Yooper Wolves

 The hour or two I spent on the Two Hearted River was tantalizing, not satiating. The Lake Superior don't have the steelhead reputation that the other lakes do, but this river's reputation proceeds itself through the writings of Hemingway. I confess, though I have read The Old Man and The Sea and Big Two Hearted River, if Hemingway had never fished the Two Hearted and written about it I'm not sure it would have changed my opinion of it for the worse at all. I mostly mention it because that's how others know of it. The Two Hearted is a low gradient, winding, tannic river whose predominant year round salmonid is the native brook trout. The lake run rainbows reportedly average about six pounds here, though my first hand experience cannot corroborate that claim as I saw no evidence of any such fish in my time there, aside from a very small number of other anglers fishing for them. Spoons seemed to be the method of choice up there, which is a departure from the float-based or bottom bouncing approach I've seen in most other places I'd fished on the Great Lakes. There were also far fewer people here. By leaps and bounds, in fact. I made for five in total on a few hundred yards of water. This certainly owes to the remoteness of the location as much as anything. Michigan's Upper Peninsula is a sparsely populated place that reminds me of Northern Maine superficially. Resource extraction is the primary industries up here. Logging and mining lead the tables. Iron and copper both come from ground here. Later in the trip we'd meet a rock shop owner on the lower peninsula who's family were Yoopers, and she talked about inheriting large pieces of float copper that were found on her family's farm. Indirectly, it was the extraction industry the got me there. On November 10th, 1975, the jewel of the Great Lakes big iron boats, the Edmund Fitzgerald, sank during a monstrous storm. Losing big boats was not a particularly rare occurrence on the lakes up until that point, but none had quite the impact on popular culture that the Fitz did, and her end was a wakeup call that essentially ended a long string of lost vessels and crew. This November 10th was the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and that was why we were on the Upper Peninsula, and how I ended up stripping streamers in the languid, black runs at the very end of the Two Hearted River.

The river almost parallels the shore of Superior at it's lower end, though it would be hard to call such a winding path parallel to anything. The very last leg almost is straight before it juts sharply north and into the lake. Before that, though, her course is a very sinuous one through the stark landscape of dunes; all sand with scattered pines, many dead. The weather on November 10th 2025 was much, much better than the weather on the same date in 1975, but a stiff breeze out of the northeast made standing facing the lake a fairly unpleasant experience. It was easy enough to avoid that, thankfully, tucking in behind the dunes. Tolerable though it may have been, and as much water as I was able to cover without impedance, no chrome flashes lit up the darkly stained water. No grabs met my slowly pulled swings either. Hours spent casting were limited, though, and perhaps a future visit will go differently. There are other animals to encounter on the Upper Peninsula, though. One is certainly rarer but less out of place than the introduced rainbows. 

Across much of the Eastern half of country, wolves are a thing of the past. They eat our cattle and sometimes us, so settlers pushed them back hard. Though rumored sightings circle, the claimed last wolf in Connecticut was killed by Isreal Putnam in the town of Pomfret. Wolves held their grasp in Michigan longer. It wouldn't be until the 1910 that wolves would be beaten down from the Lower Peninsula. Even when they were gone there, the declining UP population was faced with bounties that remained instated until 1965¹. Though granted full protection not long after, it would take Wisconsin's population rebounding for animals to filter back onto the UP and repopulated. They've grown in number since, exceeding 762 in 2024 according to Michigan DNR. Isle Royale has the most significant density, but wolves are seen in other wild parts of the peninsula. 

As I've written about before, I adore large animals, predatory animals, and dangerous animals. Though I had no delusions of getting a chance to actually lay eyes on a wild wolf- they are very good at not being seen when they don't want to be -maybe, just maybe, I might be able to hear one. 

Being some sort of strange freak, I've spent countless hours standing in the woods in the dark listening to the sounds of wildlife. From endangered frogs to owls to coyotes, to even cryptids, I've put a lot of time in "with my ears on". A cackling pack of coyotes, barking fox, or overhead barred owl alarm call stopped fazing me years ago. Hours of annotated and carefully sorted sound recordings going back to when I was just 14 of woodland noise lace multiple hard drives. To say my comfort level in the dark is high would be an understatement. That, and my cursory understanding of topography, predator habits, seasonal prey movements, and modern satellite imagery gave me the confidence to go see if I might hear the wild wolves howl. I picked a spot where a wetland river corridor abutted rolling hills with hardwoods and patchy logging cuts. It was well out of town and closer to an area with reported sightings than some other decent looking habitat. Three of us- my partner Emily, our friend Ian, and myself -split from the group at our little cabin, hopped in the rental van, and went on a little adventure. 

The woods in southern New England don't feel wild at night. It's impossible to get away from anthropogenic noise or sound, so you always know you're near dense settlement and civilization. There's always a plane going by overhead and low enough to hear. Even in the most remote place in Connecticut, on a dry night you'll hear someone's broken muffler in the distance. Light from towns illuminates the bottom of the cloud deck and reflects everywhere. The only time you can really get away from that is during a heavy snow storm. But there, down a long dirt road and away from town, the Upper Peninsula had that feel... that silence. The air wasn't moving. We heard no car, no plane. Any crunch or scrape of gravel from our feet was deafening.  Those who appreciate such desolation seem automatically inclined to speak only in hushed tones. And that we did, remarking in amazement at just how silent it really was. I just hoped, maybe, that silence would be broken by a sound that has sent shivers down the backs of our species for millennia. 

It was almost funny how long it didn't take. The three of us were all whispering when something low and distant caught my attention and I made an abrupt "Shhh, SHHH!". Ian and Emily went silent, and we all heard them. They were far away, but it was hard for me to mistake what we were hearing. Those were not coyotes. There were only a few voices, no yips and barks... just long, low, mournful howls. I stood in awe for just a moment before being overtaken by the need to get closer. "Let's go, we can get closer to them", I urged, and we hopped back in the van. The howls had come from our north, so we followed the road that direction, up into the hardwood forest. We stopped again, and after a little while, heard another- this time apparently individual -caller. It seemed just as far off as the first howls. Once again, we hopped in the van and drove north. This time, our wolves wouldn't talk again. Instead, a single truck, tooling around the dirt roads on a joy ride, interrupted the silence and darkness. It made me realize just how load and obvious our vehicle certainly was, and how unlikely it was that we'd be able to gain ground on animals that had a vested interest in not being seen. We decided to call it a night, the echo of those distant howls still reverberating in my head, another voice that would surely call me back to this place some day down the road. 

¹ James H Hammill,  2013. "Wolf Recovery in Michigan" https://wolf.org/wolf-recovery-in-michigan/

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, Hunter, Gordon, Thomas, Trevor, Eric, Evan, Javier, Ryan, Dar, Eric, and Truman 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. 

Entitled Recreation

The puritan tiger beetle lives its larval stage in the sediments of a small number of sites along the banks of the Connecticut River. They live in vertically oriented burrows, which may at any time be submerged by flooding. That's fine, they can handle it. In fact flooding is a key to the maintenance of the sandy substrate these beetles need, and the disruption of the flood cycle be dams is one of the reasons there are only a small number of sites that hold these species left. The puritan tiger beetle is a federally threatened at the federal level and endangered in both Massachusetts and Connecticut. I've never seen a puritan tiger beetle, though I've long adored the tiger beetles in general. They're quick, alien looking, and often brilliantly colored insects that pique the "shiny thing" impulse in my brain. Ellipsoptera puritana has a wonderfully patterned back of tan and brown that may have a green sheen, and reflects almost white in the right sun. It fits the sandy habitat they hunt. And with long, slim legs, hunt they do. Tiger beetles are active and effective predators. I'd love to see one of these animals in the wild, but it's a bit hard given there may be fewer than 1,000 left in New England. And in Massachusetts, their plight isn't just being progressed by the dams and flood control that started the process, but by default of their habitat being appealing to people. Because clean sand isn't terribly common on the banks of the Connecticut, the very remaining places that are suitable for puritan tiger beetles make for a pleasant beach day for recreators that are likely blissfully unaware and careless of the imperiled species whose larval burrows they trample underfoot. 

All along the Connecticut River,  recreation has other negative impacts on insects. Odonata species (dragonflies and damselflies) are notably vulnerable. Many species emerge at the river edges on calm days, crawling to the edge and anchoring in place to shed their nymphal shuck and take their winged form. They're sensitive at this time, as it takes time for their wings to harden before they can take off. Sometimes, the wake of a passing boat full of anglers, partiers, or other recreators drowns them before they ever get the chance to take off. These wakes wash the shorelines of the river on a daily basis, even within the slow no wake zones, which were established to protect marinas, not dragonflies. The corpses of these insects and others wash into the silty water, floating lopsided and slightly mangled.  That muddy, silty wash has it's own repercussions. In Idaho, wake boats are being shown to be at fault for water quality issues in Payette Lake. Scientists testing for phosphorous, which stimulates plant and algae growth, found that levels were stirred up more on average by boat wakes than by natural wave action from.¹ My good friend David Gallipoli has been battling for legislation to regulate wake boat use on Payette. It's striking, to David and others, that recreation is as stubborn and detrimental and adversary as it is. "Out of all the extraction industries in the west- mining, logging, drilling -recreation is actually becoming the larger issue in some cases," says David. Living in McCall, he's had a front row seat to the impacts of over-use on the lake. And traveling and recreating all over the mountain west, he's seen other damage and change as well. "Part of it is just education", he says, alluding to the fact that most resource users simply aren't aware of how their activities can cause damage. And who can blame them? It isn't exactly widely available information. 

In upland forests back home in Connecticut, other recreational vehicles are causing all sorts of trouble. ATVs, dirt bikes, and off-road vehicles aren't a rare sight in some larger state forests, and it seems to the riders on them have a taste for the disruptive. On a warm April day I was out to monitor endangered wildlife in some arid upland habitat. The area had a handful of trails frequented by off-roaders. Alongside the trail in one spot was a vernal pool, a spot where I'd observed spotted salamander eggs, wood frogs, marbled salamander larvae, and once even a spotted turtle. Not many years ago off-roaders had left the adjacent trail and taken to the pond, turning it into a muddy, worthless bowl drying in the late spring sun, killing many of the delicate critters that relied on it. I was happy to see that it hadn't been disturbed yet this year. While I was off the trail doing my round, I hear dirt bikes and ATVs pass a few time. On the hike out, I gave the pool a glance again. No disruption. But before I reached the end of my walk out, I came upon a pool in the existing trail. Deeply rutted off road trails create unnatural pooling, and because water is a premium resource in these arid uplands amphibians gravitate to these anthropogenic vernal pools. The riders had ripped through this pool, and sitting next to it was a spotted salamander egg mass, high and dry and left to die in the sun. It hadn't been long though and it was still wet, so carefully I picked it up, made the last strides to my vehicle, and drove that dirt road like a tree-hugging madman to the closest pool. A dozen or so unhatched salamander larvae may be a drop in the bucket, but we're fighting a war of attrition against amphibians and reptiles. So many die in the road year over year, and it's just a matter of time before they lose the battle. I wasn't going to let these ones go without a fight. Whether they actually hatched or not I don't know, but I tried. 

Off-roading directly kills fauna, but that's far from it's only impact. It causes erosion, facilitates the spread of invasive plants, crushed out native ones, and can contribute to pollution. I've seen off-roaders in Connecticut run right up the center of a beautiful spring creek containing brook trout, slimy sculpin, and tiger spike-tail dragonflies. I've watched them rip up gravel bars and cross riffles on rivers that were part of the Atlantic salmon restoration project. I've seen new, unauthorized paths pop up in just a weeks time, right through land that timber rattlesnakes still inhabit, often going just feet within vital geologic structures, or crossing frequent travel routes. Beyond anecdotal examples such as these, this is a well studied topic. Texas biologist Richard B. Taylor compiled a review of literature of the subject, and it's a short and concise indictment on unmitigated off road vehicle use. The studies cited are thorough, from plant impacts ( "Hall (1980) concluded that ORVs reduce perennial and annual plant cover and density, and the overall above ground biomass. The degree of loss is dependent on the intensity of use, although the terms moderate and heavy use are relative and may vary from site to site")², to direct pollution ("Oil has been observed on the gravel beds of the Nueces River and many vehicles frequently ford areas deep enough to dislodge or wash off engine fluids into the river."), to wildlife health and stress ("Havlick (2002), cites numerous investigations that indicate wildlife including birds, reptiles, and large ungulates respond to disturbance with accelerated heart rate and metabolic function, and suffer from increased levels of stress"). This isn't just a recreational vehicle problem though, even mountain bikers or on-foot hikers can have significant negative ecological impacts. How do we justify these negative impacts? Is it really worth threatening endangered species and sensitive habitat just to have fun? 

I'm not immune to this in my own recreation. Fisherman sometimes love the resources we use for recreation to death, and I myself am guilty. We often demand more of fisheries than they can easily give- numbers, diversity, time... fisheries have capacities, and we over fill them. Angler hours, or the time spent by fisherman on a given fishery, are increasing in many places, and it often shows in the quality of the fishing. We've long taken the approach of replacing or inflating fish populations artificially rather than accepting what natural reproduction will provide, to sometimes disastrous ends. Thinking we can bolster wild numbers by making fish in concrete raceways just doesn't meet the evolutionary standard, as generations of fish are made to survive better and better in the hatchery, while wild fish evolve to better and better survive in actual waterways. One of many studies on the efficacy of hatcheries on fish populations focused on the Cowichan River, and the survival of chinook salmon in general was studied, both wild and hatchery raised. The study was performed not to see if the hatchery was working, but because it wasn't. "The hatchery on the Cowichan River has not only been unable to increase the abundance, it has also not been able to sustain the abundances that existed at the time the program started."³ It was a post mortem, of sorts... they were looking to figure out what went wrong. This wasn't an isolated event, either. Time and time again, hatchery programs fail to do what nature could do on its own, or are simply an extremely expensive way to keep fisherman believing that fish will always be there. It saddened me deeply to see that in recent days, as it becomes clearer and clearer that the Chesapeake striped bass spawning stock is failing to produce enough fish to support a strong coastwide fishery, that many anglers have started to push for hatchery supplementation. We are failing the striped bass, and adding more of our own creation will not save the fishery. But people continue to beat up the species, hesitant to adopt less damaging tackle as treble hooks become a clearer contributor to mortality, and unwilling to give them a break when and where they're most sensitive. Are we that entitled? Do we need to fish everything to extirpation? Do we need to ride four wheelers every place we see? Do we need so badly to have fun on the lake that our boat wakes cause a toxic algae bloom? Are we really willing to trample endangered beetles just to enjoy a beach day? These seem to be a very easy list of things to simply avoid doing for the sake of healthy, bio diverse ecosystems. If we can't actually see that the value of those species and habitats exceeds the value of just having some fun... I'm not sure that's a society I want to take part in. I find that despicable. We need to be accountable in our interactions with the natural world, and aware of the fact that every action has and impact. We need to lessen that impact as much as we can, especially when that impact comes from something as expendable as activities like boating, fishing, hiking, skiing, rock climbing, or off-roading. Even as a guide and someone who makes their living off of outdoor recreation, I realize that this is expendable. My job should not exist if it is doing so much harm as to be unsustainable. I do everything in my power to keep it sustainable, and I think my viewpoint on how it is or isn't is a fairly realistic one. I won't leave with remorse if it becomes clear that it isn't possible without undue damage, either, at least not for my own financial situation. My remorse would be for the resources I selfishly damaged in the name of having fun. We aren't entitled to unmitigated recreation at the cost of species and habitats, we are privileged to have access to wild places at all in a world where they are increasingly rare and degraded.

¹ Wakes Worse Than Weather , Max Silverson, McCall Star News. July 18 2024

² The Effects of Off-Road Vehicles on Ecosystems,  Richard B. Taylor, Texas Parks and Wildlife

³Wild chinook salmon survive better than hatchery salmon in a period of poor production, Beamish, R.J., Sweeting, R.M., Neville, C.M. et al.  Environ Biol Fish 94, 135–148 (2012). 

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, Hunter, Gordon, Thomas, Trevor, Eric, Evan, Javier, and Ryan 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. 

The Nighthawk's Boom

 New Jersey's pine barrens have an ethereal quality as the sun sets. In some areas there is extraordinary uniformity- nearly perfectly flat ground and vegetation all growing to the same height -that adds to this characteristic. As the light gets low, some of the barrens critters begin to awaken. A forlorn whippoorwill call whistles through the trees and accompanies a golden glow. There's almost unsettling stillness, and it becomes easier to understand why this area has garnered enough "spook" to spawn ghost stories aplenty and it's own legendary cryptid, the Jersey Devil, and plentiful rumors of these lands being a mafia body dumping ground. Perhaps these are more than rumors, with quite a few bodies being found over the years. It isn't easy to dismiss. If something needs hidden this would be a good place to do it. The actual pine barrens, in fact, look way more ethereal a creepy than the woods in The Sopranos episode of the same name. That episode was filmed in hilly, mixed forest in Harriman State Park... and at least for me, it shreds the illusion a bit. The real barrens are such a distinct environment that it's hard to fake it.

Spooky though it may be, the pine barrens cemented themselves quickly as one of my favorite places two years ago when I first visited for a few days of looking for amphibians and reptiles. I heard my first pine barrens tree frogs on that trip, though I wouldn't lay eyes on one until a year later. That species had a special place in my memory bank. When I was only little, my mother got me a set of wildlife call cards and a reader- such a 2000's thing -The reader was just a simple device that you slipped the card into and had a speaker. You'd push a button and it would play the corresponding animal call. One card, the only one I really cared about, was frog and toad calls. And perhaps the most annoying one on their was the pine barrens tree frog. They're a very distinct, quite loud caller. I'd long wanted to see one. 

One the second trip that first year, in that waning light, I was trudging through habitat that was much too dry as the sun set just hoping beyond reason that one of those frogs might start calling. In the distance, I caught a brief, punctual, call that I thought was a green frog. Looking on the map there was no sign of water in that direction, but I started to wander in that direction. If there was a pool that had a green frog calling, maybe there was a chance there might be tree frogs around it. Trudging through the knee high  ferns and other low brush I'm woefully ignorant on identifying, there was no sign of a pool. Then came another call, this time from a different direction. More futile searching ensued. Another call. At t his point, my field partner and I were right next to each other. I turned to him; "Are green frogs just calling from out in the dry woods?".

He just shrugged. 

The sound kept happening, and I recalled hearing similar as darkness fell om the previous trip while sitting next to a breeding pool waiting for frogs to call. At the time I thought it was cars hitting rumble strips on the highway. This seemed far too distant, now. Was it the same sound? Could it really travel that far? 

Then it happened right over our heads. A bird, diminutive in size with a distinct profile, performed a rapid acceleration right over the tree tops, dipping low to them as it did so, and made a tremendous booming sound. This was a common nighthawk, specifically a male. The sound was made by the air rushing through his primary feathers. He does this during the mating time, and may have been doing so over us to try to get us to leave. He does it to ladies too but with the opposite goal in mind. Though abundant and widespread (albeit diminishingly so as many species are), I'd never knowingly been privy to this show. What a wonderful one it was! Until we gave up our dreams of finding what we have concluded is North America's quintessential tree frog that night, I was kept in good spirits by the revelation of what was making the boom. The nighthawks swooped overhead and plummeted to the ground making that wonderful sound and I chuckled at how absurdly long it had taken to figure out what it was. Wildlife is fabulous and does fabulous things, and it never fails to enchant if you maintain a sense of wonder.

Common nighthawks are cryptic while on the ground, with patterns not unlike grouse or woodcock which rely on the same crypsis to go unnoticed. They don't nest either, and their chicks rely on the same camouflage. Their eyes are like black marbles and it always looks like they're squinting at you. There's an uncannily adorable look to them. Nighthawks are bug eaters, and they perform acrobatic shows in the evening as they take to the sky to chase down prey. The species has been around a while, with fossils dating back an estimated 400,000 years. Long may these weird little birds boom over the pines of southern New Jersey, and long may their brief displays add to the mystique of a desolate landscape where rumors of a hooved, winged devil persist. The booms dwindled with the daylight, and a  setting sun was framed perfectly in the symmetry of a man made scar on the landscape. I wondered what other surprises the night bring. 

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, 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.

My Search for a Connecticut Moose

 The late Douglas Adams will always be one of my favorite writers. Though it was his fictional work, The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels were my first introduction, thanks to my father, I later found an grainy presentation by Adams on YouTube in which he read a portion of a non fiction work of his called Last Chance to See, in which Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine travel to see species on the brink. His description of a critically endangered, flightless parrot from New Zealand called the kakapo bit me hard, I had to read the book. Some time later I came across a documentary series that took place after Adams' passing, in which Carwardine was joined by Stephen Fry to revisit the places and species from the book. Sadly, in the intervening time, one species, the Yangtze River dolphin, had been declared extinct, and another, the Northern white rhino, was right on the precipice. 

I must say, I'm not a mammal guy. I've never been than smitten by megafauna or by mammals of any kind really, not in the way some people are. That isn't to say I dislike or disrespect them in any way, they just don't appeal in the way reptiles, amphibians, and fish do. But something about the episode on the Northern white rhino stirred a curiosity in me. Now, there's little chance I'll get to Africa any time soon, and very sadly in the time since that episode the subspecies has dropped to just too female individuals. The last male, an individual that had been named Sudan, died in 2018. Though scientists are trying hard to find a way to save the genetic lineage of the Northern white rhino, there is little to no hope that I'd ever get to see one in the wild. But it did make me want to see big mammals. Perhaps that's because I have an innate need to be made to feel small by the things I pursue, like I could be crushed, consumed, or trampled. There are a few things that have made me feel really, truly alive and they all revolve around that. An apt description of the feeling I get alludes me, but it is a form of excitement that nothing else has matched. It's sort of an out of control but in control feeling... something big and indomitable has the stage and is actually in control, but if I can stay quick of wit and reactive, I have just enough control to still see the show and not be killed. I get this from seeing large sharks and I get it from being in the path of violent weather. And one time I got it when a moose charged me. 

Northwest Maine is a very good place to be if you like moose, though they've never been the reason for my own visits. But they're out there. One day, solo and ambitious, I ventured from a rented cabin out miles of logging roads in search of beaver ponds with brook trout. The woods in Northern Maine are essentially a farm, patch worked by clear cuts and plots in various stages of re-growth, some re-planted with pine, others left to their own devices. They're interlaced with roads that vary in width, dryness, and ease of travel. One I happened upon had been booby-trapped by beavers. A small culvert underneath was plugged with wood and the tiny stream ventured out onto the road grade, flowing through the deep ruts of whatever truck had been through last. Astonishingly, there were tiny brook trout in those ruts. The water wasn't much more than a foot deep but they were there, rising occasionally to who knows what. So I caught wild brook trout out of a road. Just a few hundred yards past that though, I was stopped dead in my tracks by what sounded like a car driving through the woods. To my northeast was a plot that was filling in with paper birch, often a tree that will take hold first in these clear cuts. These were young trees no more than twenty feet tall and most much shorter than that, bunched so tightly that you couldn't see into the tree-line more than ten feet or so. I could see the tops of trees moving further back as something wicked this way came. That is as disconcerting a thing as I'd ever seen. I quickly backed off the road into similar tightly bunched birch of the other side, not turning my back, until I could just barely see the road. I never actually saw it, but a moose was back there, huffing and stomping around, and they say moose don't bluff charge. I figured I was out of sight so I just stayed as still as I could, trying to control my breathing and slow my heart back down to something appropriate while hoping that the breeze wouldn't give away my position. The moose moved on after a bit of pacing, and I waited until I couldn't hear him (perhaps more likely her, given the early summer time frame?) and moved on myself. That experience was a very, very exciting one. It gave me that feeling, whatever it is. I think seeing massive rhinos reminded me that large mammals can give me that feeling. So it was decided that it was very much time to see a Connecticut moose. 

CT DEEP estimates that there are more than 100 individuals in CT's established moose population. They do a fair job of remaining elusive though, as the number of sighting each year is generally much smaller than the estimated population. In a busy, developed state this may shock some but it doesn't surprise me much. Non-human animals are cleverer than we like to believe, and that includes their intelligence in keeping away from us. Not all that long ago, though, there weren't many moose here at all. Likely owing to the vast deforestation that took place not long after colonization, there were no moose in CT for better than a century. In fact, the first photograph of a Connecticut moose was taken in 1956. With forests re-growing across Massachusetts, moose were filtering south, and by present day have established themselves well despite some habitat deficiencies. 

If you're a good angler- one with a naturalist's eye -you know how to discern the habitat of your query. Knowing what the fish need and are evolved for is most of the battle. With time, discerning what makes good habitat becomes second nature. This is no different in hunting, even if that hunting is with a camera instead of a firearm. Drawing from past experiences in moose territory, everything I'd read or watched about New England's largest land animal, and available sighting information, I hit the maps. I read satellite imagery like I'd read a river. Instead of rocks and current I was looking for topography and forest age. I looked for sparse canopy, logged areas, and wetlands. I picked a spot to focus on much in the way I'd pick a stretch of river, then my partner Emily and I went there to try our luck at finding some tracks or sign. 

Though Connecticut's moose population has seen a fairly recent bump in numbers, New England's largest land animal isn't without its threats. One of the scarier risks comes from a different, far smaller animal. As warmer winters become progressively more and more normal in this part of the world, some species are taking advantage. One species, Dermacentor albipictus, is breeding and proliferating at unprecedented rates. At just millimeters in length, the winter tick might seem a poor opponent of the moose. But by the thousands their impact can be fatal. An adult moose might survive a severe infestation, but calves, it seems, are not. Data from Maine indicates the loss of almost 90% of tracked calves... that's pretty staggering. The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has increased the number of cow permits to hunters to determine if lowering densities can break the tick's cycle. A changing climate compounds other anthropogenic and natural problems, and in one example of many, forces active management to preserve an iconic species that may otherwise not need any such help.

I hoped we'd get to see a robust, healthy Connecticut moose instead of one infested in winter ticks, but beggars can't be choosers. The more I read about moose the more I wanted to see one close to home. Stepping foot in the field for the first time with that specific goal in mind made me feel alive. And when, not hours later, I was looking at a quite fresh set of tracks in the snow, it wasn't an insignificant morale boost. Fresh tracks, a few piles of poo, and even two spots where she'd bedded down convinced me this was a place to put a trail camera. 

I'm not quite sure why my affinities for certain animals are so much stronger than others. Usually preference is only a thing I notice in their absence. When I'm not around any animals, reptiles and fish are my favorites, but as soon as I'm looking at a flying squirrel, well that's the greatest thing that has ever existed. This is even true of species I've claimed not to like, such as dolphins. Dolphins are a bit too much like us sometimes. They're clever and have the capacity to be sadistic, they have a propensity toward un-consensual acts, and they can be a bit mean sometimes. But put me near  a wild dolphin and I can't help but smile. They're beautiful animals, and I can't help but be happy to see them. So, though I don't call myself a mammal guy, I can't help but feel a bit more alive when I see a bear, hear coyotes calling in the dark, or look down at a big ol' pile of moose poop on the forest floor. 

One of my favorite places I've ever fished is a serene, high elevation brook trout pond in northern New England. Though certainly not alpine, or even all that close to it, it's the closest I'll feel to it within ten hours of home. The stunted pines and pale granite boulders that line the perimeter aren't something we see at lower latitudes and elevations. Nor, as I experienced one July morning, is the hypothermia that you can still get if you sit too still for too long next to one of the spring seeps that keep the pond cold and the brook trout that live there happy. The air coming off that spring had me shivering in very little time, and when I dipped my thermometer in the water it read an astounding 39 degrees! In July! But as cold, stunted, and stark as that ecosystem always felt- and indeed, there are only two fish in that pond, dace and brook trout, neither of which need much nutrients to eek out an existence -there are also some large terrestrial mammals up there sometimes. I remember coming across moose poop just the other side of the same ridge once, while prospecting for smoky quart in miarolitic cavities in the granite. It was on a very steep grade, in habitat my uninformed mind didn't at all associate with those large ungulates. But what I did expect to see up there, and would run into on my way back from that pond after that morning of catching stunning native char after getting far too cold, were bear. This was national forest, and patch work logging occurs just a step or two down in elevation. There, after a year or two, emergent vegetation dominates the small logging cuts. Some of it produces berries. The bears take advantage of that, the dead wood harboring loads of insects, and of course the large number of mindless campers, some of whom do a poor job of keeping their own food under wraps. As I popped off the steep trail back onto the logging road on my way down from the pond, a sharp "whufff" caught my attention. My eyes snapped over to the other side of the road, and at the base of a big old pine sat an adolescent black bear. He made a sort of motion that would probably have been associated with a gruff "I'll f*** you up bro" had this been an adolescent human. I raised my arms, made a forward stomp, and said "No you won't, bear". He turned is head behind the tree for a second and then glanced back with an almost sheepish look, then dismounted from the tree and took off down the hill. It wasn't my first interaction with a bear, nor would it be my last, even just that day. They're one of the more common large mammals in the northeast now, and they've done a good job of making themselves at home even in suburban areas. Unlike moose here in Connecticut, which are more of a novelty encounter than anything, bears have become a divisive issue. They're here in numbers again and that has implications on how people live. We need to know how to respond to their presence and they force us to be more aware of our surroundings and behavior. I wonder if the moose population will continue to rise it Connecticut, and is so, whether it will have similar implications and effects? 

Back in the woods after a freshly fallen snow, I broke trail to check a camera I'd put in the area with all the moose sign. There's a magic about the woods when it has a fresh coat of snow. Sound gets muffled, things feel still, and any animal's recent movements on the ground gets recorded cleanly. Out in the open mixed hardwood forest there was a crunchy layer on top of the snow that prevented me from being as stealthy as I'd have liked. When I dropped into the valley toward the meadows, and under the canopy of the hemlocks, the character of the snow changed. Down there it was a soft white powder, and my footsteps became as muffled as everything else. There were tracks here and there: deer, coyotes, red squirrel, bobcat... but this time no moose. 

No matter. I carefully made my way to the camera trap to see what may have passed in front of it over the previous weeks. 

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 and Eric 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.

Vernalis

 It took a fair bit of effort to get to the cleared, grassy hilltop my partner in field herping, Bruce, and I walked on warm, sunny late summer eve. Admittedly, Bruce had done most of the research, pouring over research papers, range maps, and even birding forums for what clues they might contain. It that was careful online sleuthing, more than a few highway hours, a night in a junky motel, then a variety of other chaotic transport that had led us to this place. Bruce and I were probably a few hundred feet apart at the time, just walking slowly in the grass and looking at the ground in front of us. To any passer by, we probably looked like we were looking for a lost wallet or phone. That wasn't our task though. We were looking for one of the most striking native animals in the northeast, and I was about to see one in the weirdest way. 

I zigzagged along, slowly, looking carefully for something pretty much the same color as the grass. I happened to look up though, in the general direction of a utility building. It was a fairly plain, windowless structure with reddish lap siding. There was about a foot and a half gap between the siding and the ground below it, and I watched as a roughly ten inch long bright green snake dropped out from the gap under the siding to the ground and slithered quickly into the vegetation. Watching this from a distance of a couple hundred feet, I cracked a smile and chuckled lightly. I wouldn't have believed it if someone told me I would see such a thing, but this place was so loaded with smooth green snakes that it wasn't as shocking as it might otherwise be. 

The smooth green snake, Opheodrys vernalis is native to the Northeastern US, Canadian Maritimes, great Lakes Region, and Upper Midwest, as well as scattered, discrete populations in Northern Mexico, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. They are small, dainty snakes that typically max out at 20 inches long, most being quite a bit smaller than that. Their standout trait is their bright green coloration, which can vary from olive to almost chartreuse. There's a few examples of tan colored smooth green snakes from Wisconsin, affectionately called smooth tan snakes by some herpers. When a bright green vernalis dies, the yellow pigmentation in their scales breaks down and the snake turns blue. Both living and dead, a smooth green snake is a creature that looks out of place in the northeast. Finding one, particularly for someone like myself that absolutely adores wild animals and appreciates the aesthetics of a brightly colored scale and the way light plays on it, looking under a stone and seeing an almost absurdly bright green snake in a perfect coil underneath never fails to inspire awe. Smooth green snakes look like they should come from the rainforest. And yet Bruce and I had traveled substantially northward to try to see as many as we could. Even before that one dropped out of the side of the building, we'd had a phenomenal amount of success with a variety of snake species, and smooth greens were the most numerous. 

This was especially exciting for us because smooth green snakes are a much declined species across much of their range in southern New England, where Bruce and I spend most of our time looking for snakes. The species needs meadowy, low brush, grassland habitat to persist. This can come in the form of coastal habitat where salty, dry conditions, sandy soil, and wind keep vegetation relatively low, old farmland that is lightly maintained and kept grassy and lively, and mountain top balds where trees grow slowly and open low brush persists. Unfortunately for green snakes, the way southern New England has developed hasn't favored meadows. A lot of farmland has now been developed, and some areas that were allowed to remain early successional habitat have now become wooded. Without easy travel corridors that they once would have benefited from, isolated pockets of smooth green snakes must make do with diminishing habitat and can't move to re-populate areas that change to become more favorable. The species' diet has also given it problems. Vernalis favor grasshoppers, soft bodied caterpillars, and spiders. Pesticide and insecticide use has taken a significant toll on these wonderful little snakes. Mosquito spraying, pesticide use on crops, and other chemical use in their habitat mean that otherwise suitable land often no longer has green snakes.  To find the abundance we'd dreamed of, we had gone somewhere that never had pesticide use, was built on very minimally, and had plentiful open habitat. It was a shame we had to go so far, nor should we have had to. Not that long ago they were more numerous in Connecticut, on Long Island, along coastal Rhode Island, and into Massachusetts. It isn't uncommon to run into older folks that will tell you "Oh, those green grass snakes? We used to see lots when we were kids". 

The habitat we searched had an exceptional abundance of another species I see in Connecticut but generally have to put a lot of effort into: the Northern redbelly snake. Redbelly snakes are not the most popular among the recreational herping world, they're widespread and can be quite numerous and are a diminutive species. But they are variable, often vibrant, and in my opinion photogenic. They can also be quite secretive, often going undetected for years even in fairly populated areas with a significant number of eyes out looking. 

Overall, the abundance of wildlife and native flora was robust in this place. It was refreshing when compared to some of the habitat left in CT that still holds a few green snakes, much of which is loaded with invasive plants and suffers from a compromised food chain, with perhaps too many of some species and far too few of others. One of the sites I visit that has records of vernalis is progressively more and more packed with bittersweet and large stands of mugwort. Another is so surrounded by development that it's hard to imagine that it could last forever, though the species does manage too eek out an existence in narrow corridors of habitat even in natural circumstances. That said, those populations don't have to worry so much about being hit by a car, chopped up in a mower, or poisoned by chemicals. In Connecticut, this has led to the species being listed "Special Concern", a designation that doesn't give a species a ton of protections, but means that its habitat is limited and the species isn't stable because of it. 

The story of the smooth green snake in much of Southern New England is subsequently a sad one, one made of lists of places that had but no longer have the species. There was even a time when human activity wasn't harmful but helpful to the vibrant snakes. Widespread land clearing coupled with slow moving farm equipment, no pesticide use, no motor vehicles, and a lower human population density meant that the special likely thrived in the farmlands and grasslands not long after colonization. They were quickly overtaken by the industrial revolution, though, and then really took hits as insecticides like DDT became heavily used, suburban sprawl continued, and traffic increased. The decline of any species is a sad one, much less such an iconic and vibrant one. Many New Englanders may never get to see that shockingly green flash of scales as a skittish smooth green snakes vanishes into the grass. In Missouri, where there hasn't been a report in more than 50 years, there is little to no hope or the species. In some other midwestern states they are listed endangered or threatened. Hopefully, with awareness and care, we can stem the tide. 

If you see a smooth green snake, observe and appreciate it for what it is. Take steps to reduce your impact in their habitat, like avoiding moving rock (cairns suck!) and logs or trampling low brush. And fight against further development that could continue to extirpate these animals from more and more of their range. 

Walking through town on our last day in the promised land of green snakes, I noticed a little bit of plastic tarp overlapping a rock wall at the edge of a garden. I gently lifted the corner of it and spotted the largest individual we'd seen all trip, a robust female that was thick from her head to her cloaca and had incredible coloration and robust crocodile jaws. It was one of the most stunning snakes I'd ever laid my eyes on and it was just under some plastic tarp in a garden. If we encourage the right behaviors, there's no reason there can't be diversity right in our backyards, whether it be brightly colored little snakes, bobcats, or butterflies. A lively yard and diverse, healthy habitat is much better for the soul than plain, mowed lawns devoid of diversity outside a few Lyme carrying ticks and some ants. This place was rife with that, liveliness was abundant, and everyone that lived there was happier that most Southern New Englanders I'm used to running into on the day to day. It's hard not to draw some correlation. 

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 and Eric 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.

Water Ghosts

 Emily called them "little water ghosts". Dozens of jellies floated and pulsed in the hazy green bay upon we floated on a warm, breezy mid September day. They were ghostlike but tangible, lingering in view for extended time and existing their extraordinarily simple little lives. Jellies waft with the ebb and flow of the tide and other currents. This means they're plankton, which may buck a traditional sense of the word. Planktonic animals are often though of as microscopic, or at least very tiny. But jellies aren't strong enough to fight the tide, the ride with the flow, and that makes them plankton. 

These jellies were mostly Sea nettle, Chrysaora quinquecirrha. Smaller, more transparent, and perhaps more elegant than the often seen Lion's mane jellyfish that are also numerous in long island sound. They were so numerous that some drifted into my anchor line, losing bits of their long and delicate tentacles as they did so. Though just a minor irritant to a human swimmer, these jellies are death incarnate to tiny fish and crustaceans. Passive as they are though, it is very much up to the prey to make an error. The jelly is not going to chase it down.

As I pulled up my anchor line, it tugged through a Sea nettle, breaking bits off of its long tendrils. This seemed to upset me more than it did the jelly as it continued pulsing away as though nothing had happened. I never like breaking bits off of a living thing needlessly, even if it's a mindless little water ghost. 

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, and Hunter 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.

Land of Many Uses

 The motto, if you will, of the National Forest system, is "land of many uses". You can see it right on the signs. The first time I can remember seeing that motto was scrawled across the bottom of a sign for the White Mountains National Forest. One of the most striking landscapes in the northeast, the White Mountains feature some of the more severe topography in the Appalachians. Unlike much of the old mountain range, which Westerners often write off pretentiously as underwhelming hills, the Whites stand tall, rocky and steep. The Presidential Range features a stark tree line and some gorgeous high elevation habitat as well as some of the harshest weather on earth at the top of Mt. Washington. But you can drive to the top of that mountain, or ride a train there, and I'd be lying if I said that didn't make me cringe just a little. The White Mountain National Forest feels refreshingly beautiful and natural though compared to a lot of New England. But the reason I remember that signage so distinctly was that my father called my attention specifically to it, elucidating a point my young mind was not yet privy to: a National Forest designation, though it denotes protection to some extent, also seeks to maintain usage of a resource. In the case of the White Mountains, that often meant logging. And on that very same trip we'd hike into a patchwork of cuts, where the star filled sky was visible through where trees would otherwise be visible. It was strikingly beautiful, a far cry from the meagerly star-studded, light-polluted sky in most of Connecticut. 

I think it's very important that I not that cutting down trees often promotes biodiversity. That may seem counterintuitive, but as our forests mature, they often do so in unnatural ways. We've altered the woods here so thoroughly that if you dragged a pre-colonization native American into a time machine and brought them back to present day, they'd think they were somewhere else even if you brought them somewhere without a single building or piece of infrastructure in sight. There is hardly any old growth left, the species diversity has entirely changes, and we manage the land in an entirely different fashion. It is in part because of this alteration that we need to manage habitat now. And cutting down trees can be a part of that. In 2022 and 2023, I surveyed timber rattlesnake habitat with CT DEEP Herpetologist Mike Ravesi. Mike was performing frequent surveys in preparation for a "daylighting" project, which would involve selectively cutting down trees to ensure that sunlight could get to the forest floor in some key areas. This can have significant benefits to a lot of plants, insects, mammals, and birds but we were interested in cutting down trees in this zone to improve basking conditions for state endangered timber rattlesnakes. Sometimes, cuts are done without a direct conservation point like that but still result in positive outcomes and increased biodiversity. And, of course, logging can be very damaging and disruptive as well. But it that clearing in the White Mountains- where the harvesting of trees was done in a scattered, selective manor -berry bushes flourished where little but moss and ferns would otherwise. So use doesn't always hurt. But it does dissuade notions of wilderness or a completely natural setting that would otherwise creep into mind at the mention of a National Forest. 

This was very centered in my mind as I passed the first sign for the Allegheny National Forest in western Pennsylvania on a grey, cool-ish August day. The land of many uses. This can well describe much of Pennsylvania, which is a treasure trove of natural resources. Especially fossil fuels. In 1859 Edwin Drake was hired by New York lawyer George Bissel, who founded the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, to travel to Titusville and drill for crude oil. This was a pivotal moment in the industrial revolution, one of many Pennsylvania has been responsible for as a provider of coal, oil, and more recently, natural gas. 

One of the "many uses" for Alleghany Natural Forrest is mineral extraction, and that includes natural gas. The resources bellow that landscape are abundant and in some cases very much up for extraction. There are literally thousands of gas wells in Allegheny National Forest. And according to the Forest Service there were 11 fracking wells as of 2018. For those that may not know what fracking is exactly, it is a method of natural gas extraction using pressurized fluid. If not properly and safely performed, fracking can contaminate groundwater. In Dimock, Pennsylvania faulty wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas leaked methane into the ground water, apparently leading to residents of the town being able to ignite their tapwater on. In Oklahoma, fracking and wastewater disposal (pumping the contaminated water into the earth below the water table) resulted in a steep increase in earthquake activity with some rumbles exceeding 3.0 on the Richter scale. Though these are not devastating in magnitude, anthropogenic earthquakes can't be a good sign for the health of the land. And here, in the Allegheny National Forest, corporations spurred on by the gas rush were happy to drill baby drill. Many emphasize the lower emissions and efficiency of natural gas compared to other fuels, hoping to combat the widespread opposition of the practice. 

The Marcellus shale layer containing the gas was far underneath me on that road, on fact it was a geologic feature I'd never knowingly layed eyes on. But the wells tapping into the earth- new and old, gas and oil -were a very common sight all over Pennsylvania. They'd been a fixture of the background throughout my childhood, a relic of history anyone growing up there couldn't really avoid learning about in some capacity. In Connecticut, you don't see oil wells or derricks, large refineries rusting into the ground, or gas wells for that matter. We're far removed from that, though pipelines carry the gas to us and some of us use it. In schools here we didn't learn about the oil rush, other kids didn't believe me when I told them oil "came from" where I grew up, that it was Western Pennsylvania that initially fed that oh so vital part of humanity's growth and development. 

I was back in this part of the world in large part to use it too. The land here has rivers, into which many were introduced a glorious salmonid from the European continent. Ah, the brown trout. What a spectacular fish. Unwittingly they did quite well in part of the Allegheny watershed, and failing natural conditions in some places took good advantage of another use of the land. A handful of large dams have permanently altered the landscape of this part of the world, and in doing so made the rivers below them far cooler. This was an accident, we had no intention of such things. The water was needed to make power or to drink. Mostly to make power. But the deep reservoirs make tailwaters, and the tailwaters provide nice year round homes for non-native brown trout. I was there to use the rivers for my own recreational enjoyment through hunting down those non-native trout. All throughout Allegheny National Forest, non-native trout exist, some succeeding in making more of themselves but many being carted their by trucks from hatcheries to live out a short time before being caught or simply dying of ineptitude. This may be one of the weirder uses on a National Forest: we use it as a vessel for fish we make, fish that wouldn't naturally be there, but fish we like to catch. 

There are plenty of natural fish in and around Allegheny National Forest. Smallmouth bass, suckers, muskellunge, brook trout... all present for thousands of years and all perfectly good at making more of themselves when we don't use their habitat so hard it ruins it. Unfortunately in some case we did use the habitat a little too hard. That was often the excuse for adding new fish. Ironically, in some cases the habitat is used so hard that even the new fish struggle.  Johnsonburg, Pennsylvania was not a particularly hospitable place for fish, native or otherwise, for quite some time. Johnsonburg is a small town near Allegheny National Forest. Really, it is a ways east of the National Forest and tucked between massive chunks of Pennsylvania State Gamelands. Johnsonburg has one primary use, being the site of a big paper mill. The Domtar Johnsonburg Mill is an imposing cluster of structures that puts of a pretty unpleasant smell and according to Domtar's website, "manufactures uncoated freesheet papers used by customers to create brochures, direct mail, stationery, checks, envelopes and hardbound books".

In an earlier time, this mill and other industry in the area were absolutely raping the Clarion River and it's forks. The East Branch flows essentially through the Johnsonburg paper mill. For a long time, these were essentially dead water. But by the 90's, improved regulation and cleanup efforts rendered many rivers in the industrial towns in Western Pennsylvania viable fisheries once more. 

Now, I hate talking about places in fishing. I don't like burning spots. But I'm not going to talk about fishing here much now, if you care to know what these rivers are like there are plenty of resources online that will tell you all sorts of things, much of it old, much of it certainly untrue. I will tell you this: the rivers I've fished in that part of the world were not earth shattering in any capacity. Some were very pretty, some fished quite well. Often though, I struggled to find fish, access was difficult, and there wasn't anything particularly universally appealing. At times there were very obvious drawbacks to the casual angler. That is precisely my cup of tea though; high risk, high reward. Coupled with relative proximity to the place I was born but never got to fish these rivers of western PA became highly appealing to me personally... even if I walked and fished miles of them without seeing a trout. So, yeah, you know where I was now. Good for you. Good luck with that. 

Though Johnsonburg has one defined use in the paper mill now, the land around it was just as much the land of many uses as the National Forest was. More so, really. It was being used to live on, travel on, grow food on, find and kill food on, have fun on, dispose of waste on, and all sorts of other things. Though the amount of users here was much smaller than back at home and it felt a little easier to get away from obvious signs of use, the signs were still there. A low hum of anthropogenic alteration was always a little bit audible. But when darkness fell and a light rain began, after I'd caught far fewer and smaller fish than I wanted to and trotted through a setting no less urban and industrial than cities I fish in other parts of the world, I went about looking for a place to spend the night. 

Two things struck me in that search. There were far fewer cars whizzing around at 9:45 than would be at home. And there were far more animals in the road. In mere miles I saw dozens of frogs, mostly green frogs and pickerel frogs, quite a few smaller salamander species as well as red efts, a few possums, numerous very healthy deer, and three snakes of three different species, all robust and happy. In the same amount of time and distance traveled in Connecticut I'd be hard pressed to see the same abundance and diversity of wildlife under the same conditions at the same time if year. This wasn't mass migration season, this was a light drizzle on a cool August night, barely enough to keep the wiper blades going. These were just animals going about their normal nocturnal patterns, and though the roads were there they weren't so traveled that most wildlife populations forced to trek across them had been smashed to pieces by speeding vehicles. 

This land has a great many uses. It had been used and used hard. But our use hasn't ruined it yet. It is still vibrant and lively, much in the way the White Mountains always felt to me. There were things here and there that made me cringe like a road up Mt. Washington. The smell of the paper mill, the stands of invasive knotweed along the river, gas wells in the National Forest- all scars, deep and painful to the touch. Between the deep scars were just shallow ones. Land still used, but less hard. It was impossible to find land the way it always had been without interference. There isn't any left. 

I think the National Forest signs are misleading, perhaps on purpose. They try to convince us that they're protected from abuse. The signs have rounded, happy edges and the same color as signs for parks and historical landmarks. But they don't fully hide the truth, it's right there at the bottom. What do people sometimes say when we feel like someone takes advantage of us? "I was used!" "You used me!" The feelings associated with that are not positive ones. Sometimes they are deep, lasting scars. In no way am I suggesting that the land has a conscious to feel used, but perhaps it is best to think it does. It seems that in human history the cultures that treated the land as though it were aware and alive were much more sustainable in their impact. Those that treat the land with dominion, lording over it as owners and users, often lose sight of the value of that land and its resources to the point of depletion and destruction. We need to stop viewing the land as something inanimate for us to use. 

 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, and Hunter 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.