioxide also attract mosquitoes, so if you’ve been charging through the woods to get away from them, when you stop to catch your breath you’ve become a prime target.

If the mosquitoes are so bad right now, why don’t we just stay home? I’m glad you asked. In short, fishing right now is pretty darned good. Besides, ranchers are currently cutting hay, which means if we can survive a little longer, things will get better.

So, go fish.

Glacier National Park at 100

2010-07-14T20:04:00.000-07:00

“He’s been to Glacier, but he still hasn’t seen it,” has been my wife’s standing joke about my first visit to Glacier National Park.

After 25 years, that joke is getting old.

We had a houseguest from the east coast over the 4th of July weekend, who suggested the trip to Glacier, so on July 4 we headed north.

It’s appropriate, this year, to visit America’s tenth national park and to celebrate its centennial. President William Howard Taft signed the law creating Glacier National Park on May 11, 1910. George Bird Grinnell, the editor of Forest & Stream magazine (predecessor to Field & Stream magazine) led a long campaign to make the area he dubbed, “The crown of the continent,” a national park.

The creation of the park was not without controversy. First, the creation effectively took the area of the park east of the continental divide from the Blackfeet Indian nation, and the area west of the divide from the Salish-Kootenai people. The creation of the park also meant that the area was no longer open to timber and mining development. While it may seem strange from the perspective of a century, the creation of the park was a bitter pill to swallow for many residents of the area.

On the other hand, the park became a major income generator for the Great Northern Railway. The company, through its Glacier National Park Company subsidiary, built hotels and chalets in the park to accommodate visitors. As the U.S. fell in love with the automobile, the park built the Going to the Sun Road, the only road that bisects the park, and since its completion in 1932, has been acclaimed as a great engineering achievement.

The Going to the Sun Road and the road’s summit at Logan Pass at 6646 feet has been at the center of my wife’s Glacier jokes. In that previous visit, when we were on an August vacation trip, storms swept across northern Montana.

We camped at Hungry Horse reservoir and drove to Browning to drive north to the St. Mary’s entrance. As we started gaining elevation we didn’t get far before clouds closed in. At Logan Pass there was about two feet of new snow on the ground and almost zero visibility until we were at the bottom of the mountain along the McDonald River. That trip, again, gave my wife joke material for 25 years.

So, would this trip be better? At an overnight stay at St. Mary’s, storm clouds gathered over the mountains and heavy rain fell during the night. As clouds moved on we saw a dusting of snow on top of the peaks. We also overheard other visitors, unprepared for mountain weather, muttering, “And this is supposed to be summer?

This time, however, the sun came out and while there were intermittent rain showers, we had bright sunshine for several short hikes to see waterfalls and scenic vistas. The lower elevations were full of wildflowers in full bloom.

Logan Pass, however, still keeps its secrets. Dense clouds hovered over the crest of Going to the Sun road with visibility barely more than a car’s length. At the Logan Pass visitor center, snowdrifts towered over the walkways—a strong indicator of the amount of work it takes to open the interior of the park every summer. Some visitors, however, took advantage of the snowfields, trekking up the walkways carrying skis for a July ski outing.

While there are still giant snowdrifts in early July, the other side of the story is that this centennial year is a good time to visit Glacier National Park, and to be able to catch glimpses of the few glaciers still surviving. In the mid-1800s, when the first white visitors came to the area, there were an estimated 150 active glaciers, a number that declined to about 100 when the park was formed. In this centennial year there are just 20 glaciers left and projections are that they will disappear in the next ten years.

Just remember, when you’re packing for a trip, don’t forget the polar fleece vests and windbreakers. Even though glaciers are melting, winter is never far away on the Crown of the Continent.

Supreme Court Rules on Second Amendment

2010-07-07T18:34:00.000-07:00

“I’m glad the Supreme Court ruled to let us keep our guns.”

That was a comment from a friend and online reader of this column, regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the case McDonald v. Chicago.

I responded to him that I didn’t think the ruling had much to do with us and our shotguns.

Nevertheless, some people are cheering the Supreme Court decision, while others are trying to find some reason to think that there may still be some room for some common sense restrictions on firearms, particularly handguns.

The Chicago case is a follow-up to an earlier case, District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Court ruled, in 2008, that the Second Amendment secures for individuals the right to keep and bear arms, including handguns, for the purpose of self-defense. The ruling nullified D.C. laws that made possession of unregistered firearms a crime, and made registration of handguns illegal. A key point in that case is that the District of Columbia is under Federal jurisdiction.

The day after the Heller decision, petitioners, including one Otis McDonald, filed suit in Federal court challenging Chicago (and the suburb of Oak Park) handgun laws similar to the D.C. laws struck down in the Heller decision. The key contention in the suit is that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms should apply to states through the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.

The Federal District Court (Northern District of Illinois) and Appeals Court ruled against McDonald on the basis that in previous cases the Supreme Court had not incorporated the Second Amendment against the states, and the question of whether the 14th Amendment applied was an issue that could be decided only by the Supreme Court.

The crux of the McDonald case revolves around balances of state and federal power and whether state and local governments can enact laws to address crime problems in large urban areas.

The Court ruled, last week, in an opinion by Justice Alito, that the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause incorporates the Second Amendment rights recognized in the Heller case. Justice Thomas wrote a separate opinion coming to the same conclusion under another provision of the 14th Amendment.

While the Court’s decision affirmed the Second Amendment’s right for individuals to keep and bear arms, the decision did not directly strike down the Chicago laws. Instead, it remanded the case back to the Seventh Circuit to resolve conflicts between certain Chicago gun restrictions and the Second Amendment.

While the McDonald decision affirmed individual Second Amendment rights, it did little to resolve issues as to what local jurisdictions can do to address the problems of gun violence. The opinion affirmed that certain firearms restrictions mentioned in the Heller case, such as those prohibiting possession of firearms by felons or mentally ill persons, or laws forbidding carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms, are all permissible.

Further, the Chicago Tribune reported that the City of Chicago’s top attorney, Mara Georges, believes that the McDonald ruling doesn’t mean that the City can’t restrict the number of handguns kept in the home, or keep a current ban on firearms dealers within Chicago’s city limits. The City plans to draft new regulations to require registration of handguns, plus require gun owners to undergo training and submit to a criminal background check and obtain liability insurance.

Andrew Cohen, a legal analyst for Politics Daily, comments, “The ruling all but assures a great deal of litigation over the scope of the McDonald ruling. We will now see a wave of lawsuits by gun rights advocates seeking to invalidate gun control measures across the country…At the same time, state lawmakers …are likely to struggle” over questions of whether restrictions fall under the scope of the Second Amendment or longstanding regulatory measures that Justice Alito expressly endorsed.

In summary, the court decisions did, in fact, affirm individual rights to keep and bear arms, but it still allows state and local governments to put in some regulations.

The bottom line is that we will continue to argue and litigate.

2010-07-07T18:30:00.001-07:00

BP Oil Spill - the Montana Connection

2010-07-01T12:56:00.000-07:00

While traveling across Montana this June, a common sight was of Montana rivers rushing towards the Missouri River, and on to the Gulf of Mexico. With the heavy rains of June, these rivers have been carrying a big load of sediment.

At the same time, coastal Louisiana, an area much in the news these days, keeps shrinking. Every 38 minutes an area the size of a football field disappears, washed away by waves and tides of the Gulf of Mexico.

And, at the same time, a million gallons of crude oil surges out of that BP deep-water oil well every day, the ongoing disaster story that dominates the news media.

Now, let’s connect the dots.

At one time, the sediment from the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin Rivers here in southwest Montana, along with the Marias, Milk, Yellowstone, Musselshell, Judith, Tongue and Powder Rivers, to name just a few, emptied into the Missouri River, starting a long journey to the Gulf of Mexico. Naturally, much of that sediment settled out along the way, forming sand bars, islands, replenishing riparian areas, but eventually washing downstream to the Mississippi River system and finally settling out on the coast of Louisiana, forming islands and wetlands.

That sediment doesn’t go far anymore. Most sediment on the main stem of the Missouri settles out in the string of dams on the upper Missouri. The sediment from the Yellowstone system settles out as the river merges with the Missouri at the Montana/North Dakota border and the next great impoundment, Lake Sakakawea.

Now, consider all the rivers of America’s heartland that used to dump sediment loads into the Mississippi which are now dammed and otherwise harnessed in the name of progress, whether that means hydroelectric generation, flood control, or irrigation.

The sediment that does get carried to the Mississippi gets rushed along by levees, dikes, and shipping channels. Much of that sediment, which previously spread out in a great river delta, forming and replenishing islands and wetlands, now ends up in deep water areas of the Gulf of Mexico.

As a result of all that progress, the coastal wetlands of Louisiana have lost much of their vitality and are prone to erosion, a situation dramatically demonstrated several years ago when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita battered the coast, and some islands and whole communities were literally washed away.

None of this is new. It’s a process that has been going on since the 1930s. It’s estimated that 2,300 square miles of coastal Louisiana marshlands have disappeared since then.

And now we have the BP oil well disaster.

If that oil well were centered in Butte, the contaminated area would extend west to the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. To the south, it would extend to near Idaho Falls. To the north and east the spill would cover Great Falls, Lewistown, Bozeman and Big Timber.

From daily news reports, it seems increasingly clear that the BP corporate culture isn’t necessarily safety first. In addition, other observers have noted that other countries with offshore oil resources have more stringent environmental protections, including requiring that well drillers put down a relief well at the same time they establish a primary oil well. BP is currently trying to put a relief well in place, but it likely won’t be complete until August. Meanwhile, the well keeps gushing out a million gallons of oil a day, only a small part of which is recovered.

The loss of coastal wetlands and barrier islands means more oil is headed for the mainland, and oil damage to existing wetlands further weakens the already fragile system.

It’s only going to get worse. Tony Dolle, the Communications Director for Ducks Unlimited, who has spent most of the last two months in Louisiana as part of a DU task force, asks, “How are we going to tell 13 million ducks and geese they’d be better off not coming to Louisiana this winter?”

Like an old Cecil B. DeMille movie epic, the Gulf oil disaster has a cast of thousands and is years in the making.

On the web: www.ifitwasmyhome.com, www.du.org, www.vanishingparadise.org.

The Kid's a Natural

2010-06-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

The kid’s a natural. No doubt about it.

That kid is a great-nephew, one of my brother’s grandchildren. Young Nicholas Vang doesn’t have a lot of mileage on him, but he has talent and inclination for the great outdoors, and with his uncle Dan showing him the way, I see a lot of great outings in his future. This spring, Dan called in a wild turkey gobbler for Nicholas, and now he’s taking him fishing at every opportunity.

In April I wrote about the first Earth Day and the landmark environmental legislation that followed, such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. American waters responded to cleanup and rivers and streams that were all but dead when I was a kid now run clear and nurture abundant populations of game fish. The Zumbro River, which runs through my hometown of Zumbrota, Minnesota, is definitely one of them.

My nephew, Dan Vang, lives on the banks of the Zumbro River, just a mile out of town, and just down the hill from where one of my uncles (this story, it seems, is all about uncles and nephews) lived most of his life. Dan is an outdoors enthusiast, and his home is filled with antlers, mounted deer heads, and sporting art from a lot of ducks and pheasants banquets. There’s a pheasant pen in the back yard and then there’s Gus, Dan’s big yellow Labrador retriever.

As for the river, there are not only smallmouth bass in the stream; there are trout and even muskies. I looked forward to fishing the Zumbro until heavy rains turned the stream high and muddy—just like our Montana streams are right now. When Dan and Nicholas came to pick me up, he suggested we put a canoe into a tailwater, a stretch of the river downstream from a hydro dam.

It was raining when we launched the canoe into the river, but the water was crystal clear and running swiftly over gravelly riffles. Dan and Nicholas were casting lures with spinning rods while I used a flyrod.

Smallmouth bass are notorious for liking warm, sunny weather for working up a good appetite, and this definitely wasn’t a great day, but it didn’t take long before Nicholas called out, “I’ve got one!” He held up a juvenile smallmouth that flipped off the hook before I could take a picture.

Drifting a streamer across a riffle, I felt a little tug on my fly, and then landed a smallmouth of my own, which set a personal record for me, as undoubtedly the smallest bass I’ve ever caught. It was all of two inches long.

A little later, Nicholas called out, “I’ve got another one!” He held up another bass, this one obligingly staying on long enough to be photographed, before Nicholas expertly released the fish back into the water (a catch-and-release area for smallies).

Nicholas was wearing knee-high rubber boots and a rain suit, though it didn’t keep him dry as he waded into waist-deep water to cast towards a seam in the current on the other side of the river. After we finished our float downstream to the takeout point, he just laughed as he dumped a couple quarts of water out of each boot.
That evening I suggested a short lesson in flycasting. Nicholas watched intently as Dan hesitantly made a few casts. When I handed the rod to Nicholas, there was no hesitation. He made a false cast or two and then proceeded to make powerful 30-foot casts without a bit of difficulty. “We’ve got to start flyfishing,” he informed Uncle Dan.

Flyfishing, of course, is one of those specially paved and highly polished routes to perdition. You start off just wanting to catch a few fish and then, before you know it, you’re tying flies and bass bugs, building rods, studying aquatic entomology, and going to Trout Unlimited meetings. It’s a life that’s suddenly more complicated.

Though the distances between Montana and Minnesota will make it a bit difficult to watch Nicholas learn these new outdoor skills, there’s no doubt he’ll do well. The kid’s a natural.

Fish Gaza and Achieve Peace in the Middle East!

2010-06-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for life.” Chinese proverb.

This old proverb, commonly attributed to Confucius or Lao Tsu, has spawned a number of parodies, such as, “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he will sit in the boat and drink beer all day.”

Here are a few more.

“Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Unless he doesn’t like sushi—then you have to teach him to cook.”

“Teach a man to fish and you can sell him fishing equipment.”

“Teach a man to fish; and you will not have to listen to his incessant whining about how hungry he is.”

“Give a man a fish, and he’ll probably look at you very oddly and say something like, “I’m sorry but you’ll still have to pay the speeding fine.”

Vice President Dan Quayle got in the act. “If you give a person a fish, they’ll fish for a day. But if you train a person to fish, they’ll fish for a lifetime.”

You get the idea. But what would happen if you taught a hungry Palestinian how to fish?

In the news the last couple weeks, Israeli commandos have been intercepting ships attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, that poverty-stricken strip of land along the Mediterranean between Israel and Egypt. Naturally, Israel’s politicians defend their actions as necessary to keep dangerous materials from falling into the hands of terrorists.

That makes sense, of course. The Middle East, after all, is a snake pit. It’s a region where there’s no such thing as a true friend; just temporary alliances of convenience. It’s an area where personal relationships are often summed up as, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

So what sorts of things are prohibited from the Gaza Strip? According to a list from Israeli human rights organization, Gisha, there are a lot of dangerous items, such as spices and herbs, including sage, cardamon, cumin, coriander and ginger. The forbidden list also includes jam, chocolate, potato chips, fresh meat, size A4 paper (the European standard business letter, 8.3” x 11.7”), toys, goats, and chicks. Plastic chicken cages are okay; chicks aren’t.

Also on the banned list are fishing rods, fishing nets and ropes for fishing.
Certainly, potato chips should be banned. It’s just junk food, anyway. If you have thousands of hungry people you don’t want to tease them with junk food.

But fishing rods? It seems to me that if Israel’s perceived problem with Gaza is that the place is full of restive people intent on armed revolt and terrorism, then they should not only be allowing fishing rods to be brought in; they should be subsidizing importation of fishing rods. They should be hiring some of those people on American TV fishing shows to come to Gaza and give fishing lessons.

The way I see it, if we get all those people without jobs and constructive things to do out fishing, then all of a sudden, instead of sitting around and plotting terrorism, they’d be out on the long beaches of Gaza fishing and hopefully catching fish to take home to their families.

It wouldn’t stop there, of course. Pretty soon the more successful anglers would be creating TV shows and exclaiming, “Gollee! What a hawg!” Hmmm, they’d have to come up with a less-offensive term for a big fish, though. There would be people clamoring for special regulations, or advocating catch and release of game fish. There would be new cottage industries creating new fishing lures. There would be new fishing magazines—though, of course writing paper and writing implements are banned, so scratch that idea.

No, instead of banning fishing rods, Israel should be doing all it can to encourage sport fishing. That’s how I’d achieve lasting peace in the Holy Land. A ridiculous idea? Perhaps. On the other hand, consider the current policy. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof sums it up, “That’s not security; that’s a travesty,”

Cottonwood Trees - blessing and nuisance

2010-06-09T19:09:00.000-07:00

Cottonwood trees enrich our outdoor experience. In summer they provide wonderful shade along Montana’s rivers. In the fall, Montana riverbottoms are ablaze with brilliant yellows of cottonwood trees’ fall foliage. When Lewis & Clark came through Montana, they built dugout canoes from cottonwood trees, and fed horses cottonwood bark. In fact, some people assert that cottonwood trees are what made their expedition possible.

On many western rivers, such as the Missouri River, that have been deprived of seasonal flooding by dams and diversions, many cottonwood groves have lost their vitality, as mature trees age and don’t get replaced by new growth. It’s another reason to enjoy the Big Hole River where nature still rules the river’s flows and cottonwood forests are dynamic.

Yet there are times when it’s difficult to fully appreciate those cottonwood trees. Our Memorial Day weekend is a case in point.

We camped on the lower Big Hole River, intent on fishing and relaxing. While setting up camp I saw my wife scraping some stuff off her shoes. At first glance it looked like an exquisite mixture of doggy-doo and tar. “What did you step in?” I asked.
“It’s cottonwood sap,” she responded a bit testily, as scraping proved only a temporary fix. With every step we picked up more sap, along with gravel, leaf buds, dead grass, twigs and anything else in the path of the dripping trees.

Dealing with cottonwood sap was a continuing theme throughout the weekend. We agreed to leave shoes at the trailer door and not walk around inside the trailer with our gooey shoes. At least that was the theory. The reality was that no matter how hard we tried, we tracked in stuff constantly.

While we didn’t appreciate the cottonwood sap mess, it was not unexpected. Neither did we appreciate the role cottonwood sap has had in folk medicine through the years.
According to Lori Harger Witt, an herbalist from Genesee, Idaho, in an article on the website of the Moscow (ID) Food Co-op, there are a number of folk medicines based on cottonwood sap. Cottonwood buds infused in olive oil make useful massage oils. The buds contain salicylates, aspirin-like compounds which have anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects. To make infused oil, gather enough cottonwood buds to fill a canning jar and pour in enough olive oil to cover the buds. Place the jar in a pot of water and heat just below simmering for about an hour. At that point you can strain the oil off the buds, or continue to let the oil steep for a couple weeks.

In another on-line article on Natural Life News, Elnora Old Coyote, who has made a lifelong study of native plants and their uses, says Montana Indian tribes traditionally used cottonwood bark and sap as a sweetener in teas, pudding and syrup. They would cut out a piece of bark and wait for sap to collect in the cup-like holes, and then they’d collect the sap, similar to collecting maple sap. She also notes the healing properties of cottonwood buds, and offers her own recipe for a cottonwood bud/olive oil infusion, with the added suggestion of adding beeswax to make a salve for burns and other skin irritations.

There are also references to making a cottonwood bud tincture by soaking cottonwood buds in rubbing alcohol.

While cottonwood sap has a surprisingly long list of folk medicine uses, that same sap that oozes from a cottonwood leaf bud can make a mess of a car, truck, or recreational vehicle. I certainly agree it’s hard to get off. Ordinary car wash detergents barely make a dent on those sticky brown spots left by the leaf buds. According to some on-line bulletin boards, bug and tar remover products do a good job with cottonwood sap. In earlier encounters with cottonwood sap, I found Dawn Power Dissolver effective.
It’s also a good idea to not leave a vehicle or RV under a cottonwood tree for an extended period, or you may have a mess that’s almost impossible to clean. As Benjamin Franklin noted, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Mother''s Day Caddis - Still Waiting

2010-06-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

Mother’s Day is observed the second Sunday in May. That much we know. Mother’s Day came right on schedule on May 9, this year, and we duly observed the protocols for the day.

What we’re waiting for now is the Mother’s Day Caddis Hatch, that explosion of insect life that seems to get the flyfishing season going in earnest.

There are many kinds of caddisflies, and trout depend on them for a big chunk of their diet. The late Gary LaFontaine, in his landmark book, “Caddisflies,” cited scientific studies that estimate that caddisflies account for 44.7 percent of aquatic foods eaten by trout, significantly more than mayflies and stoneflies, though mayfly and stonefly imitations usually take up more space in a flyshop’s cases.

Caddisflies are of the scientific order of Trichoptera, and, according to LaFontaine, there are more than 1200 species in 142 genera and 18 families known in North America, and over 7,000 species known world-wide, and about now I’m wishing I remembered more from those high school biology classes.

The scientific name for the Mother’s Day Caddis is Brachycentrus, and a common name for them is Grannom. The caddis hatch happens on most western rivers. The trick is being around when it happens, as well as having fishable water.

The Mother’s Day Hatch, when it finally happens, can be impressive. The hatch on the Yellowstone River is famed for profuse hatches, when large rafts of insects float along the river’s currents, and an angler trying to get in on the action may find caddisflies crawling all over his/her face and into ears. On the Big Hole River, where I do most of my fishing, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any hatches that dense, though when there are clouds of insects buzzing around trees and bushes it’s still impressive, especially when they crawl inside your glasses.

On the other hand, by the time these masses of bugs appear on the water’s surface, as well as buzzing around trees and bushes, the trout may have already filled their bellies with emerging caddis trying to make their way from the stream’s rocky bottom to the surface. In fact, a good strategy, during the hatch, can be to use an emerger-type fly such the sparkle pupa patterns developed by LaFontaine, or a green-bodied soft-hackle fly.

As for fishable water, in most years that’s the real trick. All too often, the Hatch happens when spring runoff is really getting going, and while there are lots of caddisflies buzzing around, the trout are hunkered down, and not spending a lot of time looking up at adult insects on the water’s surface. I know I’ve had my best caddis action in years when runoff was more on the tame side.

There can be a fine line for optimal caddis hatch conditions. I specifically remember one spring on the Big Hole the water was running on the high side, though it wasn’t blown out. Shoreline willows were partially submerged, and trout were hanging right in the willows, in position to pick off caddis bugs dropping on the water. I had a banner day, even though the wading often seemed adventurous.

There are many caddisfly imitations available, whether you roll your own or buy them at a flyshop. Caddisfly imitations generally fall into several categories, depending on whether you’re trying to imitate a cased larva on the bottom of the stream, the pupa swimming through the water column, or the adult winged insect.

As mentioned earlier, green-bodied soft-hackle wet flies or LaFontaine sparkle pupa are good pupa imitations. The Elk Hair Caddis, developed by long-time Dillon guide Al Troth, is certainly one of the standards. I’ve also had a lot of success with a Renegade, a simple fly that possibly suggests a pair of mating caddis to a hungry trout. A small Humpy is also effective, especially when there are both caddisflies and mayflies buzzing around. If you don’t mind tangled flies and tippets, this may also be a good time for a dry fly with a wet fly dropper.

Best of all, once caddisflies show up, fish will be looking at caddisflies until fall.

The Last of the Doughboys - Memorial Day 2010

2010-05-27T08:10:00.000-07:00

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row…

This weekend we will again observe Memorial Day; a holiday first set aside to honor the fallen soldiers who fought for the Union during the Civil War, and which has since become a day to recognize all those who died in military service. Unofficially, the day is an occasion to honor all our nation’s veterans, especially those who have died, either in service or later in life.

Every Memorial Day I take a mental trip back to my hometown in southern Minnesota, where they have a community observance rooted in decades-long tradition, and of which, playing in the high school band, I always had a ringside view.

The day started in the cool of the morning with a parade forming for a march down Main Street. There would be a veteran’s organization color guard, followed by the band, scout troops, veterans groups, and Gold Star Mothers. After reaching the edge of town we’d hop in a bus for a short ride to the city cemetery a mile out of town. At the cemetery there would be a program which always included recitations of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the poem, “In Flanders Fields,” a speech by some area politician, and concluding with a firing squad’s salute and, of course, the poignant tones of Taps.

The elder statesmen of the veterans groups marching on those humid Memorial Day mornings were the World War I veterans, the Doughboys who went to France and added the needed surge of military energy to finally end the war on November 11, 1918. They were, in my youth, the civic leaders and established businessmen of our community. One of them operated the local theater where he sat in a tiny ticket booth, and inside, where his wife, my mother’s cousin, took our tickets and sold popcorn. Another of those veterans was the city manager and one of my first bosses when I had a summer job in 1959 digging ditches (really).

The last time I was back home over Memorial Day was over 30 years ago and the last few local veterans of the Great War rode down Main Street in the back of a convertible.
Those old veterans are now all gone, having taken their last rides down Main Street years ago.

In fact, of the 65 million or so soldiers, sailors and marines from around the globe who fought in that terrible war there are just, at last count, three veterans whose service is verifiable, all age 109, still living. Claude Choules, the last surviving seaman, joined the Royal Navy at age 15 in 1916. He moved to Australia after the war and later served in the Royal Australian Navy in WWII. Florence Green is the last female veteran and the last veteran living in the U.K. Frank Buckles is the last American veteran. Buckles served as an ambulance driver on the Western Front. He was held as a prisoner in WWII as a civilian. He lives in West Virginia. The last known person who fought for Germany in the war died January 1, 2008 at age 107. Canada’s last veteran, who lived in the U.S. after the war, died last year.

The poem, “In Flanders Fields,” was written by Lt. Col. John McCrae, a Canadian Army physician who witnessed at first hand the horrors of war in the Ypres sector of the war. He wrote the poem the day after he personally conducted the funeral for a friend, a Canadian lieutenant killed in a bomb burst. Col. McCrae, himself, didn’t survive the war, dying of pneumonia in 1918.

Traditionally, we observed Memorial Day on May 30, but that changed to the last Monday of May in 1971, following passage of the Uniform Holidays Bill in 1968. Whether this holiday is the first holiday weekend of summer or the last holiday of winter, as it often is in Montana, let’s not forget those whom we honor this weekend.

…if ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The Not So Silent Prairie

2010-05-19T19:46:00.000-07:00

When we think of prairies we usually think in terms of open vistas of rolling plains and grasslands. We don’t often dwell on the sounds of the prairie.

We took a springtime trip across Montana to Minot, North Dakota this past week to see our son, Kevin, and his family. While there, we went fishing, of course. It’s a good reason to go there in the spring.

Fishing, of course, doesn’t come with guarantees. All you can do is wet a line and hope for the best. Sometimes, spring trips produce a lot of fishing action but this wasn’t one of them. The end of April and beginning of May seemed unseasonably cold here in western Montana, and that was also the case in North Dakota. One of the things TV weathermen keep tabs on in North Dakota is soil temperature, and while we were there soil temperatures were dropping—which is bad news for farmers putting in their crops.

While fishing was slow, there was lots of activity going on all around us.

We spent one day fishing at Devils Lake, the massive eastern North Dakota lake complex that has, in the last 20 years, tripled in size. Kevin pointed out that a few years back he’d go there and marvel at fishing spots we went to back in the 1970s and 1980s that were no longer accessible, as they’re all under water. Now it seems to be a yearly thing. You look for a spot where you fished the year before, and now it’s gone. Farms are continually going under water—and it has nothing to do with the mortgage bust.

But birds are everywhere. There are incredible populations of waterfowl, with ducks of all kinds, giant Canada geese, and shorebirds everywhere. The Devils Lake area is a magnet for birdwatchers that come there just for the myriad shorebirds.

On another day I went to Lake Sakakawea, the big Missouri impoundment downstream from Montana. I fished along a shallow bay, hoping the sheltered waters would be warming a bit. It was a good plan, even if the fish didn’t go along with it. In recent years I’ve spent a lot more time hunting pheasants along the lakeshore than fishing, and it was hard not to think of pheasants on this pleasant spring day.

As the saying goes, in springtime a young man’s fancy turns to love, and that’s certainly the case with pheasants. Cock pheasants in springtime are a vocal group, presumably advertising to hen pheasants their availability for a good time, as well as letting other roosters know that the territory is already staked out.

A discordant note comes from an oil-drilling tower at the head of the bay I was fishing. Western North Dakota is a beehive of oil drilling, exploration and pumping, along with heavy truck traffic. In fact, it’s downright mind-boggling. A few weeks ago, the New York Times did a feature story on the difficulties oil patch workers have finding housing in Williston, the informal capitol of the western North Dakota oil fields. There are lots of jobs, but finding a place to live after work is tricky.

On another outing, this time to a small lake away from oil country, at the public access point I was greeted by a chorus of birds, including the usual ducks, geese and shorebirds, but also song birds of various kinds concentrated in a patch of trees and shrubs. There were dozens of bird songs happening all at once, with birds trying to out-do each other in making themselves heard above the crowds. And, again, pheasants were calling from their hangouts on the prairie hillsides.

While the prairie was full of sounds, tiny prairie wildflowers were in bloom, adding bits of color to the green shoots of grass and last year’s dried grasses.

At the end of the day, birds settle down, but there are new sounds. Stepping outside Kevin’s house one evening, frogs were talking from a nearby wetland and open field. “Those are western chorus frogs,” Kevin explained, as we enjoyed the sounds of the chilly evening.

The photo above is Kevin and our Labs in the Devils Lake area. A year ago, farmers were driving tractors and farm trucks down this road.

Poison Ivy Can Ruin Your Day!

2010-05-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

A long ago hunt for ruffed grouse on an early fall day in North Dakota hangs in my memory. I don’t recall whether I brought home any grouse. I do remember, however, developing a rash on my left arm a few days later. Somehow I brushed up with some poison ivy.

The rash healed up after about a week, and while I haven’t had any more of those unpleasant encounters I’d rather not have another. Accordingly, I perked up when Gary Burris of Tec Laboratories, of Albany, Oregon, made a presentation on poison ivy and oak at the annual conference of the Northwest Outdoor Writers Association, held a couple weeks ago at Seeley Lake, Montana.

The nasty ingredient that makes life miserable for people who encounter poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac is urushiol, a resin-type oil contained in the leaves and stems of these plants. It’s powerful stuff. “The amount of urushiol on the tip of a needle is enough to give 100 people a rash,” Burris said. Looking at it another way, urushiol would have to be diluted in olive oil at 60,000 to one before it wouldn’t cause problems.

Urushiol also doesn’t break down with age. Burris told of a piece of poison ivy wood that had been in a museum for 100 years. After that period, someone moved it and a few days later came down with a rash. Also, burning can release urushiol in smoke, and if inhaled can cause major problems.

The best remedy for poison ivy and poison oak problems is to avoid it. The old saying, “groups of three: leave it be,” is still the rule of thumb when it comes to these toxic plants. According to the USDA-NRCS website, both poison ivy and poison oak are present in Montana, from one end of the state to the other, though not in all counties. It’s not present in Silver Bow County, but is found in Madison, Gallatin and Park Counties in southwest Montana. I haven’t knowingly seen any, though I’ve heard from others about poison oak along the lower Madison River in the Beartrap Canyon area. Poison sumac is not found in Montana.

As to what to do if exposed to poison ivy and poison oak, the first thing to do is get it off, and it takes something that can break down the resins in urushiol. A pumice-based soap, such as Lava, is effective, as is Dawn dishwashing detergent.
Tec Laboratories makes a product, Tecnu, which the company’s founder, Dr. Robert Smith, developed in the 1960s to wash off atomic dust particles, back in that backyard bomb shelter era. The Cold War never turned hot, but after the Smith family moved to Oregon their children all became exposed to poison oak. In a fit of anger, Mrs. Smith went out and pulled up, with her bare hands, all the poison oak on their property. Her work complete she decided she’d better wash up and spotted a container of fallout scrub and washed with that—and avoided the nasty rash altogether.

That was the beginning of Tec Laboratory’s line of poison ivy and poison oak remedies.
Other remedies on the market include Zanfel and Terrafil.

Burris further recommended that besides washing skin surfaces, clothing should be washed with Tide laundry detergent. Tools and gear should be wiped down with a Tecnu-saturated cloth. Pets, such as dogs, normally don’t react to poison ivy, though an animal exposed to urushiol can certainly pass that nasty resin on to humans. Burris also mentioned that his company’s product is also effective for removing skunk spray, as well as creosote and tar.

Once a poison ivy rash develops things get more complicated. It’s important to avoid scratching as that can spread the urushiol to other parts of the body. Caladryl and hydrocortisone-based ointments can relieve the itching, and, yes, his company makes those, as well.

Some people, roughly one in 100, don’t react to poison ivy and poison oak. On the other hand, that immunity isn’t necessarily permanent. If you spot these nasty plants, avoid touching them and you’ll avoid a lot of potential misery.

The State of the Southwest Montana Fisheries

2010-05-05T19:11:00.000-07:00

Like storm clouds hanging over the western Montana mountains, the prospect, after a mild, dry El Niño winter, of a warm, dry summer, with diminished stream flows, again threatens the blue ribbon trout streams of southwestern Montana.

That was a common theme among Montana Fish, Wildlife &Parks area fisheries biologists when they made their annual State of the Fishery report to the annual meeting of the George Grant Chapter of Trout Unlimited on April 22, 2010.

Jim Olsen, the biologist in charge of the Big Hole River, reported on the Pennington Bridge stretch of the river, the area from the Pennington Bridge Fishing Access Site, downstream to the river’s confluence with the Beaverhead River to form the Jefferson River. This is an area where the river has been channelized, with riprap on stream banks, and with frequent de-watering in dry years.

In electrofishing surveys, Olsen said he found relatively low numbers of brown trout and rainbow trout, though with the low numbers of fish, there are relatively good growth rates with the fish that are there.

Olson also reported on a study he’d made on mountain whitefish, the first such study in at least 20 years or more. Whitefish, he found, migrate long distances upriver for spawning. Then the fingerlings migrate back downstream where they grow faster in the relatively warmer water of the downstream reaches.

FWP has begun a fish-tagging survey on the Big Hole River. During electrofishing surveys, biologists tagged trout of 12 inches or more last fall. They have placed kiosks at fishing access sites from East Bank to Pennington Bridge where anglers can pick up reporting cards to carry with them on the stream. The tags are placed next to the fish’s dorsal fin, and after a short time in the water get covered with algae. Anglers who catch a tagged fish can wipe off the algae and then record the tag number and other data, such as where the fish was caught, species and size of fish, and drop the card at the kiosk at the end of the outing.

Olsen says FWP hopes to get data on effects of drought conditions, importance of tributaries, migration, and other such information from the tag study.

Jefferson River biologist Ron Spoon reported on some Future Fisheries grant-funded projects on Willow Creek and Parsons Slough, Waterloo-area spring creeks, where FWP has made a number of modifications to the streams to improve rainbow and brown trout spawning and rearing conditions. He reports that the project has dramatically improved fish numbers on that stretch of the Jefferson River.

“It’s the only reason there is a fishery there,” echoed veteran fishing guide Tony Schoonen who frequently works the upper Jefferson River.

Both Spoon and Olsen reported on projects to shift mountain lake stocking from Yellowstone cutthroat trout to westslope cutthroat trout, as westslope trout grow faster. Olsen also reported on an upcoming project on a Big Hole tributary, Cherry Creek, near Melrose, where they will install a fish barrier on the stream and then replace brook trout and rainbow trout with pure westslope cutthroat trout.

Jason Lindstrom reported on the upper Clark Fork River, basically from Butte to Gold Creek. Lindstrom said he’s been trying to find reasons for a steep decline in fish numbers in the Clark Fork downstream from the Warm Springs Ponds. Fish numbers are just a fraction of what they were in 1987, though further downstream, in the Galen area, fish numbers are still consistent with what they were in 1987.

The stream is almost exclusively a brown trout fishery, with some westslope cutthroat trout and, rarely, rainbow trout, which, primarily, came out of the Warm Springs Ponds.
Lindstrom is cautious about pointing fingers at the cause of the decline of fish numbers, saying, “I am still trying to do more work on the issue and get things wrapped up.” On the other hand, he says there has been a decline in water quality on the Warm Springs Ponds, with arsenic levels much higher than in years past. He says, “I can’t prove the fish decline is due to water quality, but my gut says it is.”

A View of Earth Day 40 Years Later

2010-05-02T20:12:00.000-07:00

The annual conference of the Outdoor Writers Association of America will be held, this coming June, in Rochester, Minnesota. Assuming I go, it’ll be a trip back home, as Rochester is about 30 miles from my hometown of Zumbrota, a small town that got its name from the Zumbro River, which wanders through southeastern Minnesota on its way to the Mississippi River.

A part of the conference program that caught my eye was trips to trout streams of the area, plus smallmouth bass fishing on the Zumbro River. Previously, I’d also heard from others about great smallmouth fishing on the Zumbro.

The reason I have to do a double-take about smallmouth bass fishing on the Zumbro is that when I was a kid there weren’t, to the best of my knowledge and recollection, any sport fish on our local river, and certainly nobody was doing guided trips on the Zumbro. Nobody went fishing on the Zumbro, except for rough fish, such as carp or suckers.

Why wasn’t there sport fishing on my hometown stream? That’s an easy one. Pollution.
Just for starters, my hometown and neighboring communities all dumped raw sewage in the river. There’s a local cheese factory in town where most of the local dairy farmers sell their milk and cream. My dad made trips to town every few days to fill old oil drums with whey, the watery part of milk that gets separated in the cheese-making process. The cheese factory gave it to any farmer, free for the taking, and my dad fed it to the pigs on our farm. What the cheese factory couldn’t give away went straight into the river, which was, conveniently, just a block away, and the cheese factory had a direct sewer line that fed into the river.

The town also had a dump right on the banks of the river, and no, it didn’t rate being called a sanitary landfill, and you’d better believe a lot of what went to the dump ended up in the river.

In the context of the times, there was nothing particularly unusual or newsworthy about this pollution. In 1969, Time magazine reported on the Cuyahoga River, which flows through Cleveland, Ohio, “Some River! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. ‘Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown,’ Cleveland's citizens joke grimly. ‘He decays.’ The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration dryly notes: "The lower Cuyahoga has no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes.’ It is also -- literally -- a fire hazard.” In fact, over a hundred year period, the river caught on fire a number of times, including 1969.

Closer to home, the Yellowstone River is considered one of Montana’s premier recreational rivers and is celebrated for a premier trout fishery in the upper river. In the lower river, downstream from Billings, there’s a thriving fishery for paddlefish, channel catfish, smallmouth bass, walleye and sauger.

Yet, as many people will recall, at one time the community of Gardner dumped raw sewage into the Yellowstone, as did the city of Livingston. My wife grew up in Glendive in eastern Montana, and when she was a kid nobody fished on the river—because of the pollution.

What happened to restore these rivers and fisheries? We can look directly at Earth Day, which happened the first time on April 22, 1970, just 40 years ago this past week, and a grass roots movement that led to the passage of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and the framework to create wilderness areas, as well as creation of the Environmental Protection Agency—all achievements of a Republican administration.

Last week, public television broadcast a documentary on the history of Earth Day, with a narrator noting that while President Nixon “didn’t have an environmental bone in his body,” he certainly had a fine sense of how political winds were blowing. And that’s how the bi-partisan legislation that has done so much to restore America’s rivers happened.

From today’s perspective of perpetual congressional deadlock, it seems even more amazing.

Glad to be in Montana on a Spring day

2010-04-21T18:56:00.000-07:00

Spring keeps happening by fits and starts. A few days ago I decided I needed to go fishing. It had been a busy week and I needed to get away from computers and telephones. If there was a hitch in my plans for the day, it might have been the fact that it was bone-chilling cold that morning across the region.

My destination for the day was Clark Canyon Dam, the reservoir south of Dillon. I keep hearing stories about the red-hot fishing on the lake about the time the ice is going out. As I drove south from Butte my biggest concern was that I waited too long and the ice was out and the magic time had passed.

Those worries were for nothing. After a couple nights of temps in the teens, there was likely more ice on the lake than a week earlier. There were spots of accessible open water along the shoreline, but in those spots there were already lots of people already fishing there. Probably from some people’s perspective things were still un-crowded, but not from mine. Rather than shoehorn myself into a spot I decided to head to the Big Hole River.

Taking a hike upstream from a Fishing Access Site on the lower river, accompanied by Flicka, my black Lab, who really appreciated a hike along the river, I got to a stretch of water that has been a long-time favorite.

It’s fun to tell stories about fishing outings when you can’t keep the fish off your hook, but this wasn’t one of them. I had just picked up a fishing magazine with an advertisement on the back cover suggesting that what we say isn’t always what we mean. For example, if someone says, “I don’t care about the fish. It’s all about being out on the water,” chances are what he really means is, “I’ve already caught seven fish and you’ve only caught two.” In my case, being out on the water was all I had.
While frequent interruptions from hungry fish would have been pleasant, it was a glorious day to be out. The frigid weather of the morning changed to pleasantly warm sunshine by early afternoon.

Canada geese were flying overhead or could be heard in backwaters as they go about the routine of setting up spring housekeeping. Mallard ducks were paired up in some old oxbows, and to prove that the season had really changed, the call of sandhill cranes echoed through the river bottoms.

The riparian areas were still dry, in need of spring rains to get some greenery going. In good water years, there is also flooding to give the thirsty ground a good drink, though that’s not likely to happen this year. Still, green grass is poking through the fallen leaves and desiccated grasses of last year.

While waiting for some fish action, I reflected on my good fortune to be living in Montana, where standing in the river is a right guaranteed by both statute and court rulings.

I had just read, in the online version of the Wall Street Journal, of controversies in Colorado, concerning landowners who would like to cut off floating access on waters flowing through their property. In Colorado, the courts have long ruled that fishermen can’t wade into rivers flowing through private land without risking being hauled into court for criminal trespass.

While that’s settled law, a current issue is whether landowners can bar access to floaters. Some property owners who have developed dude ranch operations would like to be able to advertise private fishing on what they consider their water—without the annoyance of rafters disturbing the peace and quiet.

Currently, some landowners are threatening to sue floaters, while in the legislature one representative introduced a bill to guarantee the right to float, though it got bogged down in the state senate. Currently, people on both sides of the issue are circulating initiatives to bring the question to the voters this November.

Yes, nothing like warm sunshine, and a comparison to Colorado, for example, to make me fully appreciate a spring afternoon on the Big Hole River of Montana.

Note: the photo above is Clark Canyon Reservoir on April 10