May 2008 Almanac
This Month: Oh, Mr. Fisherman, Your Garden Is Calling
Serious hunters and anglers often garden, too, and they are serious about it. Sometime around Memorial Weekend, they take a day off from fishing, often the best angling of the year, to till and plant their gardens.
Often, these gardeners are superb deer hunters, and if you hadn’t noticed, folks whose vegetables win blue-ribbons at fairs are also superb deer hunters, and why not? All these endeavors have a common thread — food gathering.
Some of these “dirt farmers” begin planting cold-weather crops in April as soon as the soil turns friable, and they get in leafy veggies such as kale, spinach and lettuce as well as sow the biggie — peas.
These folks want this legume for the 4th of July celebration, which includes that all-time patriotic dish — salmon and peas. When an outdoors type furnishes the salmon from a Maine lake and peas from the home garden, it smacks of tradition spanning two centuries.
May really highlights the two Maines as far as fishing go:
In the South Country, rivers and streams have heavy hatches in May — Hendricksons and red quills (See “The Fly Box” this month.), blue quills, Drunella cornuta mayflies, March browns, black caddises and more.
Meanwhile, in the North Country, hatches don’t start until the end of May and then more predictably in June. In May, Northern Maine is hosting ice-out mania, which has long since passed in Southern Maine.
As May slides toward June and waters warm, black bass migrate toward nesting sites, and by Memorial Weekend, bass fishing starts picking up big time. Action can be blistering by the last day of the month.
Striped bass arrive in Maine in May, and serious striper anglers know where to find them. Bluefish and mackerel action is still a few weeks away.
A handful of hunters, often reloaders and serious shooters, chase woodchucks before the grass gets high enough to hide these distant brown dots. The sport attracted far more participants 50 years ago, but still, a few woodchuck hunters do get out now.
It’s May, and between all the fishing diversions and woodchuck and coyote hunting, folks can stay hopping.
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Tips of the Month
Want a Whopper? Sneak Up on Him
Compared to bait anglers, the average fly rodder approaches a salmonid or bass lie with as much stealth as a proverbial bull in a China closet. The catch rate surely increases when anglers sneak upon fish as if each one were a trophy deer standing behind a knoll on the backside of a field. The key is slipping toward — say a rising fish — as quietly as possible while holding your body low to the water. It also makes sense to avoid creating wavelets that travel across the surface, alerting the quarry. Beware of shadows, too. Move to the fish from an angle so your shadow doesn’t lie across the water.
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Name That Bug and Score Big
Astute fly rodders identify the most predominant aquatic insects on the water and then look up the critters in books. This enables folks to know how and where to work a nymph to duplicate the natural. For example, Ephemerella subvaria nymphs like getting out of faster currents and making several ascents to the surface before finally breaking through the meniscus. A nymph imitation fished to imitate the swimming behavior of the natural before a hatch can score big time, particularly if it is matched to the natural in size, color and silhouette.
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Where the Action Is
Two Great Rivers for Southern Trouters
In early May, rivers in the bottom third of the state produce heavy hatches and fast action long before the north country’s flowing waters produce, and spots such as the St. George River at the outlet of Sennebec Pond and the Pleasant River in Windham offer good sport through May and into June. Check DeLorme’s The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer (MAG), Map 14, C-1 for the St. George and Map 5, D-2 for the Pleasant.
The St. George fishes well for brown trout from the outlet beside the road downstream beyond where DIF&W removed the old dam. A brookie may sweeten the pot here, too.
In May, a mayfly hatches that folks call a “red quill,” but it has two tails instead of three like Ephemerella subvaria and the body is much more slender. The wings, legs and tails are also a darker gray than the traditional red quill.
For the Pleasant, the Windham Center and Pope roads cross the catch-and-release, artificial-lures-only section, two great access points. Fish up or downstream, particularly up because most people go downstream. This river lies near Portland — about 30 minutes — but the strict regs insure interesting fishing.
Browns and brookies keep folks busy. Most fish measure 8- to 12-inches, but holdovers or strays up from the Presumpscot River break this rule. A 14- or 15-incher would be a great catch here, but the occasional fish grows larger.
Ice-out mania rules in the high country northwest of Bingham in the many blue-ribbon ponds around Pierce Pond. Two publications can help get folks into hot fishing in ice-cold water — MAG and the State of Maine Open Water Fishing Regulations booklet.
MAG shows the two access points, beginning with Map 30, A-1, which shows Lindsay Cove on the west shore. Anglers must check Map 29 and find the Long Falls Road from North New Portland, which has the east turn right on the border of Map 29 and 30 right of B-5. The other access is Otter Pond Cove (Map 30, A-2) on the east shore, and newcomers really need MAG to find the network of roads from Bingham.
After finding Pierce, check out the small ponds around it and then check each one in the fishing-regs booklet. Key on the ones with the strictest regulations, and check the DIF&W web site (http://www.mefishwildlife.com) for more information on these ponds.
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News and Tidbits
Soft Plastic Lures are Plugging Up Fish
Maine made the national news last fall when G. Russell Danner, the state fish pathologist, and two colleagues noticed hatchery brook trout wound up losing weight and looking sickly after eating soft-plastic baits. Autopsies revealed that these lures did not break down in the digestive system and given time, would pack the stomachs tight. Further studies by Maine fisheries biologists on Sebago Lake showed wild lake trout had a similar problem because 25 percent of them had soft plastics in their digestive systems. Moral of story: Don’t use soft-plastic baits unless they are made from plastics that are biodegradable.
Let’s compare life spans of four “critters” that might surprise readers: Frogs live up to 27 years, salamanders up to 50 years, an average U.S. angler up to 78 years and a soft-plastic bait up to 200 years.
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Billions Are Spent by Sportsmen
In February, the Congressional Sportsman’s Foundation published a report with statistics on the financial pluses that hunters and anglers generate in the United States.
• For starters, the big one: The 34 million sportsmen in this country spend $76 billion annually for hunting and fishing.
• Hunters and anglers are big spenders: They dump more into their sports than Microsoft, Google, eBay and Yahoo make combined! ($76 billion vs. $73.6 billion).
• The hunter-angler population numbers more than the entire nightly audience watching newscasts from ABC, CBS, NBC. (34 million vs. 27 million).
• Hunters spend more on their sport than the total revenues of McDonald’s ($23 billion vs. $20 billion).
• Hunters and anglers support nearly 600,000 jobs, and if you want to put this into perspective, compare it to the McDonald’s corporation. It employs less than 600,000.
• Each year, hunters spend $2.4 billion on guns and rifles.
• Americans do approve of hunting, and in fact, 73 percent think hunting is just fine.
• Three percent of Americans live the animal rights philosophy.
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AOL Works With Catch and Release
Last winter on Wildfire, a Maine television show about outdoors politics, Forrest Bonney said that artificial-lures regulations are important when other regs force anglers to release fish. The reason? Bait caught fish often die…on average 30 percent to 35 percent of the time. Fly-caught fish perish 2 percent to 4 percent and artificial lures kill 4 percent to 5 percent of the released fish. As Maine fisheries biologists go, Bonney has a sterling reputation.
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Wild Wolf Killed in Massachusetts
In fall 2007, a predator with large canine footprints killed a dozen lambs and sheep on a Shelburne farm near Springfield in western Massachusetts, making state officials suspect a rogue mutt or a wolf escaped from captivity did the slaughter. Wildlife officials managed to kill and examine the animal, though, and DNA tests showed it was indeed a wild gray wolf. If this wolf originated in Canada, experts said that it likely crossed the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, went through Maine and then traversed hundreds of miles of roads, rivers and communities before reaching Shelburne, perhaps proving that wolves are moving south from Canada.
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Nature Watch
Time for Lumbering Snappers and Yellow Rumps
As April heads into May, red-maple leaves begin unfurling, tinging the bare, leafless trees with crimson. The new foliage looks like tiny flowers.
Yellow-rumped and other warblers arrive in early May, too, just as black flies swarm.
Beginning in the second week of May, deer start dropping fawns, and they continue into July. As a general rule, older does give birth the earliest and young ones the latest.
By the third week, the warbler migration reaches full swing.
Apple trees flower, and often, folks with allergies have the biggest problem now — not because of apple trees, but the whole of nature has allergens floating around in the air.
Orioles have come. If no orioles are visiting your birdfeeders, nail an orange half above a dowel driven into a pole or tree for a perch. Orioles will come out of nowhere and become regular visitors. An apple half nailed above a perching stick will draw cardinals.
Trees leaf out, and by month’s end, Maine turns as green as Ireland.
Least terns start courting rituals on Maine’s sandy beaches around the third week.
In the fourth week, gray treefrogs begin calling — a one-half to six-second trill that sounds similar to a peeper. How can a listener tell the difference? If the sound comes from close to the ground and it has interspersed, single peeps at the same pitch, it’s a peeper. (“Treefrog” strikes readers as an odd word because the other Maine frogs are compound words.)
Tent caterpillars nest in crotches of young branches in apple and cherry trees. This harmful insect has a penchant for ornamental crabapple trees.
Snapping turtles migrate to gravel well above waterline, sometimes walking long distances, and lay eggs.
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Bird of the Month
Wood Thrush
Fly rodders fishing streams and rivers running through a rich, deciduous bottomland know the song of a wood thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) as well as they know the sound of a black-capped chickadee. This thrush’s flute-like, drawn-out ee-oh-lay shouts “fly-fishing” like no other bird except maybe the poor-Sam-Peabody-Peabody-Peabody song of a white-throated sparrow.
Folks in wood-thrush habitat particularly hear this bird’s plaintive cry at dusk, often distinctively heard in the still of the approaching night. This writer grew up with this thrush in the woods just off the lawn, and the sound strikes the ear as one of the loveliest calls in the bird world.
Skilled birdwatchers distinguish this thrush from other spotted thrushes by its larger size — a 7 3/4-inch bird that sports an 11 1/2-inch wingspan and weighs a little over one ounce. (Compare this to a robin, which measures 10 inches, has a 17-inch wingspan and a 2 3/4-ounce weight.)
The reddish-brown back catches the eye when this shade-loving bird steps into a patch of sunlight, and the nape of the neck is indeed very reddish in the old British sense of the word. The bottom has bold, black, round spots against snowy white, and the eye an equally bold white ring.
This bird builds a nest in a sapling or bush near the ground, using twigs and grass reinforced with mud. It then lines the inside with fine grass and rootlets before laying four, greenish-blue eggs. (Ken Allen)
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Do You Know?
A Bushel for You and Your Kin
A licensed recreational angler has the right to harvest a certain species in inland waters as long as an individual or municipality does not have exclusive rights to harvest the fish under laws regulating marine resources. Do you know which species falls under this very odd law that gives fishing rights to commercial interests first?
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Innocent Bystander
Violent Crime Down, But More Locked Up
The New York Times ran an interesting article in late February that outlined mind-blowing crime statistics in the United States that began with good news. Over a 20-year period, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, violent crime rates have fallen 25 percent from 613 for every 100,000 individuals in 1987 to 464 out of every 100,000 in 2007.
Honest gun owners must rejoice about the dropping crime rate over the past 20 years because lower crime stats translate into a weaker stance for anti-gun activists. That cannot be all bad, as any of us know who lived through the late 1980s when legislators ran rampant pushing for new firearm laws.
This good news has a downside that makes social liberals weep, though:
According to statistics from the Pew Center on the States, one in every 100 American adults resides in a prison or local jail. This country has 230 million adults, and 1.6 million of them live in prisons and 723,000 in local jails.
Incarceration rates remain even higher for certain groups. One in 36 Hispanics and one in 15 blacks are behind bars. One in nine blacks between the ages of 20 and 34 are in jail.
As bad as this may all seem, Professor Paul Cassell of the University of Utah made an interesting observation about the stats.
“While we certainly want to be smart about who [sic] we put in prisons,” Professor Cassell said, “It would be a mistake to think that we can release any significant number of prisoners without increasing crime rates. One out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense.” (Ken Allen)
Next Month: June Means More and Better Fishing
In the North Country, brook-trout fishing in ponds hits high gear in June because hatches are somewhat predictable and the fish are hanging around near the surface. If rain prevails, salmonids run up rivers now that flow into lakes and big ponds.
In the South Country, salmonids have dropped into the deeper water in lakes and ponds, but black bass are spawning and action rocks. Slab-sided bass hit lures and flies as if there is no tomorrow for them, and for folks looking to grill big, flaky, white-meat filets, there will be no tomorrow for these fish. Catch and release should be the order of the day, though, for these slow-growing species.
Wild flowers dot fields with color, and landscape photographers after beauty shots cannot go wrong now if they expose and compose their photos with care. Baby critters are out and about now, and as the late Bill Silliker used to say, “Cute sells.” Now’s the time for wildlife photographers to take advantage.
Gardens begin producing leafy veggies, radishes and beet greens now, and folks take pride in having a side of spinach, beet greens and garden salad with a brace of brookies.
Serious hunters start shooting now more than they did through the winter — clay-target sports for smoothbore enthusiasts, target shooting for perfecting trigger squeeze for riflemen and lots of shooting for bowhunters. Archers need to practice, too, so shooting becomes second nature.
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Answer to “Do You Know?”
These Fish are Tasty When Pickled
A licensed recreational angler may take one bushel of alewives daily from inland waters by use of a dip net or single hook and line for consumption “by himself or members of his family.” (Apparently, friends and acquaintances need not apply!) If a municipality or individual buys the rights to harvest this anadromous fish from a river or stream, too bad for recreational anglers. They can be forced to sit on the bank and watch.
The general public interested in recreational harvesting of clams in many areas and lobsters get pushed out, too, in favor of commercial interests.