A Few Screws Loose

 The idea that trout don't live in ugly places is bull. Well, I guess we can find beauty in a lot of places, but the crusty railroad bridge abutment I sat on watching water slide by beneath, tucked within a couple hundred yards between roads lined with industry and shabby houses isn't most people's view of pretty. Nor mine, really. But there is an aesthetic of sorts to decay. When my neurodivergence wandered down the path of model railroading, I took joy in rust and grime and making things look old. I used chalk dust, sometimes dry sometimes not, to make streaks on iron oar cars. I tried to get walls and stonework to look worn, because that was natural. Paint chips, railroad ties crack, and metal rusts. At ten years old I was plenty conscious of that. I looked up to model makers who created urban landscapes that looked right more so than I did those who focused on dramatic natural landscapes. Perhaps that carried over with time, because though I have little interest in building a model railroad through a crumbling urban ecosystem of my own creation, there's still draw to fish a trout stream through the real thing. 

Not long ago I heard a switch-up of the old trout and beautiful places quote, this one was "trout don't live in ugly places, but they're stocked in them". This doesn't hold up either, because the very reason I sat on that bridge abutment was because this urban, grungy stream held trout that were born there. Some quite nice ones in fact. On a different day not far from where I sat I stood on the bank while my friend Grant blew a shot at a very good wild trout indeed, one we both saw enough of to make us wince when that line went slack. Of course, these were brown trout, and their ancestors had indeed been stocked. But they are wild trout none-the-less, and just one example of many in such a setting. Trout hunting has taken me past homeless encampments, under factories, and around more than a few discarded needles. In southern New England it would even seem that some of the prettier, wilder streams have all but lost their ability to produce good wild fish while some urban streams continue to kick out quality fish. It's a tenuous existence, of course. I've watched two of my favorite urban wild trout streams collapse over the last five years. These fish are riding a razor's edge. 

Just a few feet below me was clear water and rock, but also a heaping pile of nails, screws, and other discarded metal. I see a lot of things dumped from urban bridges and this was no surprise. It was quite a volume though. It would be interesting to know what becomes of this and other human metallic waste. In some places our species is creating artificial mineral deposits, some exceptionally concentrated. The current river courses of many Great Lakes tributaries could probably be mined for lead in the distant future. And this pile of rusting nails, if it doesn't just rot away first, could conceivably become some sort of iron deposit in a conglomerate rock layer of this river's substrate. 

Long before that ever happens, though, I hoped to catch some sort of stream born non-native salmonid. Ideally a robust one with orange on its belly and sharp black spots on it's flanks. A beautiful in wild thing that shouldn't be there, in a landscape of our own creation, a river marred unrecognizable from it's former glory. Sometimes, we don't even know what we had after it's gone. 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, Sammy, and Cris & Jennifer, Courtney, Hunter, Gordon, Thomas, Trevor, Eric, Evan, and Javier for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.

My Search For a Connecticut Moose (Pt. 2)

Opening up a game camera, turning it on, and hitting replay comes with quite a feeling of anticipation, especially when the goal it to capture a rare animal and you know one had walked through the area a time or two just before you places the camera. But that anticipation is frequently followed by minor disappointment- or at least it is for me, since I have no idea what I'm doing. My first camera pull revealed only the most elusive of animals... a half dozen shots of grey squirrels. Award winning, without a doubt. 

He's there, in the bottom left. Just peaking, seemingly aware of the camera. I won't lie it took a bit for me to figure out what had triggered the camera. And I should really re-set the date and time, jeez.... 

After a few visits to the site without anything of interest on camera and no fresh sign, I started to branch out. The initial forays were just to the surrounding areas. The two old beaver meadows I'd placed the trail cameras near weren't the only good looking habitat in the surrounding area. Just downstream was a much large, still active beaver meadow and pond. That was the first obvious place too look. Perhaps the moose hadn't strayed far but had just hopped down in elevation a tiny bit to an even more sheltered area. Emily and I did a full lap of that wetland one day, and though there was deer, coyote, and bobcat sign there were no moose tracks. On the next visit, my mother and I hiked not down watershed but up, to another small beaver meadow and a clear cut. Again, no moose sign.

Answers to how far an individual moose will range very. The state of New York indicates a broad range of five to fifty square miles. Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife says "With its great size and forage demands, the home range of the average moose in any given season is approximately three to six square miles, although they habitually wander much further." The website All About Moose sites data from Alberta suggesting that bulls have a range of 55 miles in the winter and 22 in the summer. Considering all of Connecticut is 5,543 square miles, that means I'm looking at a potential 1/100 chunk of the state for my bull (I'd found both cow and bull tracks). That's not huge but it isn't insignificant either. The question then became, should I break the habitat up into pieces I think look more suitable, or take a more random approach? One method that crossed my mind was walking and driving the easier routes and trying to find tracks where an individual had crossed the road. Though there isn't a rod grid per-se in Connecticut, there are enough roads to create a multitude of closed loops. So by driving or hiking those loops, I could at least determine if a moose had crossed into or out of them, possibly pinning one down to a confined area that it hadn't yet left. This wasn't a highly appealing strategy to me, but perhaps something I could use down the road if I found tracks that were a few days old. 

The activity lull convinced me to give the area a little rest. I pulled my cameras and it was a couple weeks before I returned. Sometimes absence is important. I try to be discrete and unimpactful, but there's no such thing as being entirely so. I know I leave smells and signs when I'm out there, and animals recognize these. So I let the woods rest, let the moose do their thing if they were still anywhere nearby. 

When I returned, it was past the first day of meteorological spring, and the weather had definitely made a turn. There was still snow on the ground, a touch more than last I'd been in fact, but it was all hard and crusted over now. It was also covered with all sorts of branches and hemlock needles from a number of very windy days. Emily and I made our way to the area where sign had been turning up most consistently before, sometimes able to stay on top of the hard snow, sometimes post-holing more than we'd like. It was a loud form of travel, and I had no illusions of sneaking up on a moose this time. I just hoped we might find tracks again. Deer sign was plenty at first, but no moose. Whitetail deer are such a ubiquitous part of the northeast woodlands today. In fact, far more so than was historically the case. When the northeast was colonized, there where whitetail deer here, but apparently fewer than today. Colonists fairly rapidly hunted these deer to near or full extirpation in many places. ¹In Burrilville: As It Was, and As It Is, published in 1856, Horace A. Keach writes "To a citizen of this town, it will not seem improbable when we suggest that the last deer of Rhode Island was shot on the margin of Wallum Lake." It was likely that the reforestation of the New England and some reintroduction efforts that allowed whitetail deer to return, and likely to levels well beyond their former numbers. Deer don't do poorly in a lightly developed landscape. They tolerate suburbia, and they especially like farms. In the midwest, where corn crop makes up tens of thousands of square miles, deer flourish. In 2020 in Pennsylvania, hunters harvested 435,180 deer according to the Pennsylvania Game Commission. In tiny and developed Connecticut, there are still well over 100,000 deer. See, deer also love not being predated, and despite the complaints hunters make about coyotes and bear, we got rid of the two effective deer predators keeping New England's population in check: wolves and mountain lions. Coyote are not great deer predators, though they can take some in deep snow when the deer are post-holing and they are able to run along on top. But neither they, nor we, do that good a job of managing deer herds, to the degree that whitetail deer can be ecologically detrimental given their wide and often dense distribution. They have outsized impacts on the plants they favor to feed on, and when too numerous can clean out undergrowth in what would otherwise be more diverse and healthy forest. 

There were deer tracks everywhere in this wood, including some big ones. But eventually, finally, there it was again: that unmistakably bigger trackway of a moose. 

I decided we should follow these tracks, even though they weren't that fresh. We stood to learn a lot if we could follow this animal's movements. Like a man on a mission, step after step I followed that moose. At one point I almost lost the trackway when it went into a patch of ground the snow had thawed from. There was what I though to be a different set of prints along it, and after a bit I determined that the moose had simply bedded down in that clear patch and left it right about where it entered. The animal made a few decisions that to my mind made little sense, including back tracking on two occasions, once right on top of it's own tracks, another just a few yards off. It moved eastward but zigzagged. Mostly it traveled at the same steady pace, but at times it slowed and its path meandered more. It may have covered the ground I followed it over in much less time than it took Emily and I to- about three miles, I'd estimate. Eventually, the trackway led us to one of the biggest wetlands in the area, and that area was covered in moose tracks. I'd say we saw trackways from at least five different individuals. This was mighty encouraging. I picked a spot to put up a camera again where two individuals passed through in a logical choke point, or funnel-like form to the landscape that I hoped would force a moose in front of my camera. Following the trackways had shaken my confidence a little, though. I was less than sure another moose would pass through this spot within a few weeks. They were a little more careless and erratic in their travelling than I'd expected them to be. Of course, I don't know what made the individual we followed back track, or why it followed certain topographic contours, or why it seemed to slow when it did. If I did know that, this would all make perfectly good sense to me I'm sure. But I'm no moose. My foolish human brain wasn't evolved nor trained by life around making the same decisions that a moose has to, so I was anthropomorphizing some I'm sure. We can't help that, we think "what would I do if I was a moose", when what we should be thinking is simply "what does a moose do". In complete ignorance of what a moose does at any given time, I have to think it's path was meandering and illogical. In reality, that moose's path made complete sense... to the moose. It is under no obligation to make sense to me. 

After placing the camera, we made our own tracks out. It's very probable that a moose would look at these and think they made no sense at all. I've been followed by animals before, usually coyotes. In my mid teens I spent a lot of time wandering the woods in deep snow, and on many occasions I'd find coyote prints following my own as I back tracked not infrequently. This never worried me at all, though there are rare instances of coyotes killing. Most coyote-human interactions are extremely benign. Often, claims of coyote "attacks" wouldn't be best characterized as such, and instances of coyotes biting people as the aggressor aren't very common, though they're becoming more frequent with time.² I've never once felt threatened by coyotes. But they do follow my tracks sometimes. Why? They probably aren't hunting me, I know that. A lot of the time, I got the impression they were using my path as easier passage. The snow was light and powdery many of these occasions, such that travel would be slow going even for a light canid. My path, plowed deep as I dragged through the snow pushing stubbornly onward, must look quite inviting to any traveling animal. Perhaps it was curiosity though; I wasn't likely to spot tracks over top of mine in these woods were there not snow. Maybe I'm being followed more often than I think.

¹ I found this source through Christian McBurney's article "When Deer Became Extinct in Rhode Island" on smallstatebighistory.com, a great site with a lot of Rhode Island historical articles. The book itself is the second very old piece of locally specific literature I've now read a chunk of for the sake of one of these sorts of blog posts. It can be purchased or is available archived online and is interesting in its own right. 

² Coyote Attacks on Humans in the United States and Canada, L. A. White and S. D. Gehrt, 2009.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, Sammy, and Cris & Jennifer, Courtney, Hunter, Gordon, Thomas, Trevor, Eric, Evan, and Javier for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.

Solitudinous

 There's no such word, but these are the sorts of things that come to mind when you are by your lonesome, laying on the forest floor focusing on breathing and stretching to relive tension in your back. I find I really feel do fatigue now, that close to two decades of  tromping around in the woods, rivers, and urban landscape with a variety of shoulder-mounted carrying cases- be the slings or back packs -loaded up with cameras, fishing tackle, and necessities did eventually start to do damage. So I can't just ignore it anymore. I have to pick and chose what I carry and how I carry it, and I need to rest and stretch. And so that's what I was doing, twisted into an odd pose on the forest floor, trying to get my diaphragm to do what I'm told it should do instead of what years of bad posture have taught it to do; and trying to stretch the muscles in my shoulder so I wouldn't keep wanting to kill myself so much. It would be a rather odd sight were anyone to come upon me, but such an encounter would be doubtful. This was BFE, if ever such a place existed. I'd just caught the first fish of the day. She was a lovely little brook trout no more than four and a half inches in length and had come up for a dark colored deer-hair caddis. I was fishing the way I wanted to this day: with a dry fly. This was to spite fairly cool water temperatures. I'm sure that I could have tempted a few more and perhaps larger fish with a nymph of some sort, but there was no need. Some bugs were active, including the cursory winter stones which occasionally skittered across the pools. I only saw one meet its demise in the rise form of a fish, though. A few hundred yards in and the plop of the little char as I dropped it from by barbless hook back into the stream told me I could take a rest. 

So there I lay in the dappled light on the forest floor, stretching and thinking about everything and nothing. It was a very bright, bluebird day. A cold front had passed through overnight, draped from a low pressure center that tracked through Canada. In front of it had been seasonably warm air in the mid to high fifties, as well as some rain and clouds. Though the air behind the front wasn't cold necessarily it was cold-er. And wind came with it. It whipped the tree tops about a bit and I occasionally heard a branch come down. Not big ones, really, but enough to make me wonder if one might clock me in the head at some point. The sun and the deep blue sky felt a bit contrary to the wind, but the two do often come in tandem. Those dry, clear, bright post-frontal day are wind makers. The blue was brilliant though, and the radiant heat from our burning gas ball was doing wonders for my hands that had gotten a little chilled coming in contact with the water. 

When I did finally stand back up I felt a fair bit better, but everything was bluer than it ought to be. The bright sky had left a lasting tint to my vision that lingered a good few minutes. I shouldered my sling pack, this time backwards to try to counteract the lingering soreness in my right shoulder, and told myself to just leave it in the car next time. I'd be far better off pocketing a box of flies and spool of tippet, and did I really need the camera? 

I worked my way down stream, being picky about where I fished. This wasn't the time to try to eek a fish out of every nook and cranny, I just wanted to fish some of the longer runs and pools. I didn't used to fish down very often. It was Alan Petrucci that changed my direction in that regard. Prior to knowing Alan I fished pretty strictly upstream, trying to stay behind and out of sight of the trout. This worked fine, but I learned from Alan that I could put my fly in places while going down that one just couldn't get it to while going up. I still fish up sometimes, but not always. 

I reached a run that that looks perfect, and eased into a position on the bank well above it. I gathered my fly line in hand, pulled back, and let it fly in a short bow and arrow cast. I then fed line to let the fly drift down the run. When it had drifted a distance I felt sufficient, I let it come about and hang in the current. A waking dry fly like this has almost universal appeal to Salvelinus fontinalis. On one of the popular and pressured stretches of river in northern Maine I was told to fish stonefly nymphs, that a mono rig would serve me well, that these brook trout were harder. I listened, but only for a bit. Frustration and my own rationale wouldn't let me fish a mono rig to a big wild brook trout, it felt counter to what should be done. Perhaps luck is a better friend to me than I usually suspect it is, but I had absolutely no difficulty catching robust brookies and landlocked salmon on a skated Hornberg. Don't let these nymphing nerds fool you; brook trout love a skated fly. And even in that barely forty degree water in Central Connecticut, it worked a charm. Up came a brookie, and I whiffed him like I was trying to. I played with that fish for a little while, getting it to come up again and again. Eventually, despite my best efforts, the hook did get stuck in that trout's mouth. 

I took another break, though not a stretching one. My camera had come out of my bag for the fish, may as well use it. I'm not sure why photography has always been a compulsion for me. From a technical standpoint, I remain very much an amateur. But there's been a camera in my hand on and off for almost as long as I have memories... pointed at the sky, at animals, at water. It's just something I do because it feels good and because I like pretty things. 

The stream took me down a little further, where a brushy meadow turned me back around. I rested again there though it hadn't been more than ten minutes since the last one- but only because I spotted a fish and decided to watch it for a little while. Eventually though the deer trails took me back to the car. It had been a satisfying little morning. 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, Sammy, and Cris & Jennifer, Courtney, Hunter, Gordon, Thomas, Trevor, Eric, and Evan for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.