February 2009 Almanac
This Month: It’s More of January … Just Better!
February offers outdoors folks more of January, but the second month includes two decided improvements — warmer temperatures and longer days. The thermometer averages 2 to 3 degrees warmer overall, but some days near the end of the month easily get 20 and 30 degrees warmer than January, particularly in a February thaw. Also, by month’s end, daylight has increased by approximately two hours. This longer sunlight and warming air start snow melting in good shape.
This month, anglers know they will have ample ice for their sport, but veterans check the ice thickness for fear of wandering over thin spots. No one questions, though, that ponds and lakes will have safe ice somewhere on them in the second month.
Snow sledders know that Maine will have snow from Kittery to Fort Kent and from Wilson’s Mills to Eastport — maybe! It’s a pretty safe bet, though, that snow will have fallen to provide snowmobilers with enough to run a machine.
Rabbit hunters live for light dustings of fluffy snow on a base that can hold their merry beagles. This month, fir thickets and swamp bottoms become tunneled wonderlands for their sport. ‘Cat hunters, coyote and fox callers and folks after crows also relish the lovely winter settings that often look like a calendar photo.
Smelters gather on coastal rivers and streams now, a sport that has spawned businesses that have catered to folks for decades. These entrepreneurs know how to make their clients happy, and cheerful sounds describe nighttime smelting camps as folks work for a mess of smelts while sitting in a warm shack, telling stories and ribbing one another.
The unofficial fly-tying season is going full blast as folks replenish boxes and develop new patterns. Leisurely meals with spoils from the woods and waters describe a February evening, and then, a good book by a fire makes the night ever so pleasant. Who needs to complain about a Maine winter? It offers good times for every taste.
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Tips of the Month
Great Black-Powder Practice
William Clunie, a regional columnist for this publication, hunts hares with a beagle and his beloved Thompson Center Hawken replica. Naturally, shot works better than a single projectile for improving his shooting ratio with fleet-footed bunnies, so Clunie opts for birdshot.
This black-powder rifle has a grooved barrel, though, so it shoots a poor shot pattern, influencing Clunie to buy a smoothbore barrel for his Hawken. This shoots shot just fine — a great tip for folks who want to shoot black-powder in a fast-action sport like Maine hare hunting.
Clunie has had so much practice with his muzzle-loader in winter weather that he has become expert in dealing with cold-weather shooting — surely a plus for hunting in Maine’s December black-powder season for deer.
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Tie-and-Lie Time
Fly-tying calms the nerves of folks working at high-pressure jobs with lots of stress because the tier just sits quietly at the vise, constructing flies while dreaming of better weather. However, this lonely “sport” can be just that — lonely.
Making it more sociable creates huge pluses:
If a tier invites several more fly-tiers to his home or organizes a big day by renting a large room, a group of like-minded folks can help one another master skills and learn new patterns — reason enough to gather for a “tie and lie.”
If the organizer follows a plan — say how to tie a certain series of flies such as Compara-Duns, classic dries, mayfly nymphs or you name it, the day may progress with more purpose. But hey, it’s winter, so any plan, even no plan, can work. Good friends indoors on a snowy day create memories.
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Where the Action Is
Strict Ice-Fishing Regs Create Excellent Fishing
On Lobster Lake near the West Branch of the Penobscot River in Piscataquis County, the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s fisheries managers have enacted seriously strict regulations to help grow big salmon and trout:
1) Open to ice-fishing only in February.
2) Use or possession of live bait prohibited.
3) Restricted to two lines per person.
4) Daily limit on trout, salmon and togue one fish in the aggregate.
5) Minimum length limit on salmon 20 inches long.
6) Minimum length limit on togue 23 inches long.
The strict regs draw incredible crowds here, even though it’s a long drive from population centers, showing that people want to fish where the management policies create excellent fishing for large salmonids.
Check DeLorme’s The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer (MAG), Map 49, D-3 for access details.
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News and Tidbits
Oldest Living Creature on Earth
The first time Jonathan, the tortoise, showed up in a photo, a war photographer was shooting a black-and-white image of a Boer War prisoner circa 1900 — about 109 years ago. Jonathan, a 70-year-old then, just happened to be in the picture, and it helps establish this South African animal as the oldest living creature on earth.
About the time Jonathan was born, Andrew Jackson of the Democratic Party won his bid for the U.S. presidency, and one candidate running against him, William Wirt, belonged to the Anti-Masonic Party. Wirt’s main issue was the evils of secret organizations.
We often think people get crazier every generation, so we’re doomed, but can you imagine someone running on such a narrow, bigoted ticket today? History teaches us and creatures like Jonathan inadvertently remind us of so many lessons.
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Muzzle-loaders Need Cohesive Organization
Maine’s muzzle-loader permits are now outselling licenses for the statewide bowhunt, even though archers have a season that lasts twice as long as the muzzle-loader hunt. Muzzle-loaders must realize their numbers are growing and the need for a cohesive organization to represent them grows with the increasing permit sales.
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Angling Crowds Show Need
Misologists often complain that crowds around waters with strict regulations such as fly fishing only, artificial lures only or particularly catch and release show that such regs do not work because they create mobs from folks loving that particularly resource to death.
What crowds really show is quite the opposite. Strict regulations prove ever-so popular in Maine, and the reason doesn’t baffle folks in the know. Strict regs translate into better fishing. Because people flock to these waters, the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife must recognize the fact that a need exists. People want to go where DIF&W has instituted tough laws to protect the resource. Because crowds are forming, we need more such places to spread people around more.
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Big Reed Woes Continuing Story
Big Reed Pond in T8 R10 WELS in Piscataquis County has made the news in a big way as of late because of the blueback trout woes there, thanks to the introduction of rainbow smelts, which push them out of a habitat.
An interesting tidbit about Big Reed involves this statistic: When European settlers arrived, this water had brook trout, blueback trout and northern redbelly dace. Since then, bait anglers have introduced six more species, including blacknose dace, pearl dace, lake chub, creek chub, white suckers and rainbow smelts. Chars including brookies and bluebacks do not do well against many invasive species. Why does Maine continue to allow live bait in sensitive waters?
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Why Eels for Stripers?
Live-bait anglers, particularly ones fishing after dark, often use live American eels almost exclusively, but a fascinating, 3-year Massachusetts study checked food habits of New England stripers. Out of 55 food sources ranging from Atlantic menhaden to garter snakes, American eels ranked 43rd! Menhaden topped the list followed by rock crab, American sand eel, unidentified boney fishes, sand shrimp, American lobster, green crab, lady crab, Atlantic herring and sea worms in that order for the top 10. River herring took 16th place, and rainbow smelt grabbed 29th — well above American eels. Bluefish took 54th, one ahead of garter snakes.
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How Big Was That Striper?
The largest striped bass recorded on record fell to a seining net in April 1891 — a 125-pounder! This shows how large this species might grow given the chance.
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New Species Every Day
Environmental writers constantly preach gloom and doom, but science offers us so many positive stories, beginning with a recent CNN report. Scientists are finding two new species every day, and a recent 6-year study in the Mekong Delta astounded scientists and the public alike because of the richness and diversity of species in that area torn by war through most of the 20th century. One sighting in the Kekong Delata in a World Wildlife Fund study from 1997 to 2006 found a thick-tailed rat, thought to have been extinct for 11 million years. Another discovery was an all-green viper spotted in the rafters of a restaurant and added to the list of new species.
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Fish Species Move North
Every once in a while, a Maine angler fishing the mouth of the Saco River and other hotspots along the Southern Maine coast hooks a bonito, a fish associated with southern New England waters. Last year, saltwater anglers in Rhode Island saw tarpon rolling far offshore! As the earth warms, fish move northward, exciting anglers who look forward to catching bonito, tarpon and other storied species from the South.
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Do You Know?
How Often Is the Law Broken?
Do you know if people can store live bait in any Maine waters?
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Book Corner
Best Hunting Anthology of All Time
This reviewer has enjoyed a lifelong love affair with fishing or hunting anthologies, beginning with the granddaddy of them all, Nick Lyons’ Fisherman’s Bounty (Crown Publishing, copyright 1971).
Recently, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, the best hunting collection of all time crossed our desk — The Gigantic Book of Hunting Stories, edited by Jay Cassell with an introduction by one of the late 20th century’s finer outdoors writers, Thomas McIntyre. Some of the pieces are short stories and others nonfiction. All I could say over and over was “Wow!” when first thumbing through it.
On those snowy, frigid December nights, I’ve pored over this Skyhorse Publishing anthology, relishing one story after another. And, by the way, for readers who appreciate that genre known as outdoors literature, Skyhorse Publishing has made a mark on the world. Expect big things from this publisher in the coming years.
The Gigantic Book of Hunting Stories includes stories by the early greats, Theodore Roosevelt, Ivan Turgenev, Anthony Trollope, Lt. Col. J.M. Patterson, Zane Grey, Nash Buckingham, Aldo Leopold and Charles Dickens — yes, that Charles Dickens — and then it heads into another era with Lee Wulff, Nelson Bryant, Lamar Underwood, Gordon MacQuarrie and others from that group.
The modern guys fill the book, though, and names such as Thomas McIntyre, E. Donnall Thomas, Jr., Michael McIntosh, Geoffrey Norman, William G. Tapply, Robert F. Jones, Tom Huggler, Lionel Atwill, David Foster, Craig Boddington, Phillip Caputo, Rick Bass, Jay Cassell figure heavily in the book.
And did I say many of the writers have several pieces in this one book. That endeared the anthology to me because many collections have but one story by each author.
(Another point, I read Atwill’s “A Flintlock in the Rain” when it appeared in a magazine about 30 years ago, and it planted the seed for me to get into black-powder shooting. That article is in this book.)
Then, this reviewer’s two favorite writers, Terry Wieland and Thomas McGuane top the long list of stars, and Wieland’s “Vengeance” and McGuane’s “The Heart of the Game” justify the price of this giant book — $24.95.
And this list of outdoors greats doesn’t even get to other writers in the book such as Gene Hill, Corey Ford and other guys like them or it doesn’t mention Lawrence Sargent Hall’s “The Ledge,” that finishes the vast collection. Hall’s story ranks as the most gut-wrenching short stories I have ever read, and it takes place in Maine.
If you like the outdoors and hunting excites the soul, you better pick this one up. A book like this one comes by once in a lifetime. (Ken Allen)
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Innocent Bystander
Outdoors Bulletin Boards Need Stricter Monitoring
Mike Violette of Poland hosts Strictly Sports, a local, cable-television talk show that covers Maine’s interscholastic sports scene and professional teams. This low-budget, call-in program captures my interest because Violette keeps up with evolving news stories and trends. He strikes me as a man with enough knowledge to rival hosts on national sports programs, reason enough to tune in.
Early last December, a Boothbay caller, a Yankee fan, commented about win-lose records in games between the Red Sox and Yankees during each season in recent years.
I won’t bore you readers with details, but the caller’s statistics were flat-out wrong. I rolled my eyes and listened as this fellow began trying to make a point that would not work if he had used the correct win-lose figures between these two perennial rivals.
The erroneous stats must have flabbergasted Violette. For a few seconds, this TV host sat speechless, but finally he said, “You’re being stupid, caller,” and then, he cut the man off. Click…buzz. …Just like that.
Before drifting to a different topic, Violette and his co-host that week, Travis Lazarczyk, briefly discussed the real win-lose record and why this guy’s point didn’t work with the right stats.
Wow, I thought, I wish the people in charge of monitoring Internet bulletin boards behaved that decisively. It would eliminate lots of needless rows and spreading of misinformation.
What sense does it make to have a long discussion on a topic built on a statement that clearly has no basis in fact? And I want to emphasize we’re not talking opinions here, but rather, erroneous information. Violette gives callers a chance to express opinions based on a particle of facts.
Ten years ago, outdoors bulletin boards on the ‘Net caught my eye, and at first, I said to anyone who wanted to listen, “What an incredible medium!”
Such euphoria proved short-lived, though. Never in my life have I witnessed so much incorrect information being passed around. It astounded, and yes, depressed me. Is the general population that far off or does this ‘Net medium attract them? I strongly suspect the latter.
‘Net rats will spend days debating a point that’s factually incorrect, as if the world depended on how the thread ended. They rant and rave at one another, often fighting about a nonexistent issue.
These boards soon made me bitter enemies, too, because I often corrected posters. I couldn’t help myself, though, the editor in me. I felt some of the faulty info hurt movements in this state, movements started by well-meaning, hard-working activists and politicians. (Ken Allen)
Next Month: Two Maines Obvious Now
Talk about two Maines. No month makes this concept more obvious.
As a resident of the South Country, this writer loves March, which begins like more of winter but ends in spring with signs of the new season everywhere — crystalline snow on the backside of ridges, bare spots in fields, Canada geese in open rivers, woodcock returning before month’s end, new songbird sounds each morning, spring smells in the air and on and on it goes. And our economies depend less on winter sports.
North Country denizens just see more of winter this month, and snowmobiling continues unabated as hamlet motels, sporting camps, restaurants and convenience stores fill to capacity each weekend. What a boon for rural economies with limited job opportunities.
White-water canoeing starts in earnest before month’s end in the bottom third of the state, and pastoral trickles roar now, exciting arteries for travel for those with the courage and audacity to do it.
Before ice breaks up along coastal rivers, smelting peaks now before the spring freshet opens rivers and large streams to the ocean. Sea-run, rainbow-smelt spawning runs reach a climax now, and at least one other species attracts some folks — tommycod. This latter sport attracted legions in the 19th century, but now, many people have no clue about tommycods. They wouldn’t know one if they caught it.
As the month dwindles toward April, inland rainbow smelts also begin spring spawning runs up tributaries and outlets. This inland version of the sport differs, too. Instead of warm shelters, folks go forth into the frosty night with long-handled nets and dip the little silver darters.
Birders love March, and one of the pleasures is lying in bed shortly after dawn, listening to birdcalls and songs. Each day offers new sounds beyond the common ones such as the coo, coo, coo of a mourning dove and the sucking whistle of a northern cardinal, which sounds like a human trying to say who while sucking air inward. Good birders know all the sounds, or most of them anyway.
Open-water fishing in March can be good before spring melting, and in fact, low, clear rivers and streams offer far better action than April’s roaring currents. A handful of waters are open now, and they attract fly rodders far, far more than they do the bait crowd. Go figure.
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How Many Folks Know This Law?
Answer to “Do You Know?”
It’s illegal to store live bait in any water that has an S-4, S-5 or S-6 designation. S-4 means live bait for fishing is prohibited, S-5 means fly fishing only and S-6 means artificial lures only. S-4 allows dead bait and worms. Most baitfishers know about this law but you just know casual anglers don’t have a clue.
Here’s another bait regulation: Anglers can only use the baitfish listed on page 60 in the State of Maine Open Water Fishing Regulations booklet effective from Jan. 2008 to Mar. 31, 2010. This one does get broken often enough when uninformed folks trap their own bait in a water, catch a species not on page 60 and then decide to use that unlisted fish. Some of these anglers even break this law intentionally because they think it’s stupid not to use bait trapped in the very water they’re fishing.
Of New England’s northern states, only Maine has seen the popularity of hunting hold steady. The number of licenses issued there has stayed at about 200,000 since 1993. Paul Jacques of the state wildlife department thinks this is because Maine is better than its neighbors at keeping game and fish populations high for hunters and anglers.
—The Economist magazine, November 27, 2008.
You can see the statewide picture pretty clearly just from the newspaper headlines: “The deer aren’t there.” “Maine hunters coming up short.” “Winter more deadly than hunters.” And “Deer season proves as difficult as originally feared.”
—Roberta Scruggs blog, Downeast Magazine, December 2008.
Central and southern Maine have the ability to bounce back rather quickly.
—Lee Kantar, DIF&W deer biologist, hoping that deer numbers will pick up in 2009 after a dismal season in 2008. Same Roberta Scruggs blog.
Turtle shells have protected the species for millions of years. There are very few natural predators that can kill an adult turtle. But where it doesn’t work is against truck tires.
—Phil deMaynadiere, DIF&W biologist, praising a new oversized culvert installed with the Gorham bypass, designed to help wildlife cross the busy highway. John Richardson story, Portland Press Herald, December 15, 2008.
This is a place where young people can get connected to the rural community… We’re taking a site that would be unproductive and turning it into a recreational opportunity… It’s just a perfect site for brook trout.
—State Senator David Trahan, leading a project with Windsor gravel pit owners Bill Dion, Mark Hoffman, and Ron Giles, along with DIF&W, to turn the pit into a kids-only brook trout pond. Craig Crosby story, Central Maine Newspapers, December 6, 2008.
Maine is obligated to administer the (Allagash Wilderness Waterway) in such manner as to protect and enhance the values which caused it to be included in the (national) system of protected rivers. But the statute leaves the determination of how best to administer the (waterway) to meet those objectives to Maine.
—U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruling that the state, not the feds, determines how to best manage the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. The Court dismissed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate a state law guaranteeing AWW motor vehicle access points. Associated Press story, Lewiston Sun Journal, December 7, 2008.
These measures (are)… not only good for salmon and good for wildlife, but good for people, because these pesticides have been detected in drinking water.
—Josh Osborne-Klein, Earthjustice attorney, commenting on a decision by NOAA Fisheries Service under the Endangered Species Act that farms and orchards using three pesticides that harm Pacific Coast salmon will have to expand buffer zones around their fields so the chemicals don’t reach streams. Associated Press story, Kennebec Journal, November 19, 2008.
I’ve been going up (to northern Maine) for years hunting and it’s sad because we used to have a lot of out-of-state hunters that used to come to Maine and spend a lot of money here. You go up there now and there’s nobody there.
—Representative Dale Crafts, a new legislator appointed to the Fish and Wildlife Committee. Lewiston Sun Journal, December 23, 2008.
There is no easy solution or someone somewhere would have patented it. Sounds and lights have all been tried, but there really isn’t much you can do to rid south-central Maine of crows. You might manage to move them from one area, but they’ll just go someplace else. And they might come back.
—Tom Hayward of the Stanton Bird Club, commenting on a problem at the Auburn city garage with a winter flock of “rowdy” crows. The city sends a police car to the site each evening with blaring sirens and flashing lights to move the birds and problem elsewhere. Scott Taylor story, Lewiston Sun Journal, December 22, 2008.
States that have adopted some form of boater education have seen meaningful and measurable decline in the number of accidents and fatalities… Unfortunately, Maine is one of only two New England States that lacks some form of mandatory boating safety education.
—Maureen Healey, executive director of the Personal Watercraft Industry Association that will support another attempt this legislative session to require mandatory boater education in Maine. Guest column, Lewiston Sun Journal, December 21, 2008.
