Slowly Dying

This has been a rough week. Very rough. I've been sick for so damn long. In good weather I'll fish even if I've got a stomach bug, but when it's really, really cold it's hard for me to justify fishing with a body temperature behaving very much like a yoyo. It isn't fun. I've been keeping busy, tying flies, playing with my little cat, and slowly dying on the couch watching "Cheers". But I need to fish ASAP.

Uglying up the Ausable Ugly

A Fish At the Edge

Hey everybody, sorry for my tardiness. It has been a busy weekend for me and not in regards to fishing. That and I have also become sick... fun. Hopefully it doesn't last.

There's no ignoring the fact that man has done a lot to change the state of the natural world. One way we have really messed things up is moving species from place to place, essentially playing God. One big issue I've encountered in my search for a banded sunfish is the proliferation of bluegill. They are one of the most heavily transplanted fish in North America, and although they seem like benign fish, they have upset the balance in many watersheds.

On Thursday Noah and I sampled a stream that had been surveyed before in 1989 and 2012, and only one bluegill turned up in the first survey. There hadn't been spectacular numbers of banded sunfish but there were enough to give us hope. There were also a handful of other species neither of us had caught.

I knew it was a bad sign when the first fish we both caught were bluegills. The next few hours we caught a lot of bluegills, killed most a limit each, and only caught a handful of native sunfish, those being pumpkinseeds and redbreast sunfish.

Now, I know, I am usually not the person to harvest fish I don't personally plan to eat. Hell, I don't even like the taste of fish much. But these guys had taken over a stream that is on of the handful of remaining banded sunfish strongholds in the state. So we killed a lot of non native sunfish on this outing, despite the fact that we put the tiniest of dents in their numbers because they are space hogs. Introduced species have been the prime mover in pushing banded sunfish to the very edge of their homes. To make things worse they are an easy fish to pass by. How many of you had hear of banded sunfish before my first post on the subject? Organizations and coalitions and societies have come about to protect the glamour fish. Your trouts, your salmons, your striped bass, hundreds of thousands if not millions are out there advocating for their protection. But this little sunfish; which now exists in less than a quarter of the water bodies within its range than healthy native brook trout populations do in this state; has been largely ignored by the masses. And even though I have yet to encounter one, this depresses me. 

On a more positive note, meet Pip!

He's very tired, but he had to be for me to take a photo of him. Any other time he's moving too quickly for the camera. Pip is short for Pipistrello, or bat in Italian. Why? He's a black nocturnal kitten with goofy big batty ears. Our other back cat is called Pezzettino so keeping the Italian names going was a good plan. He's still a little guy and therefore requires attention, but I lucked out with a kitten who could care less about flies and fly tying materials... that's a bit rare and fortunate! 

I normally don't discuss my personal life but this little guy is just too adorable not to brag about. He's cleaning himself next to me now. He ate a stink bug earlier, which he seems not to have learned from because he continued to chase them around the room and chatter at them after the awful taste went away. 

I won't be writing about Pip frequently though, I hope you enjoy this one little tidbit.