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Monday, January 16, 2017

Scouting Out a New Small Stream

Today I decided to visit a stream I've been eyeing up for about three years. It is not particularly easy to get to being down a veritable maze of back roads and un-mapped trails that often dead end at someone's private land. Today I negotiated the labyrinth and finally found water. I was going to make a few casts here and there, but there was a lot of ice and the water temperature was hovering just at freezing. The only thing keeping it from freezing during the first couple hours of the my outing was motion. Even though the air temperature was in the mid thirties ice crystals formed on my boots and line. Slush formed around sticks floating in slow eddies.

Before I even rigged up my rod  I met some new friends.


After the deer and I parted ways I began waling water. When I'm fishing a new stream I cover a lot of water and don't always cast much. I look for riffles, deep pools, and rushing pocket water. I look for hatching insects or, in their absence, I roll stones and pull out woody debris to see what's crawling on it. If the stream is small enough I walk quickly and try to spook some fish. This stream today was not small enough for that, far too much flow. So I looked for potential habitat. I found plenty. Unfortunately the cold water ice, and slush probably prevented any feeding from whatever trout may have been there.





Despite the skunk, which I was expecting anyway, I was having a tremendous day. I covered a lot of ground and saw some really beautiful things, including this 15ft deep spring hole. If it were connected to the stream I would not be surprised if it had a bunch of brook trout in it.


While riding through a field at the end of the day, I spotted something interesting: a line of very large animal tracks. I saw them while riding at a pretty good clip. I had to whip back around to have a look, and what I found was amazing. Large track with a 3 3/4 inch width, some with splayed toes, the first three (in softer earth) with claw prints and the rest without any sign of claws.They had three lobes on the pad, signifying a feline origin... I am quite confident that these were mountain lion tracks.



Very splayed toes
That was a pretty spectacular find to end the day, topping of seeing lots of natural beauty. That all makes a decent recipe for a fish-less day that is still just awesome!

12 comments:

  1. We enjoyed a skunk yesterday, probably for the same reasons you did.
    I love your company.
    I wish I could locate the photo of a deer kill I came upon. It was so fresh that the blood was still running. Half of the carcass was still there, I looked closely at it and noticed that the femur bone was crushed, to do such a thing the animal had to be big. There were no tracks accept mine. I got nervous and left.

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    1. A number of winters ago I found a similar kill, still warm and steaming in the snow. lots of coyote prints around it. It was a rather small doe.

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  2. Interesting day - especially the tracks. That sure looks like the X one would expect to see in a cat track when drawing a straight line between the two right and left toes (across the pad). There was the cat on a trip a couple years ago that was run over down in SW CT - from the Dakotas... Why couldnt another go on a walkabout...

    Exciting finding.

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    1. Many have suggested that mountain lions have re-established into some of the Appalachian range, and I for one believe it having seen three of them in CT. The states don't want to spend money on required protection so they deny their presence.

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    2. While I have not seen any, I know two reputable people who swear to have seen wolves in Maine and in the Adirondacks.The theory there goes the same - the states deny it, since they'd have a public panic issue on their hands if they admitted they exist and the populations are probably too small for it to matter at this point anyway.

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  3. These are interesting observations. Rowan - do you think it could be a large bobcat?

    Alan - any chance a coyote could've had the jaw strength to break a femur or maybe that the deer broke its leg on its own and then died? Were there any animal tracks around? I don't blame you for not hanging around. I came upon a freshly killed elk carcass in Yellowstone in a box canyon and was cut off from going farther upstream by a large waterfall. I high tailed it out of there.

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    1. Not a chance- bobcat tracks are less than 2 inches across, these were far bigger. The only other possibility would be a huge dog, but these had three bumps on the heal of the pad not three. I'd bet anything they were cougar prints.

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    2. George
      I have seen many coyote kills and they feed like dogs.bite and rip. They do not have that kind of force in their bite to crush bone like I witnessed. There were no visible tracks around the carcass. I did not hang around to look for any either.

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  4. NICE water and I'm sure the fish are there.
    We do have the Cougar in the mountain ranges. In PA they also will not acknowledge their being here. I have seen tracks years ago.
    Get a canister of bear spray.
    Tie, fish, write and photo on...

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    1. If I carry bear spray it will not be out of concern about wild animals, it will be out of concern about people.

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  5. There are confirmed cats coming through CT. One was hit by a a car in Milford a few years ago in 2011. Google it

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    1. Yes, I am fully aware of that. I also know that the frequency of sightings and track finds suggests that CT has once again become a part of at least a few mountain lions' home range. Which every NE state agency swiftly shoves under the carpet so as to avoid public conflict like the stuff we've seen around the reintroduction of wolves out west.

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