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.

My Own Letter to the ASMFC Re: December 2024 Striped Bass Board Meeting

Dear Ms. Franke and Striped Bass Board Members,

As a fly fishing guide, angler, and conservationist whose livelihood is tethered to the success of the Atlantic striped bass, I'd like the opportunity to comment on potential management options.

For the most part, I stand in agreement with the ASGA (American Saltwater Guides Association) on their stances as expressed in their letter on this topic: That no targeting closures would be inequitable, hard to enforce, and are based on faulty assumptions; That no harvest closures are also inequitable, disproportionately affect those operating in states with shorter seasons, and can allow states to cherry-pick closure periods that minimize their impact; that adjusting a slot limit to preserve what is left of 2018 year class; and that commercial and recreational reductions should be as close to equal as possible.

However, I'd like to go a step further as well. If we stand to lose a viable striped bass stock, and withstanding six years of extremely poor recruitment that doesn't seem unlikely, every business that relies on striped bass as a robust, healthy fishery is going to suffer. Losing sight of that fact in a quest for equity among sectors from recreational anglers, catch & kill charters, catch & release charters, and commercial fisherman means we will all eventually lose. There will come a point, and I firmly believe we are already at this point given the data at hand, that management action will need to be taken that negatively impacts some if not all businesses that rely on Atlantic striped bass; something like a moratorium on targeting striped bass or a moratorium on harvesting striped bass. Temporarily encumbering businesses in the recreational and commercial sectors that are responsible for driving the Atlantic striped bass stock into the ground will eventually be unavoidable. Though I'm an angler, writer, fly tyer and guide whose business benefits from being able to target striped bass, I'd rather be legally obliged to stop doing so for a short time than watch the fishery continue to decline to the point of collapse. No target and no harvest closures aren't the solution to rebuilding the stock, but perhaps a temporary coastwide moratorium, or coastwide gear restrictions (for example: single, barbless hooks, artificial lures only) that equitably affects every angler, guide, and business is. Either we lose business now and rebuild the stock, or we fail and see the stock collapse and lose our businesses for good anyway. I'd rather take the temporary hit than a permanent one.

Rowan M. Lytle

Guide, Connecticut Fly Angler

Climb Out & Scream (Pt. 1)

In a small dirt lot somewhere in Northeastern Missouri, I cracked the window of the rental car and let in a sound. It was a wavering buzz, a chorus of many singers emanating from the trees on this stiflingly hot early summer day. This was a sound I'd driven well over a thousand miles to hear. I looked over at my partner in the passenger seat and cracked a maniacal grin. We weren't too late after all!

Periodical cicadas or "magic cicadas" represent seven different species of cicada that emerge on 13 and 17 year cycles. 17 different broods emerge of separate cycles all across the Eastern United states. In 2024, two broods emerged simultaneously in the Midwest and South- the Northern Illinois Brood and the Great Southern Brood. Collectively, millions of cicadas emerged from the earth, where they spent more than 99 percent of their life, shed their nymphal shucks, and went about doing what sexually mature cicadas do best: screaming and having sex. That's probably what I'd want to do if I'd just spent the last 13-17 years living in the soil too, quite frankly.  Some people aren't particularly big fans of the sound or the bugs themselves. Personally, I think those people suffer from a severe negative attitude problem. How lucky are we that such an incredible ecological phenomena occurs in our backyard? It's such an incredible display of life, a vitally important occurrence in the habitats in which these bugs persist. Throughout parts of their range, some periodical cicadas are not doing well at all. Charles Lester Marlatt, who first assigned Roman numeric designations to the existing broods (as well as 13 others that don't actually exist) noted dramatic declines in the very brood that should emerge in the Connecticut River Valley, attributing it to deforestation and the introduction of house sparrows (Marlatt, C.L (1907). "Summary of the Habits and Characteristics of the Cicada.") Unfortunately, Brood XI was last seen in 1954 and is now extinct, an outright ecological catastrophe most southern New England residents are wholly unaware of.

As I've written about in this blog before, I'm a cicada addict. I adore periodical cicadas and everything about them, from their ornate, jewel like wings to their mechanical sounding call, to their seemingly bumbling flights as they try to evade predators. Of course, it doesn't hurt that fish like to eat them. Fish really like to eat them. Here in Missouri, I was hoping that the fish that would be really liking the cicadas would be grass carp. In North America fisherman often have a pretty poor understanding of what carp are In this area in the midwest it's made no better by a plethora of large native suckers that look vaguely like common carp, and a number of introduced Asian carp species, including grass carp. Grass carp are a bit different than the species that are often in the headlines as Asian carp, which are silver and bighead carp. Grass carp, Ctenopharyngodon idella, are the only species in their genus and look, at least to the trained eye, absolutely nothing like common carp. Nor do they act like common carp, come from the same part of the world (grass carp are from far Eastern Asia, common carp from Europe and far Western Asia. Though both species feed on or near the surface semi frequently, grass carp are built for it a little better with a terminal mouth while common carp have a more inferior mouth (this means that their mouth is on the bottom of their face, not that their mouth is worse). Both are detrimental ecologically in a variety of different ways. Both are also a heck of a lot of fun to catch on a fly rod, but to this point in my fly fishing carrier I'd caught exactly one, this monster from a park pond in the northeast: 

I really wanted more, and I really wanted to catch one without having to throw a bunch of bits of bread in the water. These calling cicadas were singing a promise to me. They were singing a promise that I was surely about to find my fix. I trotted through the brush towards the river, cicadas blundering into branches in their haste to get away from me. Upon reaching the edge of a high clay bank and peaking over, it was immediately apparent that they bugs weren't lying. A half a dozen or so grass carp cruised up and down a bubble line, picking off bugs as they went. They weren't alone though. They were joined by roughly the same number of shortnose gar, a fish species I'd gotten to see for the first time with my friend Hamilton Bell earlier in the week down in Arkansas. They'd snubbed me then (read: I blew a lot of shots), but this opportunity seemed almost too good. And they were eating bugs? What a wonderful surprise! This seemed uncharacteristic for a gar species, but I'm not one to turn down an opportunity at an odd species on a dry fly. Firs though, I had to rush back to the car to rig up. My grin was now twice as maniacal.

There's some minor complexity to catching cicada eating fish, but it isn't so technical as to be prohibitively difficult. Certain fish seem to have certain preferences at different times. I've never gotten carp to eat sinking cicadas well, though I'm sure it happens. On the tailwaters of Maryland during the 2021 emergence, I caught fat brown trout on some sinking cicadas, to exclusion of the dry fly during the midday surface activity lull. I had yet to get the opportunity to put a cicada in front of a grass carp, or a shortnose gar for that matter, but given the methodical behavior of these fish I anticipated a long drift being favorable to a splat-down, and probably minimal action on the fly. And that's exactly what I got. In fact, I was about to have two days of the best dry fly fishing I'd ever experienced. These grassers behaved much like big brown trout do. They chose the same sorts of lies a trout would, holding position in faster water and cycling in the froggy spots. They were selective but not overly so, and they fought incredibly well. They fought astoundingly well too. It was everything I could have asked for. (Short video available to Patreon supporters: www.patreon.com)

I knocked a couple grassers out really promptly, but was immediately keen on sticking a gar. It didn't take too long to find willing participants to grab the fly, they were in fact extremely keen on that, but it did take a little while to get one willing to stick (read: I whiffed a whole bunch of them). When I finally did, it was an elevating moment. My first of a gar species, my third gar species, on a periodical cicada dry fly. That just seemed absurd. But these fish were clearly keen on the bugs. They were setting up much like the grassers were, though they favored cruising the slower water over stationing up. Some were holding lies though, finning in the current and picking off cicadas as they floated by. They showed notable preference for the bugs that were still alive and moving, and in turn for a fly that was twitched like the living naturals. It was just the coolest thing, so cool I had to know if this was a well know phenomena. I reached out to Dr. Solomon David, biologist and gar specialist at the University of Minnesota about what I was seeing. Not only did he respond promptly confirming that shortnose gar are indeed known to feed intently on periodical cicadas, he told me that one of the only pieces of formal scientific literature on the species delved into their behavior while feeding on magicicadas: American Midland Naturalist Journal: Shortnose Gar - Territorial Defense of Profitable Pool Positions. 

How friggen cool is that? Solomon David then asked if I'd be able to contribute any data. I'm always looking for an excuse to provide something that could be of use to fisheries science. If I'm going to go around pricking all sorts of fish in face for fun, some sort of good should at least come of my efforts. Subsequently, for the rest of my time in Missouri, every shortnose gar I caught was accurately measured and photographed. Their behavior prior to capture and exact location were recorded, and I took photos of gar in feeding lanes, cicadas on the water, and overall shots of the river. It added some work on my part, but that isn't unfamiliar. I spent many formative years observing river herring runs to get visual estimates on returns in streams without fish ladders. The amount that can be learned by approaching fish with a scientist's eye, looking for a quantitative analysis, is significant. Fisherman aren't always good scientists, arguably rarely. The goal of catching fish doesn't always necessitate understanding exactly why fish do what they do. It doesn't take a thorough understanding of fish, across all sorts of species and waterbodies, to catch enough to be satisfied. Anglers are often not even that good at telling what species of fish they're holding in their had when they do catch one. So taking a very scientific approach, engaging with the ichthyologists and fisheries biologists, and participating in the collection of data that might further the scientific understanding of fish and their habitat presents a lot of opportunities. I'll jump at the opportunity to take part any chance I get. 

They way gar take a fly has always amused me. It's almost adorable, bordering on comical at times. With these cicadas it was no different. The fly would plop down, perhaps two or three feet ahead of the fish. Either it would respond to the fly landing or I'd twitch the bug. The gar would turn, angling toward the fly, and nose right up to it. By nose up, I don't mean put their snout under the fly. They get it next to their eye almost, next to their jaws on one side of their head or the other. If they could they'd probably be squinting at the fly at this point. If a moment passes and the gar doesn't  commit, I'm inclined to give the fly little twitches. This is usually all it takes, the gar's fins kick a little and it closes whatever gap it has between it and the fly. Then is snaps at it, opening its mouth and jerking its head to the side. Can you picture it? I've seen it countless times from four different species of gar, everywhere from Vermont to Florida to Arkansas. It's very specific, and frankly very funny. 

My satisfaction with life is heavily contingent, probably too contingent, on laborious exploration of places I've never been with either a fly rod or a camera in hand. There isn't necessarily anything relaxing about it at all, sometimes I wear myself down to zero. I beat myself to a pulp wading twelve miles of river one day and had to pull over on the side of the highway because the cramping was too severe to drive through. I forget that my body even exists in favor of paying attention to everything else instead. And when an event is ephemeral and temporary, or my time in a place is short, I can be almost frantic about it. Not so frantic that I don't take time to be completely stationary though. 

Standing on a high, sloping bank above one long, slow pool, I could see a few grassers larger than the one's I'd been catching working the surface. The rock below my feet was sheet thin layers of sedimentary strata, layer down millennia ago when this whole place was underwater. Not much had altered it since it had hardened as it was near perfectly level and didn't who much at all in the way of signs of metamorphosis from heat or pressure. The river had carved at it though, revealing the time it had been laid as step-like layers sloping down to the riverbed. On top of it was a less old form of the same process- layers of sand and clay that had been dropped by the river when it was younger. The rock made a good seat, I decided to watch the fish feed for a bit and take in as much information as I could while I had the opportunity. The larger fish were definitively wearier than the smaller ones, and didn't spend as much time hovering right under the surface. Since the water was extremely turbid they were only really visible as dark, long smudges with wavering tails. Some of the little ones stayed up and cruised around. But the larger ones, some of which were probably in the high 30 inch class, rose up from the gloom and held position for a moment or two, picked off a couple cicadas when they came by, and then sank back down. They were clearly favoring proximity to shad, though they didn't seem to need to be in it all the time. Fish treat shadows as cover,, because it is. I couldn't see them well at all when they were in the shade, but could see them fairly clearly around the periphery of it. They seemed to want to remain close to that shadow as a quick escape if it became necessary. Eventually sensing a pattern of movement with the larger fish there I eased down to the water's edge. From that level seeing the fish before they surfaced to eat was nearly impossible, so I waited with fly line in hand to make a quick but long cast. When one topped, I let it fly. The bug landed, a few seconds passed, and white lips opened around it. I held ground until the lips closed and the head turned to go back down and lifted the rod. The pool then erupted as an angry grasser mad it's feeling about being deceived known. 

I repeated the process over an over that second day, scrambilng up and down steep banks, watching fish, and walking river in deck boots and shorts, hunting and hunting some more until I was fairly satisfied with the results. I'd come, I'd seen, and I'd caught. I watched birds hunt the cicadas and seen a few snakes slide away into holes. I'd done some minor gar science and bent an eight weight on more grass carp than I'd caught up until that point prior. Understanding that the time had come to push northward, we said goodbye to Missouri- as place I'd not had anywhere near the respect for that it deserved until driving it's entire extent from south to north. But there were more bugs, more fish, and more places to be. The clock is always ticking, and I needed to find more to keep that maniacal grin on my face. Though there was a tornado to be chased in Nebraska first, the next stop on the cicada pilgrimage was Illinois. 

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.