I’ve got one hectic Friday ahead of me, but I wanted to fire a couple of interesting links the Undergrounder’s way before things got really weird.
Then again, things are often weird here, especially with the long Labor Day Weekend looming.
First, Some Good News
From the Bangor Daily News comes word of Atlantic Salmon habitat recovery efforts that recognize the need to restore not just the big rivers, but also the small tribs.
Project SHARE, which stands for Salmon Habitat and River Enhancement, is a coalition of landowners, anglers, businesses and government agencies focusing on salmon issues in Down East Maine. What makes the organization unique, said Koenig, the group’s executive director, is the leading role that landowners played in seeking habitat improvements.
“It was the landowners who said that this was important,” Koenig said while motioning to the restored stream bed, which was located on land managed by Wagner Forest Management.
The obstacle in this case was a fish-unfriendly steel culvert, which was replaced by a steel arch.
It reminded me a little of some of CalTrout’s Redband Trout recovery efforts on the Upper McCloud, where culverts and other manmade obstacles are strangling the population.
If CalTrout’s Curtis Knight and I can coordinate our schedules, I’m hoping to get out there and shoot a few pictures about the problems and progress surrounding the Redband recovery effort. Stay tuned.
Ed Dentry: Stupid Is As Stupid Does
Ed Dentry of the Rocky Mountain News relates the magic of opening day for hunters… and how the clarity and purpose of the day is soon washed away by an army of idiots.
From his tree stand overlooking elk trails, Levi Judge, of Denver, watched the forest wake. Dawn of opening weekend is the purest of times.
It also is the last time you can expect elk to behave naturally. Soon, as it typically happens in national forests in Colorado, the human circus would arrive.
Sadly, it gets worse before it gets better (actually, it never really gets better).
First, Judge heard the ATV. Then he spotted a big silhouette decoy pretending to look like a cow elk’s rump. Some hunters hid near the rump in plain view and tooted cow calls.
“I felt like a forward observer on a skirmish line,” Judge said.
On the hike out, he met another man dressed like a TV commercial driving past on a shiny ATV. The man pointed to the Funnel and told Judge he was headed there.
Every fly fisher has a vest pocket filled with similar stories, and I’m reminded of the time I was swarmed by four fly fishers while I was working a pair of rising fish.
They wanted to cross the river, I wanted to catch a fish, and the results were… predictable — at least in the sense that I didn’t catch a fish, they acted like idiots, and one fairly livid (and outnumbered) fly fisher used the word “assholes” a couple of times when its use was warranted, but not advised.
That was years ago, but I was reminded of it by the end of Dentry’s column:
That evening, the rust-bucket SUV roared in precisely when the elk were coming down out of dark timber for supper. Four lads jumped out, slammed doors and crashed toward Judge’s hiding place.
“I knew it had to be a big herd of elk coming,” he said later. “Nothing else makes that much noise in the woods.
“Then these four morons sit right in front of some trees a few yards across from me. I stood up so they could see me, and they just waved.”
Excellent.
[tags]atlantic salmon, salmon recovery, hunting, atv, ed dentry[/tags]
