Hunting Season Almost Here

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

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

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

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.