April Activities

Not sure about everyone else, but April is flying by!!  Not too much happening, except work...and even then it's iffy...but I have managed to get out and play once in awhile.

Last week, I took some advice and got out of town for a little bit.  Where to?  Where else?  Time to hit the Selway!  I left Thursday and found my favorite camping spot (up the Selway) wide open.  Actually, I basically had the entire river to myself; talk about blissful!  I fished the extreme tail-end of the steelhead season up the South Fork of the Clearwater with absolutely NO luck Friday morning...even when I switched rods and tried for just normal trout.  Oh well.  I had my fill of driving and headed back to camp where Butch met me later in the afternoon.  I had better luck fishing the Selway and even managed to pull a bull trout out of the eddy in front of camp.

The next day we went and looked at the falls and poked around for morels.  No morels, but not for lack of trying.  Overall it was just a nice, relaxing trip.  I actually could have used more time down there...


Camp Thursday night



Another view

 

River view



Breakfast Friday morning.  Never even got out of the bag!



Tail of Selway Falls

Now this is irritating me.  I've SAVED these rotated correctly.  Upper end of the falls. 
 *sigh* blogger



It rained, snowed, sleeted, blew, was sunny, calm...etc.


Okay, now that brings us to 10:31 a.m. April 21, 2013.  Heyyy, wait a minute, that was yesterday!  Yes, yes I know...but it'll make more sense in a second.

While Sarah was running a race, I decided to head into the woods and see what I could see.  So there I was, walking through a unit that had been logged about oh, two or three years ago.  South, southwest aspect.  All of a sudden, I noticed I had a shotgun in my hand!  Then I found a slate turkey call in my pocket!  All be darned.  So I'd find a dry spot (it was raining pretty good) and squeak on the call.  Pretty quick, I got a response from the way I had just come from!!  I hunkered behind a tree and called some more, and before I knew it, there was ANOTHER one responding from RIGHT BEHIND ME!  I sloooowly turned my head to look over my shoulder and almost jumped out of my skin!  This monster of a bird was five feet from me and coming in hot!  When I jumped, it flaired it's wings, gained about 10 feet of elevation (past my head) and stuck itself to the side of the tree!  I looked up and finally figured out I was looking at the underside of a pileated woodpecker!  Then the other one joined us and they just called and called...sounding like mockingbirds they were so close to sounding like my turkey call. 

Well, that was pretty darn cool.  I've never called in a woodpecker before!  I got wandering through this unit and every once in awhile I found myself stopped just thinking about what had just happened.  That's when something on the ground looked oddly familiar.  Yep, THAT was 10:31 a.m. April 21st, 2013...the first morel of the season!!  Pretty quick I found myself on my hands and knees searching as they were juussttt popping up.  The average size was about an inch and the biggest maybe two inches.  I picked enough for dinner and proof and then had to walk past all the little ones coming up.  This week is setting up to be perfect bluebird...so they should be gaining some mass by the end of the week!




Not too bad for the first of the season



These went fast!

After that, I took a quick drive around Fernan lake to see how many people were fishing.  Turns out there were quite a few, despite the rain.  That's when I noticed a loon out in the water acting like it was getting attacked by a pike!  It'd flop around and flap it's wings, causing a huge commotion.  Then it would stop for awhile and put it's head underwater to look around....pretty quick it was flopping and flapping around.  I figured if it wasn't flying away, maybe it was tangled up in fishing line!  A very likely possibility since just last year some folks rescued an osprey dealing with just that problem in the same lake.

So I ran home and got my wildlife biologist who was more than willing to go, loaded up the boat and headed out.  The idea was to take the big steelhead net, don some leather gloves, and carefully cut the line off of it.  Of course, in my haste, I forgot the net...but figured we could snag the line somehow.  As soon as we got the boat in the water and ready to go, it started pouring rain!  Even the folks on the shore fishing were packing up to leave, and there Sarah and I were, heading out in a boat to rescue a duck.  Of course, we saw the bird in question and another one on the way in, but not while we were out there.  The one we DID see while we were motoring around had absolutely no problem diving and swimming about a hundred yards at a time.  Definitely not tangled up in anything.  And...knowing that dead ducks float....pretty sure it either a.) got out of it by itself or b.) that was some sort of territorial display.


Grrr, blogger!  Sarah enjoying the weather.

 

See?  Smiles!

In doing some research this morning, I'm thinking it was a territorial thing.  Most likely that other loon was underneath it somewhere and that's why it kept looking under the water?  Who knows, it was weird.  First time I'd ever seen that in my life.  But, it sure looked a lot like this:

http://youtu.be/sxN88QOpzBg

Interesting day overall.  And by the time we got home, it was only 2:30!