Proposed Bill No. 6248 & The Housatonic Problem

 During the January session, CT's 33rd district representative Brandon Chafee introduced Proposed Bill No. 6248, referenced to the Committee on Environment. It is titled "and act establishing a moratorium on fishing for striped bass in the lower Housatonic River", and reads "That the general statutes be amended to establish a moratorium on fishing for striped bass in the lower Housatonic River until the populations of striped bass recovers". 

I commend Rep. Chafee for making an attempt at bringing this issue into legislation, because the Housatonic and especially it's holdover striped bass are a source of problem and controversy. Poaching is rife there, as a plethora of undersized male stripers make their way up the river in December and spend the winter, filtering back out in March and April. There are some large fish and some females that come in as well, but it is known mostly as a place to go in the winter and do what I often call "beating up toddlers". With a spinning rod and paddle tail on a jighead  you can, many days, catch as many 14-20" striped bass as you like, with people bragging about catching into the triple digits. I did it once too, and it left a sour taste in my mouth as soon as I really thought about it. It's gratuitous and unnecessary, and frankly isn't even all that fun after a while. But the real problem is the sort of poaching these easy targets encourage. Just this December CT EnCon officers and their K9, Luna, sniffed out a haul of 34 undersized bass. 

This isn't an isolated incident, as many anglers that have spent time on the Housatonic will tell you. It's enough of a problem that legislating a solution makes sense, but what of Bill 6248? Would that work? 

I'd argue that no, it will not. One problem is that "striped bass fishing" is not legally defined. This means that all one needs to do to be legal is simply not be in possession of a striped bass. Boats illegally targeting striped bass in the EEZ, where it is illegal to do so, routinely play that game. As long as they don't have a striper on board, they aren't likely to be prosecuted. To make that moratorium on striper fishing work effectively, legal definitions would need to be drawn up.  I'm not against that, necessarily, but it does leave wiggle room and wouldn't be any easier to enforce than the current situation. 

Arguably, a better strategy would be a full blown closure, and ideally a seasonal one. The problem time is typically from December to March, and the problem area is from the Derby Dam to Washington Bridge. A total closure of fishing, regardless of species, in that time frame and stretch of river. This has precedent. When we had trout seasons (and I personally really wish we still did) most rivers were closed for a month and a half or so. Under this case, anybody fishing for the vulnerable holdover bass, and that's really all that's worth fishing for down there that time of year, would be breaking the law, regardless of tackle choice. There isn't a way to sneak around the legal definitions and pretend you're targeting something else. 

Another strategy, and one that would have benefits outside of the Housatonic, would be hiring new EnCon Officers and increasing the fines for environmental infractions. As it stands, the fines and ramifications can often be equated to a slap on the wrist, and judges have tended not to take them seriously. This is a system failure, in my opinion. We should be placing higher value on our resources, and penalizing higher when people abuse them. These actions could take significant strides towards reducing the poaching problem and fishing mortality that occurs on the lower Housatonic. We can push for this, and we should. Find your representative here: Find Your Legislators- CGA, and email or call them to encourage a more enforceable, stronger version of Proposed Bill No. 6248, with emphasis on a closed winter season for fishing the lower Housatonic, and increasing fines for poaching infractions. 

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.

Aliens in Our Waters & The War Against Them

Noah and I paddled our way over the milky waters of Lake Champlain's South Bay one warm summer day toward a shallow cove. We were on the hunt for bowfin and longnose gar, and in that grey stained water, a weed-bed was calling our name about a half mile away. In other clearer parts of the lake we'd had success finding bass and bowfin around aquatic vegetation, so reason suggested that weedy area was a good place to start. As we closed in, we could tell it wasn't the sort of weed-bed we were used to in other parts of Champlain: the bulrush, the pickerel weed and it's lovely purple flowers, the elodea that the bowfin love to gracefully slide through. These weeded areas are always full of life, harboring little schools of shiners and young of the year sunfish. Dragon and damsel flies hover and perch on the vegetation that perks above the water's surface, and birds skim around chasing them. This was very different. It was a thick, homogenous, deep green mat with a lone, straight-as-an-arrow path cut through it. This was a water chestnut mat, and the path through it had been cut by the boat equivalent of a combine harvester- in fact we could see a few of these vessels working not far away. The state of New York was operating these to put a damper on the rapid spread of the chestnuts, which just so happen to be one of the most virulent invasive aquatic plants in the northeast right now. Water chestnuts take hold hard and fast, outcompeting native vegetation and creating a thick, green mono-culture, a mat that is impenetrable by kayak and not suitable for the fish and invertebrates that evolved to live in our waterways without it. The only way Noah and I could get into the cove filled with the water chestnuts was through the path created by the harvester, and within the clearer water and visibility of that open pathway was the only place we could find fish anyway. Even the most weedless of hollow-bodied frogs wasn't pulling a bowfin up through the lawn-like chestnut mat. 

Water chestnuts, or, more accurately, water caltrop, are native to temperate portions of Eurasia and Africa. They emanate from a devilish looking seed, a dark, spiky thing an inch or two across that lodges in the muddy bottom... or your foot, if you step on one. A thin but fairly strong yellow stem protrudes  from the seed and rises to the surface, where it blooms out into a concentrated radiating cluster of angular, deep green leaves.  Water caltrop usually peak in July, when they form the thickest and most heinous of patches in the moderately shallow, slow water they prefer- around which time they produced the seeds that will be their next generation. From one year to the next, un-managed patches will grow rapidly. They're transplanted occasionally by boaters but also by large waterfowl. The species was introduced to the Northeast in 1877 in the Cambridge Botanical Garden. It took but a couple years for it to make it into the Charles River, and though the spread to the rest of the northeast was not direct or immediate, Trapa natans has since made its way around the Northeast and Mid Atlantic. The Hudson River and Lake Champlain in New York, Lake Nockamixon in Pennsylvania, Burke Lake in Virginia, and the Connecticut River through the heart of New England are just a tiny list of the places that have been invaded. The Connecticut River, though, is my home. I've watched the effects here first hand, and it has been astonishing... gut wrenching, even.

In 2016, Noah and I came across a small, round patch of water chestnuts in a shallow, muddy backwater. We knew that they would be a potential problem, but weren't fully knowledgeable yet. Eight years later, nearly to the day, I stood at the edge of the very same cove looking at the most visually striking example of an aquatic invasive mono culture I'd ever seen. One species of plant had taken over just about every inch of the cove, acres upon acres. Anyone who wanted to paddle to where we found that one little ten foot diameter patch eight years prior would have been in for a monumental effort, and a worthless one too. Where we'd caught bass in milfoil beds, had run ins with big pike on channel edges, and sight fished to tailing carp on open flats was now all just a lawn of water chestnuts, devoid of the diversity that had been there. Yes, some of that diversity had been detrimental non-natives too, but as bad as common carp can be for an ecosystem they don't belong in, the water caltrop are a bit worse, or at least more visibly impactful. 

Not far away, my brother and I crept the Otter through a different cove, looking for a pair of sandhill cranes that I'd heard calling and then spotted a couple days prior. We were having no luck finding the birds, but had less trouble finding problematic plants. 

Water chestnuts can be combatted with manual removal, something that isn't always productive on all aquatic invasive plants. By carefully pulling at the main stem of each plant, the whole thing- seed included -can be removed. The seed, that devilish looking little spikey thing, is the key: leave the seed in the muck and a new plant will just pop up. We carefully pulled as many plants as we could, rinsed the muck and living critters off of them as well as we could, and piled them into the boat. When there are hundreds of thousands of plants, this can be a very intimidating task. It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it.

Though Malachi and I put just a little dent in between the two of use, it was satisfying. The canoe sat a little lower in the water on the way back to the launch, and we had to haul the heavy masses as far from the water as we could in my Ranger net to get them somewhere they'd dry out and die without being washed back into the water by rain. This wasn't my first go, though it was my first year devoting time to the effort. But there are groups that have been attempting to hold back the invasion for a number of years now, brave volunteers at the front lines combatting invasives with hardened resolve. 

One of those organizations is Connecticut River Conservancy. I talked with Rhea Drozdenko, who has been with the organization for two and a half years and coordinates water chestnut pulls and other aquatic invasive species efforts, about it. She worked at Wesleyan University before coming to CRC, and wanted to do something that combined her experience in advocacy and outreach with her love and passion for the Connecticut River. "Once something gets out of control its really hard to bring it back" Drozdenko said of the water caltrop situation. "The plant grows exponentially. One seed can produce ten or so rosettes and those rosettes can produce another ten seeds." Each summer, when the growing season occurs and those thick green mats of rosettes form on infested bodies of water throughout the state, Drozdenko and CRC set out with volunteers in two to combat the invasion and try to slow it down. On weekends they gather 20 to 30 volunteers at any of a number of sites to do manual removals. They generally start around 9:00a.m., paddle out, carefully pull as many plants as they can, then return to the launch to dispose of the water caltrop. "It's a pretty labor intensive process, but also a fun one, too," Drozdenko says, "you don't have to have any experience with it, we'll take anyone and show them the ropes of it. You don't even need your own boat, we'll have all the equipment that you need." And they're making some progress too! "There's one site we have which used to be a major infestation. The past two years we've seen 50 plants tops, so its not a site we bring volunteers anymore." Plenty of sites have a lot to pull though, and CRC disposes of the plants they remove in a couple of ways. For one site they have a contract with Blue Earth Compost, a company that specializes in turning food products and other organic waste into soil products. At other locations they just haul the plants high away from the water line to where they can decompose naturally without washing back into the river or pond. Manual pulling isn't the only focus, though. "Pulling is great, but prevention is much more important." says Drozdenko. It take much less effort and money to keep water caltrop from spreading from one watershed to the next than it does to get it out once it does establish. Now, some sites are to infested for manual pulls to be all that useful. "We're hoping to move into herbicidal management," she tells me, "the Army Corps of Engineers is doing a several year filed demonstration on hydrilla there, and anecdotally we could see that the herbicide for the hydrilla had an effect on the water chestnuts as well." All of this manual pulling, herbicide, and prevention does have cost though, and it is very important that the funding is available to organizations and agencies focused on combating aquatic invasive plants—enter the AIS Stamp. 

A dragonfly rests on native marsh grass. Native vegetation plays a key roll for the ecosystem at large.

In recent weeks I watched anglers and boaters getting rather angry about an additional fee they felt was suddenly being thrust upon them, with cries about a "new tax" ringing around the Facebook groups. It reminded me of times not long ago when CT added the trout stamp to counteract the fact that virtually every dollar of license sales was going to keeping the hatcheries going, despite the fact that plenty of license holders don't trout fish. I wanted the scoop, and Gwendolynn Flynn from CT DEEP's boating division provided it. "In 2019, our legislature added a five dollar fee to the vessel registration. Some people noticed, some people didn't notice." There's always a bit of a disconnect between the constituency and the legislature, because most people just flat out don't pay attention and think they don't have time to. Unfortunately that can lead to a bit of chaos. When some modifications were made to take the fee off the vessel registration, people noticed and they didn't like it. But it's vitally important to fund the fight against invasive plants as they stand to inhibit fisherman, boaters, and other recreators alike. "Prior to the AIS stamp in 2019, there was nothing, there was no state funding," says Wendy Flynn. But the new fees now fund groups that combat the problem both directly and indirectly. "That money is turned around into a competitive grant program, and non-profits and municipalities can apply for this money for control, research and education of aquatic invasive plants and cyanobacteria." Our dollars as resource users go directly back to benefitting the river that we love and use. In fact, the operations performed by Connecticut River Conservancy benefit from the AIS stamp and fees: "We're recipients of the AIS grant, that money goes to organizations like ourselves that do removal, management, and prevention work" Rhea Drozdenko told me. 

I, for one, am glad that this problem is being taken seriously. I've watched these plants progress, not only with water caltrop but with hydrilla as well. Aquatic invasive plants pose a very real threat to native plants, fish, and insects. They fill in water that would otherwise be open, making recreating harder. And they take away the wild, native soul that our waterways have. We need to covet and protect the native plants that evolved in our ecosystems. They're invaluable, no dollar amount could be placed on their beauty and their ecological rolls. But these plants are snuffing them out. It takes a lot of work to put the bear back in its cage once it gets out. Thankfully, it seems to me the right people are on the job. And I'll be out there too, in my little canoe, pulling up wads of water chestnuts, getting muddy, doing my part... would you care to join me? 

Helpful link:

www.ctriver.org

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/39f2d565ea304c0aa97335ad2d3c7f0d?org=CAES&views=Instructions-1

https://www.nae.usace.army.mil/Missions/Projects-Topics/Connecticut-River-Hydrilla/

https://portal.ct.gov/deep/boating/faqs/faq-ais-stamp

Thanks to Rhea Drozdenko and Wendy Flynn for their help on this one. 

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.

Climb Out & Scream (Pt. 2)

 An unnatural waterway meets the Rock River in Colona, Illinois, just a short distance above it's confluence with the mighty Mississippi. That waterway winds eastward to the Illinois River near the just east of of Bureau Junction, population 282, and just north of Hennepin populations 741. The latter is the town that now gives the canal it's name. Formerly known as the Illinois and Mississippi canal, the Hennepin Canal and its pools and locks sit a relic of an era when boats were a vital part of commerce in inland America. It's history is a little different than some of it's nearby contemporaries, because it was in essence already obsolete by the time the first boat made transit through it in 1907. Despite some architectural significance, including being the first canal built with concrete and no stone facings, it never got the opportunity to fulfill its roll as fully intended. After more than half a century of desire for the canal, construction began in 1892, and while it was being built work was underway to make locks on the Illinois River suitable for larger vessels. With it's narrower lock chambers the Hennepin settled into life as passage for recreational vessels rather than as an artery of commerce. 

Tiskilwa, Illinois is the embodiment of small town middle America and sits near the eastern end of the canal, near Lock #10. The canal does a sort of zig-zag North of town. In 2023, the population was 728. At it's peak there weren't many more than a thousand residents, living centered around an iconic main drag in the village center. Prior to European settlement a Potawatomi village was on this site. White man filtered in and settled along the Galena Trail, a stagecoach route that takes it's name from a lead ore mineral that occurs in deposits scattered around the Driftless Region. Galena looks the part, lead grey in color and heavy, sometimes forming beautiful crystals often cubic in habit. In fact, I have specimens with galena and fluorite from Illinois in my personal collection. Lead ore in hydrothermal replacement deposits in the limestone and agriculture on the fertile flood plains drew people to Illinois and through the spot where Tiskilwa stands now. In History of Bureau County, Illinois, published in 1885, Henry C. Bradsby notes the town's official inception out of two settlements, Indiantown and Windsor, which were consolidated and took the current name in 1840: "Tiskihca. — Names of Indiantown and Windsor changed to Tiskilwa, law, February 3, 1840, 107; town incorporated". Today, there is no sense of sprawl, suburbia, or anything else of that sort in Tiskilwa, as is consuming the soul of small towns in other parts of the country. Old homes line the street grid, along with some small businesses and a museum along the town's Main Street. The railroad completed in the middle of the 19th century arcs through town, still active. Up away from the river courses the land is flat and dominated by farms. Miles upon miles of farms. Endless farms. Save for some narrow strips between fields, there are few trees breaking up the view. This was likely part of the more than half of Illinois that wasn't forested anyway, but it must look very different now. Close to town, Rocky Run and its tributaries have carved their way down into the plain. There, trees are still very much present, and evidently have long been, as Bradsby also notes: "About Tiskilwa and on the Illinois River there is considerable rich bottom lands, covered with fine heavy timber". Where trees have persisted, so have periodical cicadas. That's what brought me to Tiskilwa, a town that is not in any way on the map for fly anglers.

Lightning strikes the flat farmlands, east of Tiskilwa a ways.

To be fair, Tiskilwa just happened to be the spot that caught my attention first as Emily and I worked eastward through Illinois. I'd pinned sites all the way into the Chicago suburb of Joliet, but when once again I cracked the window a ways outside of Tiskilwa and heard that familiar buzz, that evil grin crept across my face. The bugs had brought me somewhere new yet again, somewhere I'd never have had reason to go otherwise, somewhere with history, ecology, and culture I'd not have learned otherwise. sometimes a bug isn't just a bug. 

As I walked along the Hennepin Canal under the blazing sun, it's water flowed very sluggishly but clear, with vegetation and aquatic life all over. It's remarkable how life takes hold. In one lock I observed some gar and channel catfish milling around, as well as a few bigmouth buffalo scraping algae from the canal walls. All of these fish seemed rather averse to my presence and completely disinterested in cicadas, so I didn't linger with them long. I was a bit more interested in seeing a natural water body anyway. 

My first look at the creek I'd spent time viewing through the magic of the internet and satellite imagery came after skirting around a deep slough in grass that wasn't much shorter than I. Unlike the area I'd fished in Missouri, this was a classic freestone river with runs, riffles and pools. It had gradient and chunky limestone. It looked delightfully inviting and delicious. But did it have cicada eating fish? I stayed low and slow, eyeing the greyish green stained water for signs of life- a shadow, a waving fin, a rise form. It didn't take long. From deeper, darker water emerged the hulking form of a grass carp. It sidled up into the shallows over light colored bottom, then rose to a cicada drifting by. Slowly and carefully, I made my approach. The fish held it's ground, unaware of my presence. I'd love to say it was difficult, and maybe if I'd not done this quite a few times in the prior days it would have been, but I splatted that bug down and the grasser came to it without hesitation. The fight was on. In a log filled bend pool, I battled a freshwater giant about three feet long with a graphite stick and a glorified hand line. Much like Missouri, Illinois took me by surprise with just astoundingly good and enjoyable fishing. 

I enjoy fishing just about anywhere, especially where other people aren't. I've plied the famous trout rivers in Montana, squeaked snook out of the mangroves in the Everglades, and swung up landlocked salmon in the north Maine Woods. I've battled surf on famous spots of the striper coast and waded up legendary limestone spring creeks. None of that was any better than the fishing I had in Illinois. I don't give a damn what anyone says, this was my jam. 

 

I wonder what it was like in the area where Tiskilwa stands today when what are now known as Northern Illinois brood and Great Southern Brood last emerged in tandem, in 1803. There were probably still a fair few bison working the land in Illinois then. The indigenous peoples were still the dominant cultural presence. Illinois wasn't even Illinois yet. There was no railroad, no canal. The flora would have been distinctly different from what I saw. Even the river's very course may have been displaced. There were certainly no grass carp there. How many cicadas were there? Many millions more? What fish were eating them? How did the indigenous people respond to the insects abrupt emergence?

Fly fishing is largely a silly, useless hobby until we take note of everything else going on around us while doing it. The longer I stay with it, the more clear that is to me. It would be almost wholly un-stimulating to me now were I not using it as an avenue through which to explore the sciences and history. I'd give up fishing for fishing's sake before I gave up the places it takes me both mentally and physically. Fishing doesn't matter to me as an individual anymore, not the way it did. Pursuing a bug and an invasive fish eating it took me to a tiny town in the middle of Illinois. It made me want to learn about that place and it's history. So much so that months later I was combing through a book published in 1885. I grazed information about malacologist named Charles Torrey Simpson who was supposedly born in Tiskilwa and published dozens of pieces of scientific literature, including "The pearly fresh-water mussels of the United States; their habits, enemies, and diseases, with suggestions for their protection" in the Bulletin of the US Fish Commission. I learned that to pay for the operations of the Hennepin Canal, ice blocks cut from it during the winter were sold. This reminded me of ice ponds here at home in New England, and how different our lives and the land are now from just a handful of generations ago. This is all far more interesting and important than catching a fish, in my humble opinion. That's just trivial. Not the fish- the fish is just as interesting and important -but catching it? Sometimes I do think about quitting that part. 

It sure is fun though. 

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.

Reading the Sky

 The atmosphere is fickle and complex, more so than a lot of people understand. In fact, the public at large is extremely ignorant of what the sky does and why. I'm not sure I can pinpoint the event, if there is a specific one, that made me keen on learning about weather. When I was very young I had nightmares about tornadoes. They were a monster in those dreams, a living breathing thing that had intention and direct malice. Those dreams were colored by imagery I was seeing in bits and pieces in media on the May 3rd, 1999 Bridge Creek-Moore Oklahoma F5. At the time, that was the penultimate tornado, and it was a terrifying one. A video clip of mud and debris splattering on a car's windshield far outside the black, rolling mass of the tornado itself were ingrained in my memory though I couldn't have been more than four or five at the time I saw them on the television. Not many years later, I saw hail for the first time. The core of a supercell thunderstorm passed over our home in Western Pennsylvania, dropping enough dine to quarter sized stones to coat the ground. That was impactful, not singularly, but it definitely encouraged curiosity.

Years later, I was on the bus to school in the winter, now living in central Connecticut. It was sleeting, and the small ice pellets  made light "tick" sounds as they hit the windows. I had entered my weather nerd stage by then, and knew that these frozen droplets were formed as snowflakes partially melted in a warm layer of air, then re-froze into hard pellets in a cold layer on their way down. But the other kids on the bus were calling it hail. I tried to explain that hail was a warm season phenomena and much bigger than this but it fell on deaf ears. As I grew up I'd become continually more aware just how weather ignorant most people are. It baffled me, because weather impacts everything we do, and with just a cursory knowledge of cloud structure and a good set of observational skills and feel I was making short term forecasts that were pretty accurate while adults in charge were getting caught offgaurd by thunderstorms. Being weather ignorant is fine, until it isn't. Until their life is in danger. And it doesn't take a monster tornado for weather to kill you.

On a warm, calm evening in June I was on my way to the shoreline with the canoe racked up to meet John. Our goal was going to be to put a good sized striper in the boat, and I'd been on a school of cows for a few days. But there was a catch, a catch in the form of a thin green line on radar. 

Doppler radar works by bouncing radio waves off of particles in the atmosphere and measuring the phase shift, which in terms of waveform means the displacement of a waveform in time. By measuring the waveform, radar can determine the speed and direction a particle in the atmosphere is traveling, and by measuring the strength of the reflected radio wave the radar can determine the size and quantity of particulate. This particulate could be a tiny snowflake, a fat hailstone, or even a chunk of a house, in the terms of the things storms might put in the air. It can also be insects, smoke, or airplanes. That gives us an awful lot of information to go off of. and to my slightly trained eye, that thin, broken green line told me a lot. With limited reflectivity (light green rather than yellow, orange, red, or purple. radar reflectivity is measured in dBZ, or decibals relative to Z- the measure of the strength of the returning beam. Low dBZ is represented by blues and greens, high by reds and purples.) I could tell there wasn't much if any precipitation reaching the ground along most of the line. Rather, the radar was picking up a dense but thin line of clouds with small embeded cells. They were moving quickly though and so was the wind pushing them, evidenced both by their speed on the radar and the bright green when I switched from the reflectivity product to the velocity product. This radar imagery was a classic example of a strong outflow boundary or gust front. when storms expel cold air, it hits the ground and spreads out, often creating an arcing line of cold outflow wind. This can sometimes persist for hours, even after the storm is gone. The storm that made this wind was long gone and not visible. I could see the shallow, puffy line of clouds out my window though and it confirmed my forecast. 

When I met John I told him "This might be short lived, but we'll give it a shot". Though it was nearly dead calm where we were, I knew it wouldn't remain so. The line of advancing cumulus clouds was visible to the west. "It's going to get windy when this gust front comes over us". 

I wasn't worried because I knew the wind direction and knew that it would just blow the boat back to the beach we were launching from. I also knew John could handle the minor discomfort of a choppy trip back, this was far from his first time in my canoe either.  But if it had been any other client I wouldn't have even left the house. I knew my boat, knew the location, and knew I could keep us safe, but I also knew there was a fair shot it wouldn't be all that fun and that we'd get very little fishing time. John wouldn't care as long as there was a brief shot at a big bass, but it sure wouldn't make a good trip for most paying clients. If it had been another launching location  the story could be quite a bit different, and I could picturw someone getting themselves in quite a bit of trouble on a small paddle craft, or even an overloaded aluminum motorboat or smaller sailing vessel. We got out to our position, John fished for a bit, and the gust front came over. The change in conditions wasn't gradual. It went from blowing less than 5kts to over 20kts in a matter of about 60 seconds. We could hear the wind coming before we felt it. I pulled the anchor and calmly pointed the bow shore-ward, allowing the wind to carry us but fighting tide that wanted to pull us Southeast beyond my preferred landing point. We made it to shore, pulled the boat up, and looked at each other each wearing a face that said "that was gnarly". 

Had we been along a shoreline facing a different direction, in the same vessel, and unaware that the gust front was coming, that could have been extremely inconvenient at best and dangerous at worst. Knowing how to read the sky and radar and being conscious of the surroundings and our limitations kept us safe. You hear, from time to time, about small boats getting into serious trouble, often weather related. People die because they don't know how to interpret the weather, and the more time you spend outdoors, especially on open water, the more of a risk that is. Don't be a statistic. Learn the weather. 

Happy holidays everyone, I hope you are all in good health and spirits. Thank you all. 

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.