March 2010 Almanac
~ THIS MONTH ~
Spring Springs This Month, But Snow Just Kills Us
Spring kicks off this month, March 20 to be exact, but the third month starts with plenty of snow and ice, looking like more of winter.
In the bottom third of the state, though, astute observers can see, smell, hear and feel spring coming every day unless a late storm beats the new season back.
• Snow melts in sunny, open spots, the wind carries a spring-like, fresh odor.
• Amorous skunks foul the night air.
• Newly returning birds add new notes to spring’s morning sounds.
• The thermometer rises as days become equal length to dark.
Observers who not only look but see note all the changes.
A new trend amazes folks who think about it. Winter and early spring fishing get more and more popular, and it’s not bait anglers who do participate, but rather, fly rodders. Go figure.
Crowds actually form on rivers such as the St. George where folks flock to hotspots such as the outlet below Sennebec Pond or Payson Park in Warren. Lifelong friendships begin in this snow-filled setting.
Smelters get out now on tidal rivers and streams and catch big smelts through the ice. A tiny segment of the population also fishes for tommycod now in coastal flowing waters. This sport proved bigger in the last half of the 1800s.
As the month wanes, inland smelters hit tributaries and outlets of rivers and ponds to catch the tiny, silvery baitfish, an old Maine tradition. Unfortunately, part of the tradition involves some folks drinking heavily, making the sport rowdy at times.
Calling coyotes at dawn and dusk excites predator hunters now because they have much milder temperatures than they did two months ago. Baiting these canines sweetens the attraction. Night hunters also take advantage of the warmer weather, but hey, it’s still plenty cold after the sun sets.
Fox season closes Feb. 28, so coyote hunters must watch the little red bandits now without shooting. From a management standpoint, it would not hurt the fox population to leave the season open through March. Predator hunting for wild canines draws a small number of hunters, explaining the reasoning behind that proposal.
As fields clear of snow, woodchuck hunters get out now and hunt those distant brown spots. This same crowd might take a pop at a crow, too, but serious crow hunters use smoothbores, camouflage clothing, calls and decoys.
Wildlife photographers really begin rambling this month as they shoot images of waterfowl, songbirds and eagles, a busy time for the naturalists among us.
White-water canoeing had a big spurt in popularity in the 1970s, but that has slowed in recent years. It’s a great sport, though, and it gets folks out early when spring melting and rain swells waters, making normally rocky rivers and streams a thrill now. Kayakers may outnumber canoeists these days.
~ TIPS OF THE MONTH ~
Running White-Water? Go With Flow
Once white-water canoeists buy a suitable canoe for running white-water, they need a personal flotation device and wet or dry suit for safety in water that occasionally hovers between 34 and 39 degrees Fahrenheit in March.
An attitude change ranks as the next item for safety on the agenda. Many canoeists try to make tricky maneuvers in rock-laden channels to get around obstacles, but the best bet makes more sense much of the time. When the current carries the canoe forward and paddling cannot slow it down enough for a ferry or abrupt change in direction, go with the flow and miss rocks with small adjustments in direction that just miss boulders and jagged ledges.
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Early Stream Fly-Fishing
Fly fishing in early spring streams and rivers grows in popularity along waters such as the St. George River, parts of the Kennebec River, Cobbossee Stream and Nezinscot Stream. In the early, frigid water, weighted flies shift the odds for anglers because early season trout hang close to bottom. They don’t move far to feed, so the savvy fly rodder gets his offering right on the fish’s nose to induce a strike.
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March Bicycling
Folks are getting into exercising so they can better hunt and fish. If unseasonably warm weather prevails, many of them like to start bicycling during March, particularly in the bottom third of Maine as the month rushes to a close. One danger now involves excessive sand on road edges, a byproduct of winter sanding.
Sometimes, it piles so deep that it can throw a rider off the bicycle, so beware and avoid going through sand. If a car coming up behind does not allow the biker to swing from the breakdown lane into the main traffic lane, stop the bicycle and let the vehicle or vehicles pass and then go into the road to get around a sandy spot.
~ WHERE THE ACTION IS ~
Great Time to Hunt Coyotes
This month cries for hunting the wily coyotes, and two areas of Maine shine as good places to find open country and good coyote populations:
• In Southern Maine, predator hunters have a huge expanse of forests and abandoned fields to shoot coyotes. This hunting ground lies within an area with Acton on the southwest corner (DeLorme’s The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer [MAG], Map 2, B-1) Buxton on the southeast (Map 3, A-1 and Map 5, E-1), Fryeburg on the northwest (Maps 4, A-1 and 10, E-1) and Otisfield on the northeast (Maps 5, A-1 and 11, E-1). Hunters might key on fields off Routes 117, 113, 5, 25, 160, 11, 110 and particularly side roads off main arteries.
• Just southwest of Bangor (Map 22), coyote hunters might hit potential spots along Routes 7, 139, 69, 9, 202, 222 and secondary roads off them where they can find working fields, abandoned fields and clear-cuts where a caller or baiter can set up a hunt.
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Great Pond’s Great Pike Action
March excitement in the Belgrade Lakes includes ice-fishing for northern pike on Great Pond (MAG, Map 12, A-4 and Map 20, E-4), one of Maine’s great pike destinations.
The boat launch lies just south of Belgrade Lakes village – turn east off Route 27 onto the Sahagian Road. (Visitors turn where a small lot holds a bunch of stored boats.)
One Great Pond honey hole is beside the boat launch, the cove in front of the marina. (No kiddin’!) No one needs a snow sled to travel…foot power works fine because the walk is but 100 yards – tops.) Pike concentrate in this shallow, spring-brook-fed cove for spring spawning.
North Bay on the northeast corner of the pond attracts pikers in the know. This bay stretches out as large as many Maine ponds, and the area northeast of Chute Island and northwest of Snake Point hold pike.
Another spot is the south end of the pond around Austin Bog.
The three above spots are great bets in March. By June, these cold-water fish spread into deeper water, say around the giant, submerged boulders off Hoyt Island, but now, these toothy critters like the shallows.
~ NEWS & TIDBITS ~
Cobbossee Bass Story from 1887
W.H. Bunting, a reader from North Whitefield, found the following news story in the Richmond Bee, a newspaper from the 1880s. In the July 1, 1887 edition, the news story said, “George B. Randlette and Frank H. Lovell left for Cobbossee Lake Tuesday afternoon and returned here Wednesday evening. The result of the short fishing trip was a string of 25 as handsome [smallmouth] bass as we ever wish to see. Several of them weighed over three pounds each, and the entire lot average over a pound and three-quarters.”
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Who Lost It?
According to Sidney J. Harris, “We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from active to passive voice – that is until we have stopped saying, “The deer was wounded and lost,” and we say, “I wounded the deer and lost its trail.”
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It Takes 8,000 Seedlings
It takes 8,000 seedlings to produce one, large mature tree, a point driven home this past summer when hundreds of tiny oaks sprung from acorns in the bare, sparsely grassed earth beside the end of this writer’s driveway. A stately tree in Maine requires a minimum of 100 square feet, so 7,999 oak saplings must eventually die to make room for one magnificent tree.
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Tree Strategies
Occasionally in Maine, an early October snowstorm shows astute observers what it costs hardwood trees to get above other trees and capture sunlight for photosynthesis. The leaves still on the trees collect so much snow that it weighs down limbs, breaking many, nature’s way of pruning.
It also shows us the strategy used by deciduous trees to avoid this pitfall by shedding leaves before seasonable snows fall. If hardwoods kept leaves through winter, then most trees would die after losing most of their limbs over a decade or two.
Conifers, particularly spruce and fir, have limbs slanting downward rather than upward, which resist breaking and promote the white stuff sliding off in the meager heat of a midday sun.
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How Many Large Oaks to Build a Warship?
In colonial times, shipbuilders needed 700 large oaks to build a 3-masted, 74-gun ship of the line. In addition, it took three white pines, 120 feet tall with a 40-inch diameter butt and a 27-inch top, to make the masts. Trees that met this specification earned the name “King’s Pine,” and it was illegal to cut them for anything but the British Navy.
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Pine-Needle Clusters Grow in Exact Numbers
The state tree, the white pine (Pinus strobes), grow its 4-inch long, trilobal needles in clusters of five, but a red pine has clusters of two. The famous longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) of the deep South – also called yellow pine – has clusters of three. This tidbit about needles shows Mother Nature’s organized, meticulous manner when making her creations.
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Wind Does the Work
Most trees in northern forests, as opposed to tropical rainforests, rely on wind rather than animals such as bees to pollinate them. Perhaps trees evolved this way because northern forests have too few animals to spread pollen successfully and rainforests too little wind.
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We’ve Got Fishing Regulations to Envy
Maine has more fly-fishing-only (FFO) waters than any other state, and most of them are in clusters in the northern half of the state, thanks to farsighted sporting-camp owners who pushed for legislation a century ago. (Back then, it required legislation to change a water to FFO.)
Interestingly, lots of these waters are shallow ponds that lend themselves to FFO as opposed to deep-water ponds.
Also, a quick perusal of general bag limits in other states reveals that Maine has the lowest salmonid bag limit of any other state.
In eight counties in Maine, we can only kill two salmonids a day from lakes and ponds. Furthermore, in the other eight counties, we can kill five brook trout from lakes, ponds, rivers, brooks and streams, but like in the rest of the state, the law allows but two brown trout, rainbow trout, splake or lake trout. In short, of the four species, the daily bag limit is only two fish. If it’s an aggregate instead of the same species – say one brown and one rainbow – that’s the limit for the day.
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Maine the Coldest!
Of eight cities in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire, the one Maine location – Portland – has the coldest daily average temperatures in August and February. The temperature averages 67.3 in August and 23.3 Fahrenheit in February. But: Portland can be downright balmy compared to Northern Maine locations such as Caribou, which can be 10 degrees colder on average.
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Maine’s Capital Closer to Boston Than Fort Kent
Augusta lies 170 miles from Boston, but 261 miles from Fort Kent and 174 miles from Calais, illustrating that, compared to other New England states, Maine is a large geographical area.
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What Do Bangor and Paris Have in Common?
Paris and Bangor lie on the same latitude line with one another, making us wonder why Bangor is so cold compared to Paris in winter.
~ BIRD OF THE MONTH ~
Mourning Doves Will Keep You Awake During March
Oh, yes, as the first gray light of dawn begins in March, mourning doves (Zenaida macroura) start calling that mournful, hollow coo-coo-coo, so we sink deeper into the pillow and hope the “noise” stops, but it doesn’t as these birds continue their mating antics while snow still covers the ground.
To the inexperienced ear, the mourning dove’s call sounds like who-who-who, and casual observers might think, “To hell with the questions …just go back to sleep!”
While we’re half-asleep, we may think of the call as “noise,” but once awake, this sound has a soothing effect on the listener. In short, it may remind us of a melancholy moment, but that sadness may have an association no more serious than how mist resembles rain – a nagging, distant unpleasantness but still pleasurable.
It’s common for bird writers to compare species by size, and for the mourning dove, it’s easy to choose a blue jay as the measuring stick because this dove measures 12 inches long and a blue jay 11 to 12 1/2 inches.
Blue jays fall short in the weight and wingspan departments, though, and this difference really shows to the naked eye. A blue jay weighs three ounces and sports a 16-inch wingspan, and the dove goes 4.2 ounces (over 33 percent larger) and has an 18-inch wingspread.
John Audubon hunted game birds, waterfowl and songbirds, and like all hunters, he really scrutinized a blasted species up close. Mourning doves really shine when one lies in the hand inches from the nose, too.
Why?
This dove has vibrant, brownish-gray feathers, iridescent black spots on the wing coverts and sharp white on the tail that strike the viewer as beautiful. No photo or painting does the species justice – as hunters or poachers who have held one in their hand know. (Ken Allen)
~ DO YOU KNOW? ~
Leaf Shapes in Red and White Oak Provide IDs
Deer prefer the acorns from northern white oak as opposed to northern red oak. Do you know the major differences in the leaf-lobe shape that help distinguish the two species?
~ BOOK CORNER ~
A Must Read for All Maine Residents
Conditions May Vary by Gregory A. Zielinski (Down East, Camden, Maine) belongs in the bookcase of every Maine resident and visitor – a dynamite title for folks wanting to know about Maine weather. In fact, it isn’t much of an exaggeration to say the book could save the lives of folks who canoe big lakes or fish in the ocean. Tips from the book allow folks to notice gathering storms that meteorologists do miss in forecasts.
Chapters One and Two immediately impressed me, particularly the latter one, and they easily and smoothly drag the reader into the book:
Chapter One, “The Culture of Maine Weather,” intrigued this reader, particularly a section talking about benign weather forecasts slated for a weekend in March 1992 that turned into a major storm event. Maine’s weather has a reputation of fickleness that can make a meteorologist empty a whisky bottle after a particularly mistaken forecast.
Chapter Two explained weather terms we hear or see on television, radio or Internet forecasts – stuff like relative humidity, dew point, clouds, heat index, atmospheric pressure, wind direction, fronts and so forth.
As an example of what defining the terms meant to this book reviewer, I have a general idea of the definition of dew point, but the book succinctly and concisely defined it in layman’s terms, giving me one of those ah-ha moments.
Chapter Seven will intrigue readers because it has data on the number of days per winter when a measurable amount of snow falls. The answer may delight or depress each person, depending on whether they describe their glass as half-empty or half-full.
Old timers use to look into their pasture at the milk cow, or herd of milk cows or steers, and make accurate weather predictions. How did they do that? Bovines have a herding instinct and stand with their noses into the wind, and wind direction predicts weather. The book gets into this wind-direction stuff and how it affects what nature will deliver in 12 to 48 hours.
Winter 2009-2010 had several storms that illustrated a point driven home in the book. Old timers call storms coming up the coast “line storms” or “nor’easters.” They actually begin in the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic, and the low-pressure system from such storms makes the shape of a comma on weather maps. We’ve had plenty of nor’easters or line storms this past winter.
Also, the book explained another weather phenomenon that late 2009 and early 2010 have delivered in spades. When storms coming from the west join up with another low-pressure system coming from the south, big snowfalls or rains occur. We had several examples of these meteorological events in December and January where low pressures combined, leaving us with deep snow.
Conditions May Vary, a 176-page paperback, costs $15.95, a must buy. Don’t be turned off by the bad graphics, either, because the words contain so much info that folks can read it over and over for years and years to come. (Ken Allen)
~ INNOCENT BYSTANDER ~
Shooting Running Big Game at 400-yard Distances
A few years ago in the “Almanac,” I wrote a review of Jack O’Connor’s The Best of Jack O’Connor (Winchester Press), a fun read, but in the review, I made two negative comments about O’Connor:
• In more than one story, O’Connor shot at running big game such as deer from 400-yard distances, and yes, it led to self-admittedly wounded animals. Also, in one story, O’Connor shot wildly at a deer with just brush behind it when he had no idea where his partner stood – neither of these particularly responsible choices.
• O’Connor shamelessly imitated Ernest Hemingway’s prose.
Hemingway, one of the more influential American writers of the 20th century, would eventually win a Nobel Prize in 1954 two years after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, but he was ultra-famous in the late 1920s, thanks to the immense popularity of his first big novel – The Sun Also Rises. O’Connor, a college professor in his young manhood, surely noticed.
Recently, I read a new book by Hemingway simply entitled Under Kilamanjaro (The Kent State University Press), a very long (475 pages), previously unpublished manuscript, written about a safari in the early 1950s. In this book as well as in Green Hills of Africa (published in 1935), Hemingway was shooting at running big game such as Cape buffalo and rhinos at 400-yard distances, and yes, he and his guide lost at least one, a Cape buffalo.
Last December, I made the mistake of reading Under Kilimanjaro, Green Hills of Africa and the new restored edition of A Moveable Feast at the same time – literally. I’d read 50 pages in Under Kilimanjaro and then 25 in A Moveable Feast and then 100 pages in Green Hills of Africa, which mixed me up on details in the books, particularly the African titles.
However, one point was certain in Under Kilimanjaro and Green Hills of Africa. Hemingway used racist language galore, including the “n” word and “j” word, and in one place, he told the white hunter that he wanted to shoot one of the black workers in the butt. The white hunter told him that he shouldn’t do it because such an act would cause him – the white hunter – a lot of grief from the authorities. Hemingway was intending on doing it with his beloved .30-’06 Springfield, a cartridge that would surely cause bigger problems for the target than the authorities.
In Under Kilimanjaro, Ernest quotes his wife, Mary, saying, “Let’s be white about this.”
Under Kilimanjaro has a worse example from Mary, too, because Hemingway has a love affair with a black native, and Mary accepts it, saying just don’t pull this stunt with a white woman.
This book for all its frailties still offers Mainers with an interest in historical perspectives a good read – if for nothing else but the excellent descriptions of action hunts that capture the fear of shooting dangerous game.
Also, the two African safari books underscore a point that many thoughtful folks have expressed many times. Those American generations participating in World War I and World War II might have been the great generations, but as some of us know who lived in the 1950s, the WWII generation was the greatest generation if you happened to be a white-Anglo-Saxon protestant. People then routinely used racist language and held minorities back.
Reading the Hemingway books brought it all back and reminded me of a Maine in another time when two trends were receiving big-time attention.
• In the 1950s, wild, irresponsible shooting led to upwards of 19 shooting deaths of Maine hunters in a year. Can you imagine the political turmoil today if Maine hunters shot upwards to 20 hunters in a single season? There would be bills to outlaw the sport.
• Blacks were just beginning to gain political momentum, and Mainers noticed the violent encounters on the news many evenings.
Baby boomers can get an excellent glimpse into the world into which they were born by reading Under Kilimanjaro, and the other two books give us an idea of how we got there. (Ken Allen)
~ NEXT MONTH ~
April Starts Out Like More of Winter
No month illustrates the two Maines better than April. In the bottom third of Maine, snow goes quickly in the fourth month, and folks work feverishly on spring raking, laying mulch and sprucing up the yard for the first mowing session. In the North Country, though, snowmobiling continues in the warming sunshine as snow lasts until at least Patriot’s Day.
Indeed, April begins like more of winter, but even in Southern Maine, the month ends with black flies and mint-green foliage first showing that timid color before the viridescent explosion of late May.
Ice-out mania hits full swing in Southern, Central and Mid-coast Maine as ice goes out in early to mid-April, depending on elevation and latitude, and according to The Maine Sportsman’s The One That Didn’t Get Away Club, a big chunk of the trophy fish entered come during the first few weeks after ice-out. Many of us may not get a wall hanger for the Club, but by gosh, we get the biggest fish of the year now.
The other hot time for this Club occurs in early January, and fall, allegedly the time to catch trophies, has a small sampling in this prestigious recognition of successful big fish anglers.
Brook fishing starts slow, so slow that April Fool’s Day seems like the appropriate choice for the open-water season to begin, but by late April, brook fishing for brookies sizzles as black flies swarm and alder leaves reach the size of a mouse’s ear.
Scouting for turkeys grabs lots of attention now, and a handful of folks hunt woodchucks in fields with low grass and no snow, perfect for drawing woodchucks out for early spring feasts.
Speaking of hunting, serious deer hunters scout now because signs from the fall stay frozen all winter. They’re still visible now, so folks take advantage.
Besides, it just feels good to get out now after a winter of snowshoes or forced prison in our own houses. Hiking, scouting and even camping in the form of canoe tripping, backpacking and car camping excite a few folks. Any warm day now works as a bonus and promise of what’s to come in the next few weeks as the sun rises higher and temperatures correspond.
~ ANSWER TO “DO YOU KNOW?” ~
The Lobes and Tips Distinguish the Two
Deer prefer northern-white-oak acorns because they are sweeter, thanks to having less tannic acid than northern red oak acorns. Given a choice, deer flock to the white species every time.
Looking at the leaf lobes on each species tells the difference so dramatically someone standing on the ground and looking at foliage on the lowest limb can easily distinguish the two.
The white oak has smooth, rounded lobes but the red oak has bristles on the ends of the sharply angular, pointed lobes.
Often, the white oak has more shallow sinuses than the more deeply notched sinuses of the red oak, but this rule has exceptions so proves little of an aid for IDing species. However, as a curiosity, it’s fun to look at white-oak leaves to see how many have deep sinuses and how many don’t.
In winter, the bark helps with identification:
• On mature red oak, as the name suggests, the shallow fissures often have a red tinge against the smooth, gray ridges. On immature red oak, the bark looks smooth and gray.
• On mature white oak with large trunks, long, peeling ridges form, often in small blocks with patches of white.
• Split red oak for the woodshed has a red tinge.
Maine lies on the northern extreme of oak habitat on this continent, and of the two, red oak grows further north than white oak in the Pine Tree State.
Just one example of this rule lies a few miles north of the Spencer Road that goes west off Route 201 by Parlin Pond. Not much oak grows north of a hardwood ridge covered with red oak; however, red oak does extend up the St. John River valley in Eastern Maine.
Precious little white oak grows north of York and Cumberland counties, but folks in the know living in Southern Maine key on white oaks during deer season.
