Eye of the Cormorant

another odd bird who chases fish.

Tag: outdoors

  • Trout Fishing the Driftless Area

    “Phil, I get the draw of fly fishing in Wyoming, but Wisconsin?”
    email from friend in Miami

    ”Someday I want to go fly fishing in the Driftless.”
    overheard on train to car rental at Chicago O’Hare

    The Driftless area of Wisconsin was not glaciated, so it has some big rocks sticking up, topography conducive to springs and formation cool water trout streams. It’s pretty countryside, with cornfields in the flatter areas framed by woodlands in the dolomite and limestone ridges and valleys.

    The nearby town of Viroqua was described to us as a college town without a college. Many of its local businesses are named for the Driftless area, e.g., the Driftless Cafe, Driftless Books and Music, Driftless Angler, even the Driftless Humane Society. At the Viroqua Food Co-op you can buy Driftless Coffee.

    Brook Trout are native to the Driftless streams and Brown Trout are naturalized.

    In the Driftless, Brook Trout and cows come together.

    In addition to these self-sustaining trout populations, the Wisconsin DNR stocks streams with Rainbow Trout so the googans armed with spinning rods and barbed treble-hook spinners have something to catch on opening day. Any rainbows that survive that onslaught provide the big brown trout with something to snack on the other 364 days of the year, aside from their own offspring and hapless field mice. The Driftless streams grow some big browns, big like 30”. Fishing at night, when these leviathans are out feeding, is disallowed most of the year.

    In my week of fishing, I saw hundreds of brown trout and brookies, but not a single rainbow. No monster browns either – the largest was about 18”, a nice trout by my standards.

    Our first Drifltess afternoon we were joined by Adrian Livangood, a fishing guide from the outfitter Extreme Driftless. Adrian had spent five hours the day before scouting streams to find one with cool enough water, not higher than 65°F.

    Adrian finally chose his home stream, one he’d fished since he was a kid. Not surprisingly, he knows every ripple and sand ridge, and how they change with each rain storm.

    The stream, like many in the Driftless area, is accessed via a fishing easement, a strip of private land on which the owner has received a tax break for allowing access for trout fishing.

    Following Adrian, we tunneled through 100 yards of tall corn, crossed under a barbed wire fence, then stepped out onto a cow pasture through which flowed a beautiful cool stream.

    As Adrian and I stalked the stream bank for trout, Gray sat in the pasture and drew. A herd of dairy cows and their attendant bull kept their distance from Gray at first, but grew increasingly curious. They hadn’t seen an artist before.

    One cow came close enough to drool on Gray’s notebook.

    The afternoon was not too fishy, as fishing goes, but I got the feel of where trout hang in the local streams, catching eight brown trout on dry flies, dropper nymphs, and streamers. 

    Brown Trout.

    Nothing I saw that afternoon was huge, but Adrian showed me three holes inhabited by “lunker” browns 29-30” in length. He hooked one as a kid when he was starting out, and of course it got away. He has seen them in that stream a few times since then but hasn’t caught one. In winter and spring Adrian catches at least one big brown (20-25”) daily on a nearby river. 

    Weekday mornings during our stay, I woke with the first song of the Indigo Bunting, and headed out to fish a different Class 1 trout stream each day. Weekends I left to the locals who work during the week, and who, by all rights, shouldn’t have to complete with visitors on their home creek.

    The streams I fished are designated catch-and-release, and all had cold water 58-64°F.  I caught lots of trout on dry flies, typically a Parachute Adams, but also terrestrial insect imitations: grasshoppers and ants.

    This 14” native Brook Trout was a prize catch on the size 12 Parachute Adams dry fly.

    After my introduction to the Driftless in a grazed pasture, I quickly came to understand why fly fishers like short rods for creeks. My 9-foot long, 5-weight rod was fine for fishing a stream with cow-mown banks, but proved ungainly in the more typical, heavily vegetated streams. There I lost multiple flies in tree branches and cow parsnips and spent hours unhooking flies from vegetation and tying up new hopper-dropper rigs.

    I stopped by the Driftless Angler in Viroqua to replace my lost #12 Parachute Adams dry flies and made the mistake of wandering over to the rod rack to drool over their collection of short 3wt rods.

    Here I am fondling a nice 4wt fly rod at a shop in the Catskills. Substitute your favorite class of merchandise and you’ll get the picture.

    The St. Croix ($400) seemed like a good fit for these streams, but felt like a tent pole compared to the Sage Dart ($825). The urge to buy terrorizes me. Time to leave.

    Near our home exchange house, I fished a beautiful wooded stream, this one a particularly tight fit for a 9’ fly rod. 

    Good pool for trout, but tight for casting a 9’ fly rod.

    Once I did find a good use for the long rod, flipping the #12 Parachute Adams around a bush into an upstream pool that I could not see. Hearing the splash of a bite, I twitched the rod tip sideways and hooked a nice 11” brown.

    Brown that munched a Parachute Adams

    The next pool held a rising fish that repeatedly ignored the Adams. I noticed black ants marching along the bank, so I tied on a floating #16 black ant fly and flipped that into the pool. A small brook trout jumped into the air, did a back flip  and dove onto the ant fly.  It missed the fly, but earned top marks from the judges for difficulty and style.

    Floating ant fly.

    The adjacent pool upstream was wide open, so I tried the ant again. A second brookie came at the ant fly from below and connected.

    Easier pool to fish. A Brook trout waits unseen for bugs to appear at the back of the bend on the right.
    The Driftless Anteater.

    These two were the only trout I caught that morning before the rain set in, but their capture and release through fiddly persistence, the essence of fly fishing for trout, made the morning entirely successful in my view.

    The Driftless streams tend to be clear during the summer, which makes the trout more wary. Footpaths along the sides of many indicate the older trout are well-educated. But even on the most heavily fished stream I visited, the ancillary rewards are beyond words: picture rattling calls making you look up to see a pair of Sandhill Cranes flying low overhead, lit amber by the rising sun.

    Some days the trout were actively feeding on bugs that did not resemble the gray-bodied Adams flies. For instance, this big yellow mayfly held the trouts’ attention a couple of  morning on different streams, but my fly box lacked the size 8-12 Parachute Sulfur fly that would have “matched the hatch”.

    Stenacron canadense , sometimes referred to as a “Light Cahill”.

    Other mornings trout were taking small, unseen insects off the surface or jumping a foot in the air to snap at something they could see and I could not. At those times, I couldn’t get a bite on an Adams dry fly of any size. Looking around, I saw the odd caddis fly and some tiny gnats or blackflies buzzing around. The rising trout refused my size 18 Elk Hair Caddis. Maybe they’d have taken Griffith’s Gnat in size 20 or 22.

    If I’d had some.

    An article on the Orvis site says that fly anglers who fish clear, spring-fed streams carry multiple fly boxes. Oh. So I’ll need to wear a backpack too?

    Adrian wore a backpack…Click, grind, wheeze, the penny drops.

    I did make two other relevant discoveries: (1) coffee makes my left hand shake too much to thread thin tippet into the hook eyes of #18 & 20 dry flies, and (2) The smaller-sized dry flies I bought mail order from The Fly Shack had hook eyes blocked by hackle, tying thread, and/or head cement – I gave the company an earful.

    When surface feeding trout ignored my dry flies, a sinking nymph fly under an indicator (tiny foam float) or foam grasshopper fly sometimes did the trick. The best such nymph was the Jig Hot Butt Hare’s Ear that I’d bought last summer from Kelly Galloup’s fly shop on the Madison River in Montana. This nymph is said to be good where caddis flies are present. 

    Jig Hot Butt Hare’s Ear, in olive, size 16

    Last morning in the Driftless, after releasing ten brown trout caught on this cute little fly – including a nice 14-incher – plus another on the dry grasshopper, I lost both of my Jig Hot Butt Hare’s Ear flies to grabby overhead branches. A timely sign to wind in my line. Indeed, wiggling free of my waders back at the car, the sky opened up. If I lived near the Driftless area, I’d assemble the materials to tie this little fly myself, plus the Parachute Sulfur.  And I’d splurge on that Sage Dart stream rod.

  • DeSantis Gulag: Protest #2 at Alligator Alcatraz

    Construction has begun on Alligator Alcatraz, the 1000 person immigration prison that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is building in the heart of a sensitive wetland. Once again, 400 concerned Floridians made the trek out to the center of the Big Cypress National Preserve to stand and protest for 4 hours under the midday sun.

    On the drive out to the second protest on Saturday morning we passed 8 concrete mixing trucks returning from the site and dozens of tractor-trailer rigs lined up to deliver construction materials.

    In winter, the center of Big Cypress National Preserve is a nature lover’s paradise, but in summer you reach a terminal sweat in the unrelenting heat and saturating humidity. Mosquitoes are big and fierce. The nearest small town is Everglades City, 40 miles away. This site has the makings of a Siberian style gulag, described by Alexandr Solzhenynitzyn in The Gulag Archipelago.

    Environmental activist Betty Osceola of the Miccosukee Tribe led the crowd of peaceful protesters.  We could hear the drum beats in the distance as the Miccosukees themselves protested to a higher authority.

    Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity have filed for an injunction pending the full environmental review required by federal law, and ignored by Gov. DeSantis.  DeSantis plows ahead, ignoring the law, his trademark modus operandi.

    DeSantis has seized the land under his 2023 emergency declaration, but the only emergencies we’re seeing here in South Florida are unnecessary ICE raids in our communities and unnecessary prison construction in a cherished and protected wetland.

  • Dodging Keraunos on the flats at Flamingo

    Zeus used his lightning bolt “Keraunos”, a gift from Cyclops, to exercise divine authority over the sky and weather, wielding Keraunos in divine retribution as he saw fit (perhaps inspiration for you-know-who and his black Sharpie, only more final and definitive).

    I launched the skiff out of Flamingo before sunrise with the triple intent of (1) trying my new used Spey rod around actual fish, (2) seeing if small dark-colored paddletails, gifts from a friend, might pull a redfish out of the mangroves, and (3) not getting struck by lightning from any among the squadron of thunderheads coursing the flats.

    I fished wherever the storm cells were not, motoring away from every encroaching squall to the nearest patch of clear sky.

    Results:

    1. The two-handed Spey rod works. I caught four speckled seatrout, some ladyfish, and a catfish on assorted flies while Spey casting from the skiff’s poling platform.  Wind is not a serious problem.
    2. Throwing the tiny dark paddletail into the mangrove roots, I hooked a redfish, but it came off as I got it to the boat. That happens. But the tiny paddletail works as intended.
    3. I had to move around a lot, and could not fish where/when I wanted, but the outboard let me dodge the electric storms. One can’t do that in a kayak.
    This seatrout ate Tim Borski’s Mackerel Shrimp pattern.

    It turned out to be a pretty good day for bird- and fish-watching despite the ominous weather.

    I spotted this Mangrove Clapper Rail peering out from its secretive world.

    Mangrove Clapper Rail, Snake Bight ENP

    Roseate Spoonbills foraged on the adjacent flat. I counted 67 of them. When you find feeding spoonbills, the snook are usually close by, foraging on the same small fish and crustacea.

    The wind picked up, but no lightning, and then it rained. Between the wind, rain, and holding the boat steady in the tide coursing the shallow and narrow channel, the elemental chaos was too much for fly casting. With a spinning rod I still managed three snook in the low 20-something-inch range, just what the spoonbills had predicted.

    After the rain moved out, I paused to watch a Reddish Egret scampering after a shoal of baitfish. The one in this video I found at Key Biscayne, but it gives you a sense of their hyperactive hunting style.

    While I watched the antics of the egret, something to the right of it caught my eye. A snook was working its way below the surface, sneaking toward the same bait school as the egret, but from the other direction. They came closer and closer together until the snook made its move, charging the baitfish and showering the egret with spray. The surprised egret jumped into the air, flapping to land several feet back. Wish I’d gotten a video, but I was too mesmerized by the impending collision to reach for a camera.

    Three bull sharks formed a mullet-hunting party. After the trio dispersed around me, this six-footer came close enough to get a video.

    Keep your hands in the boat.

    With that many sharks hunting in the water, it’s time to wind it up.

    © Philip Stoddard

  • Tropical Spey

    Casting the new (used) Spey rod at Crandon Park, photo by Gabriella Parilla

    A favorite backyard game in the summer of 2006 was holding my 8-year old daughter aloft in both hands and tossing her headlong into the deep end of the pond. “Do it again, Daddy!”

    And I did, over and over, until something went “pop”.  

    The regional elbow specialist, Dr. Obvious, diagnosed the injury:“You pulled a ligament in your elbow.”

    He prescribed the state-of-the-art treatment: “Baby it.” 

    Forever, it seems.

    After taking up saltwater fly fishing in 2022, I discovered that fly casting is an elbow-intensive sport. The heavier the rod and line, the greater the elbow strain. 

    I settled into elbow-friendly fly rods 7 weight and lighter. But I’ve found that a 7wt setup, situated in the middle of the weight range, has its limits: the 7wt can’t deliver big flies very far or turn a big snook away from the mangroves. Of greater consequence, a 7wt fly line cannot punch far through the coastal winds common on the open flats. Can I only pursue medium-sized fish using smallish flies on calm days?  

    This year has  been extra windy, as documented by the local avocado growers, who complain that wind desiccates the blooms and lowers their yields. I’ve been using the 8wt rod more than my elbow likes.

    To fish tarpon with my friend Chris Schneider in the Keys where it’s often windy, I really need an 11 or 12wt setup, but I can cast Chris’s elegant Hardy 11wt tarpon rod twice at most before my elbow calls Uncle.

    I’ve been pondering two solutions: left-handed casting (working on it) and two-handed casting. Left-handed casting is good relief, but when my left elbow began taking notes from the fussy right one and demanding equitable treatment, it came time to study up on two-handed casting.

    Salmon fishers on the River Spey in Scotland invented the two-handed Spey casting system for throwing big flies on big rivers with long rods and heavy lines. Queen Elizabeth II was said to be a good Spey caster in her day.

    Steelhead fishers on the Skagit River north of Seattle evolved their own variant of Spey casting, using shorter shooting heads on their fly lines.

    A two-handed cast with a long Spey rod should still load the elbow but minimize the elbow flexion that particularly irritates my injured ligament. In Spey casting, the caster’s dominant hand holds the rod above the reel and remains almost stationary as a fulcrum, while the other lightly hand grips the rod butt, performing a sharp, short, punch and tuck to lever the distant rod tip back then forward. In contrast, a single-handed fly rod cast is 100% forearm action, maximizing both elbow flexion and torsion.

    I looked up [Spey + tarpon] on the web. Wading past the page of retail ads, I spotted the podcast Wet Fly Swing featuring an hour-long interview with saltwater Spey casting evangelist John Grasta,. Grasta has adapted the Skagit Spey style to fishing Florida’s mangrove coasts for tarpon. And he lives in Florida within half a day’s drive of my house.

    I tracked down John Grasta at the Bass Pro Shop in Orlando, where he runs the store’s expansive fly fishing department.

    John is an affable guy who retains his Rochester accent. One could not find a more enthusiastic Spey coach. A couple of weeks ago, I hired John to give me a Spey orientation and casting lesson on one of his days off from work.

    I drove 215 miles north from Miami to Orlando, stayed overnight with a University of Central Florida colleague, and met John at his house in Winter Garden, Florida, following him to a park on the shore of Lake Apopka.

    Apopka is famous in zoological circles for its male alligators having been feminized by the endocrine disrupting effects of pesticide runoff. Here in Florida, that’s a lifestyle choice, right? But I digress.

    John laid out his collection of Spey rods on the bed of his pickup.

    He rigged up a few rods, and spent the next hour explaining innovations in the specialized tackle and narrating the dynamics of the simpler Skagit Spey casts.

    John Grasta shows me one of his big iguana popper flies. A big Spey rod can throw this monster a long distance. And speaking of monsters, John recently caught a 200 pound arapaima on the Spey rod. You can see a video of its epic jumps on the JohnGrasta Instagram feed.

    I asked a million questions, taking notes, photos, and videos. 

    Video of John Grasta firing off a demo Spey cast.

    After an hour of explanations and demo casts, John handed me a 15 foot, 10wt rod rigged with a short Skagit shooting head.

    Hopes are high, but tempered by the recall of my learning curve with single-handed fly gear. I also remembered the podcast where John explains how many thousands of casts it takes to get competent with a Spey rod. To increase the challenge, a wind is blowing directly at us. Being realistic, I expect my first two dozen or so Spey casts will resemble hurled plates of spaghetti. 

    I took a breath and exhaled as I made my first cast…

    The line shot out 70 feet, dead straight. I couldn’t believe it. That’s my maximum single-handed cast range with no wind.

    I tried all the rods and, not surprisingly, my elbow chose the lightest one, a 12 foot, 7wt, fast action Sage Igniter that John had rigged with the equivalent of a 12wt single-handed tarpon line.

    After half an hour with the 7wt, I was throwing long casts that cleared all the line.  After the last one, I retrieved the thrown line from the lake, laid it out on the grass, and measured it with my calibrated paces: 96 feet +/- 3%. That should do.

    * * *

    On the long drive home I spotted fourteen Swallow-tailed Kites.

    Fishing the flats at Flamingo yesterday, a Swallow-tailed Kite danced in the sky over the mangroves.

    More kites swooped low over the trees as I drove home through Everglades Natl. Park.

    Last night as Gray and I shared mango slices for desert, we heard a chorus of whistled peeps above us – baby Swallow-tailed Kites! While I got odd glimpses through the trees (video below), Gray scrambled up the step ladder to the roof for a view of the open sky. Five kites circled our neighborhood, the parents with three noisy fledglings.

    In July, the Swallow-tailed Kites will leave the Southeast to winter in the tropics. Satellite tracking shows they depart the west coast of Florida and fly SW across the Gulf of Mexico to the Yucatan.

    Sensing a theme in the air, I take my recent flurry of kite sightings as an omen for a bright future of feathers making long flights over water.

    © Philip Stoddard, 2025

  • “F*ck Alligator Alcatraz”

    So read one young woman’s sign this morning, 40 miles west of Miami on the Tamiami Trail, in the heart of the Big Cypress National Preserve.

    Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier’s latest brainstorm is to build an ICE prison in the middle of the Big Cypress National Preserve, a plan he dubs “Alligator Alcatraz”.

    James Uthmeier came to notoriety as the brains behind the diversion of $10 million in public Medicare funds into Gov. DeSantis’ dark money campaign against the Florida ballot initiative to legalize marijuana.

    This would be the same A.G. Uthmeier who is now held in civil contempt for advising Florida law enforcement agencies they should ignore a federal judge’s order limiting enforcement of a Florida statute creating a state immigration policy.

    Hundreds of people showed up this morning to protest Alligator Alcatraz. The line of parked cars was 1/4 mile long on one side of the road and I didn’t measure the line on the other side. Virtually all the cars driving through gave us positive toots on the horn and thumbs up. Zero disapproval.

    Click any photo to see it full size.

    Betty Osceola speaks. That’s Clyde Butcher on the left.

    Uthmeier is promoting this site for an immigration prison because, according to him, it wouldn’t need a perimeter fence since nobody can escape through the Everglades. What a moron. Does any intelligent person think that immigrants who escaped gangs by walking through the tropical forests of the Panama’s Darien Gap will be stopped by the inviting waters of a South Florida cypress swamp? My wife and I take children and geezers on swamp walks through the Big Cypress.

    If any immigrants did escape, Miccosukees and Seminoles living nearby would likely take them in. These First Nation folks have a long history of hiding fugitives from the U.S. Government in the swamps of South Florida. The proud Miccosukee Tribe never signed a treaty with the U.S. Government.

    No, the real reason for a 1000 bed ICE prison at Mile 48 on the Tamiami Trail is the Dade-Collier Transition Airport. So easy to lock people up out of sight then fly them out of the country in the middle of the night.

    This land is jointly owned by Miami-Dade and Collier Counties. Will our County Mayor and Commission fight to prevent the state from snatching it for an immigration prison?

    The young woman got it right: “Fuck Alligator Alcatraz”.
    Silence is complicity.

    © Philip Stoddard, 2025

  • Fishing the mosquito-infested swamps of Hell

    on Friday the 13th

    What National Park offers so many opportunities for exciting wildlife encounters as the Everglades?

    In 1979, Professor Tim Williams, wrote me a grad school recommendation letter that ended with this line:  

    “If I were planning a research expedition to the mosquito-infested swamps of Hell, I would choose Philip as my field assistant.”  

    I was never 100% sure if Tim meant that as a compliment, but to my prospective grad school advisor, Mike Beecher, it sounded like high praise so he took me on.

    With that reputation as a prelude, I’m embarrassed to report that a year ago, in June of 2024, Black Salt Marsh Mosquitoes kicked by butt (well, bit my butt, to be precise) and drove me out of my favorite Everglades kayak-fishing spot when I’d barely gotten started. 

    I studied mosquitoes in the lab and I’m not a mosquito sissy. 

    This is my hand, feeding a precious batch of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes selected for the “Tiki Bar” phenotype in the which this normally diurnal mosquito is hyperactive after sundown.

    Even I have my limit, and the Black Salt Marsh Mosquito (BSMM) found it that morning.

    Determined vampirism of the summer BSSM hoard provides solitude for anyone hardy enough to fish the tidal mangrove estuaries of the Everglades backcountry. That morning, 30 minutes before sunrise, I was the only human within miles, attempting to cast a topwater fly at a large, actively feeding snook. The BSSMs were so brutal, it was hard to pay attention, much less savor the splendor. But the one single mosquito that managed the coup de grâce somehow found her way inside my head net, whereupon I inhaled her. Ten minutes of hard coughing to dislodge that mosquito from my trachea, while her sisters and cousins bit me through my clothes and chewed my exposed finger tips (despite the insect repellant) – that was too much. I gave up and went home with my bitten tail between my itching legs.

    Here’s what my pants looked like after 15 minutes.

    The secret antidote to mosquito bites:

    I don’t much react to bites of local mosquitoes, but the number of BSSM bites that day overwhelmed my acquired defenses. To sleep that night I had to take the antidote, the invention of my clever FIU colleague, Dr. Laura Serbus.

    Read the labels before ingesting, right?

    Mosquito bites irritate our skin via two histamine receptors, H1 and H2. H1 receptors produce about 20% of the itch and H2 receptors the other 80%. Typical antihistamines, like Benadryl, only block the H1. I use cetirazine instead, which lasts 24 hours and doesn’t make me drowsy. To block the H2, I use Pepsid AC, an over-the-counter drug for excess stomach acid.  Not everybody reacts well to the H2 blockers, but I’m OK with them. Itching disappears completely for 12 hours.

    * * *

    Back into the cauldron on Friday, June 13th, 2025

    It took me a full year to recover the motivation to venture back into Mosquito Hell, succumbing once again to the prospect of fly fishing snook, juvenile tarpon, and redfish from the intimacy of the kayak. Winds in the open were 14 mph with gusts to 22 mph and my usual flats and creek mouths were too exposed. That left the sheltered mangrove coves, areas best left for winter when the mosquito population is at a dull roar instead of a loud one.

    This time I had to better prepare myself for the onslaught of the June BSSM population.  Here’s what I wore:

    • Fishing pants. AFTCO, synthetic, light tan
    • Snow gaiters, calf height
    • Second pair of fishing pants
    • Sand socks
    • Crocs
    • Hoodie fishing shirt, knit fabric
    • Tight weave sun shirt, with top button fastened and collar turned up
    • Tilley hat
    • No-see-um proof head net, Cochrans
    • Insect repellant (Lemon Citronella) on my exposed fingertips and the edges of my gaiters where they met my Crocs sandals

    It worked well enough at keeping BSSMs from reaching my skin that I could enjoy a good morning fly fishing tarpon & snook. A great morning, in fact. I lost count of the tarpon hits.

    The BSSMs found a vulnerable spot where the gaiters met the Crocs [I’ll spare you the photo of my red-spotted ankle]. Next time, I will wear ankle-high neoprene dive booties instead of the Crocs.  

    Another twenty skeeters somehow managed to bite me on my butt [definitely no photo], though damned if I know how.  This happened before while camping on the Arctic tundra and I couldn’t figure it out that time either.

    High concentration DEET works pretty well but dissolves plastics on contact (thinking of my fly line here). Picaridin works well too but lasts half as long as DEET.

    Mosquitoes don’t see red light (ditto snook, tarpon, redfish). I outfitted my head lamp with a red lens (3D printers rock) so I could see to set up the boat without getting mobbed by BSSMs and no-see-ums.

    Two things I don’t think will work for me:

    (1) mosquito netting suit. It’s too easy to tear and simple for BSMMs to bite through where it touches my skin or another article of clothing.

    (2) permethrin-soaked clothing. Permethrin is a good mosquito excito-repellant, but new research shows it damages our heart and nervous system. 

    The next puzzle: How do you get 300 mosquitos out of a car? 

    It took three days to fully rid the car of BSSMs. Several hid in my stuff and found their way into the house. Next time, I’m going to open the car’s rear hatch and all four doors, then drive backwards around the parking lot in circles as fast as I can. Other suggestions are welcome by email or in the comments section below.

    buzz buzz buzz.

    P.S. I received a comment worth sharing from Dr. David Glabman: “As for the mosquitos in your car maybe try capturing a bat for release in the car since he will eat many times his weight in them.”

    Regarding Dr. Glabman’s idea, I very much like the concept. I’d need one of those tropical leaf-gleaning bats that can forage in tight spaces, and I’d have to wait until nightfall for the bat to feed. I do need to drive home with fewer vampires for company.  Mabel’s Orchard Spider, however, might do the job. They’re our most common orbweaver, voracious predators of mosquitoes, diurnal, completely harmless to humans, and their possession does not require federal and state permits. I might release a couple in the passenger seat next trip to see what they can do.

    © Philip Stoddard, 2025

  • To decimate 

    … as in “The Burmese python is decimating native wildlife across their invaded range.” Miami Herald, 12-Jun-2025

    Marsh Rabbit photo swiped from Animal Diversity Web. Such cute ears!

    People today use “decimate” synonymously with “devastate” and it bugs me.

    These two words sound similar, but to “decimate” is to reduce by 1/10th, not reduce to 1/10th. 

    I’d be thrilled if pythons had only decimated Everglades mammal populations.

    Origin – The verb “decimate” dates back to ancient Rome. My high school Latin teacher, Mr. Downum, explained that if a member of the Roman Legion committed a heinous crime, and nobody among the ranks would identify the culprit, all the soldiers were lined up and every tenth one was killed.  Wikipedia provides a similar explanation with more detail and historic record, albeit limited. Decimation didn’t happen a lot after the scary new word got around. The original meaning gave “decimate” the power to change human behavior for the better.

    Here are more examples in which over-educated people are decimating the lexical diversity and power of our language:

    “The first time I drove into Tuscaloosa after the storms, I had to pull over on the side of the road to take in the decimation and collect myself.”  Joyce Vance, 17-May-2025

    “A Fungus Decimated American Bats. Now Scientists Are Fighting Back”  Headline, The New York Times, 17-Sep-2024

    “In 1989, Hurricane Hugo decimated much of the remaining old-growth forest that is vital habitat for endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers, Leuconotopicus borealis.” @grrlscientist, 11-Oct-2024

    It’s everywhere. Even Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman conflate “decimate” and “devastate”, two erudite professors with a mastery of English.

    In a living language, word meanings can change. Still, this one sticks in my craw every time I read it. Seems a shame to lose such a graphic and powerful word to confusion in common parlance.

    * * *

    I’d tell this to the marsh rabbits in the Everglades, if I could find one to tell. Not that a marsh rabbit ever listened to what I had to say. Not even back in the pre-python glory days, when legions of round-eared bunnies lined up ten feet apart along the swale of the Shark Valley tram road every evening. Had they merely been decimated by Burmese pythons, they’d line up today eleven feet apart. Like coral reefs and trees dripping with migrant warblers, or a savored word that’s lost its meaning to misuse, I miss them.

    Grumph, grumph, grumph.

    © Philip Stoddard

  • The Fisher’s Epistemology Problem

    How can a fisher tell if one lure is better than another?

    Say I am fishing and not getting a bite. I see a juvenile tarpon roll and throw a black fly in front of the expanding rings on the surface. I do it four times to four circles. Nothing.

    That’s never happened to me, because I change up after three rejections, but say it did.

    How do I know whether lack of a bite is because:
    (a) I have on the wrong lure or fly,
    (b) there’s something wrong with my presentation,
    (c) the fish aren’t biting,
    (d) or, if I am blind-casting, that the fish are simply elsewhere?

    I postulate the problem is (a), tarpon don’t want black flies today, so I clip off my black fly and tie on a white fly.

    Next cast, BOOM, I hook up.

    I make another cast and hook up again. Ah ha! I’ve found it!
    White flies are the ticket. Pretty clever, huh?

    Maybe. 

    Are white flies effective just here and now?
    Whenever / wherever the conditions are just like this?
    Every day, but just at this place?
    Did the tarpon bite finally turn on (right time or tide)?
    Or did a couple of naïve tarpon just happen by?  

    It’s hard to tell.

    John Gierach (1988) noted that some fly fishers on The Henry’s Fork of Idaho switch flies regularly, cycling through all their mayfly imitation types (spinners, duns, emergers, and nymphs) until they connect with a feeding trout. Others cast their dry fly spinner imitation to multiple trout until they find the one that’s eating spinners (mayflies that have landed on the water after they finished breeding). Gierach described it as a question of how you want to spend your time on the river: looking down while tying minuscule flies onto a thin leader with tiny knots, or looking at a pretty river and fly casting.

    But my point is that it’s hard for us fishers to know what we know.

    Worse, a nerd like me sets out to enjoy himself on a beautiful day in nature and stumbles headlong into the tar pit of epistemology, the branch of philosophy that explores the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge.

    Back home, seeking enlightenment, I watch an online video where some fishing pro sets out to see which of two lures works best, perhaps two artificial shrimp, the new pink variety (lure A) or the old original shrimp-colored variety (lure B). He throws the two lures in alternate bouts of five on two identical fishing setups. Being scientific here.

    Our pro gets a couple of bites on the original (B) but FOUR bites on the new pink one (A), including a really nice fish. The pink lure outperformed original color by a factor of two.

    But the difference in effectiveness of the pink lure found in that video might not have been real. I don’t mean anyone faked the results, I mean that I know, in the back of my head, that a higher catch rate on one of two lures that day might not have been caused by the superior color, but by chance, like a run in a string of coin flips or rolls of the dice. Brings to mind Abelson’s 1st Law: “Chance is Lumpy“ (Abelson 1991).

    Here’s the question that our pro ought to have asked before posting the video: “What is the likelihood of getting a result that extreme (i.e., twice as good) or more extreme (better than twice as good) by chance alone?”

    To figure it out, I could do some probability math or write a quick computer simulation to estimate the odds of getting at least a two-to-one success ratio for six fish caught by two identical lures, just by chance.

    I opt for the simulation because I enjoy programming. I have my computer do six virtual coin flips:
    [heads = lure A catches the fish]
    [tails = lure B catches the fish].
    And, to make it accurate, I’ll repeat the test an astronomical number of times and take the average (computers are fast). Here are the results for Lure A:

    What do we have here… First, I see a bell curve, as expected.

    Lure A catches zero fish 2% of the time, one fish 9% of the time, two fish 23% of the time, half the fish (three) 32% of the time, and so on, eventually catching all six fish 2% of the time. A graph for lure B, not shown, would be the left-right mirror image: when Lure A catches zero fish, Lure B catches all six, and so on.

    How impressed should we be that the pink lure (A) did twice as well as the gray one (B)? In my simulations it caught four of six fish 23% of the time, five of six 9% of the time, and all six fish 2% of the time.

    23% + 9% + 2% = 34%

    So roughly a third of the time, by chance alone, the new lure A will perform at least twice as well as the old lure B. Likewise, lure B will perform twice as well as lure A another third of the time. So 2/3 of the time we can expect one of the two lures to outfish the other by at least two-to-one. Just one third of the time they’ll perform similarly.

    Four percent (2% + 2%) of the time, one fishing trip in 25, one lure or the other will totally clean up, catching all six fish while the other delivers a resounding skunk (see Vantesall et al. 1991, “Removing Skunk Odor”, citation below).

    I might have just wasted my money on that new lure color.

    But suppose that instead of spending just $7 on a pack of the new pink lures, my brother and I are making an important commercial decision, “Should we invest serious money in developing this new lure color for the marketplace?”

    In theory, I suggest, we have to decide whether we’re willing to be wrong, given the high odds that there’s no real difference in effectiveness.

    But then my brother reminds me that commercial success of a new lure depends on hooking fishermen rather than fish. It doesn’t matter if the new lure is actually better. As long as it looks great and works roughly as well the old one, our customers will be happy.

    Plus, everybody with more experience than me knows that pink works for Redfish.

    A few years ago, one of my favorite tackle vendors proudly touted their new pink lure as being especially attractive to Redfish. They even gave it a name to indicate its effectiveness “FRED: Fooling Redfish Everywhere Daily”. I want to fool Redfish too, so I clicked the link and ordered the new pink ones. Here they are, the old shrimpy one, and the new pink one:

    The wise folks at my local tackle shop likewise swear by pink for Redfish: pink Rapala X Rap lures (bought one) and pink flies (tied some).

    Then I discovered that the Redfish visual system doesn’t extend to the red end of the color spectrum. Redfish don’t have a cone receptor in their retina that’s stimulated by wavelengths longer than orange (Horodysky et al. 2008). Anything red, lacking a sensitive receptor, appears as black to them. Pink, a diluted red, appears as gray. That means Redfish cannot distinguish my pretty pink lures and flies from the shrimpy old gray ones. DOINK!

    But humans see the difference, so merchants sells a lot of pink lures.

    I don’t feel too bad, though. I justify my resources devoted to pink shrimp lures & flies because my beloved Bonefish, unlike Redfish, Snook, and Speckled Seatrout, actually do see red, so pink stands out to Bonefish in the waters I fish on the west side of Biscayne Bay. Here, with an N=1, is definitive proof that pink gets it done.

    What are the chances a shrimpy-colored or silver one would have caught that same fish? I want to think that pink did the trick, my gut tells me about 99%, but I really have no way of knowing.

    Side note: I prefer to throw flies at Bonefish because it makes the difficult into the borderline impossible, but these photos were taken when I was forced to use my spinning rod after snagging and breaking the tip of my fly rod on a “No Fishing” sign.

    On a recent visit to Virginia, Smallmouth Bass guide John Waller mused to me how local fly fishers swear by the Shenandoah Blue Popper, despite all the research showing that Black Bass (including the Smallmouth) don’t see wavelengths as short as blue.

    Shenandoah Blue popper, $9.90

    This pretty blue popper looks gray to the bass. Apparently they’re just fine with neutral gray while bass fishers themselves strongly prefer blue.

    If it’s hard to figure out what a fish will eat, it’s sometimes easier to figure out what they won’t eat. For instance, when fish are heavily pressured, they learn to avoid familiar things bearing hooks. Changing color can help. And pressured fish get spookier to presentation: lures and flies with less splash do better on wary fish. Natural selection.

    Then there’s my friend, Andy Hong, who catches redfish on sautéed broccoli. For real. He’s posted the recipe.

    In short, I have not yet seen the justification for all the cool lures and flies in my possession. At most, three shades of each lure or fly would probably set me up for life: light for clear water, dark for nighttime or tannic water, and medium-shaded for when the fish get wise to black and white. And maybe last night’s broccoli if I’m getting skunked.

    Here’s my takeaway: If you find it more fun to mess with the new lures and flies go for it. If you want to stick with your old lures and flies, go ahead – the guys who outfish me regularly do so on their old favorites for a whole lot of reasons having nothing to do with lure selection.

    Crawling from the tar pit, I realize that I am still only pretending I know what I’m doing.

    Tight lines, friends.

    © Philip Stoddard

    Literature Cited

    Abelson, Robert P. (1995) Statistics as Principled Argument. Psychology Press, New York. https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781135694425_A24427578/preview-9781135694425_A24427578.pdf

    Gierach, John (1988) “Big Empty River” in: The View from Rat Lake. Pruett Publishing Co., Boulder, CO

    Horodysky, A. Z., Brill, R. W., Warrant, E. J., Musick, J. A. and Latour, R. J. (2008). Comparative visual function in five sciaenid fishes inhabiting Chesapeake Bay. Journal of Experimental Biology 211,3601-3612. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.023358

    Vantasell SM, Hygnstrom SE, Ferraro DM (2011) Removing Skunk Odor. NebGuide, Univ Nebraska, Lincoln Extension, Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources. edu/publication/g2100/2011/pdf/view/g2100-2011.pdf

  • 2025-05-30 South Fork Shenandoah River

    Gray and I drove the EV north from Miami to check in on my parents in Northern Virginia, ages 98 & 91. We made a vacation of it, returning to a rental cottage on the South Fork of the Shenandoah, near the town of Shenandoah VA. The river teams with Smallmouth Bass and there’s paintable scenery everywhere you look.

    The river by the cottage was easily wadable when we stayed here two years ago. It was so much fun I stood around in the cold water in my nylon pants until hypothermia set in. I never appreciated a hot tub so much.

    Here I am two years ago, wade-fishing the middle of the river. Easy-peasy. (photo, Gray Read, 2023)

    This year I’d brought my new waders and wading boots. Arriving in the afternoon, I walk down the steep steps to the river and discover the small floating dock, despite being chained to a big sycamore, had washed away in a flood.

    As the sun falls behind the mountain to the west, the hour when the fishing was best two years ago, I don my gear and wade out. The river is a good 2’ higher than before, with a faster current to match. I can wade with care and two hiking staffs, but the prospect of wading all the way across, as I did readily two years ago (photo above), is intimidating. Further, fly casting in that strong a current, while my boot cleats cling tentatively to submerged rock ledges of different heights and angles, is nothing like the relaxing Zen-ish experience I remembered from before.

    Venturing forth in the waders towards deeper water. Clumps of leaves are still stuck in branches, leftover from the flood that took out the dock. (photo by Gray Read).

    “There he stands, draped in more equipment than a telephone lineman, trying to outwit an organism with a brain no bigger than a breadcrumb, and getting licked in the process.”   Paul O’Neil

    On the plus side, the waders keep me dry and warm. Fortunately the house comes with three simple kayaks, and I had chartered a guide with a drift boat for tomorrow, so I don’t push my skill or luck tonight.

    Day 1. Drift boat fishing with John Waller

    We spend the day floating the river with guide John Waller in his spiffy inflatable raft. Summer has started in Miami, so Gray and I, acclimated to the heat as we are, arrive at the boat ramp bedecked in multiple synthetic layers, while John arrives in a pair of shorts and a light, long-sleeved shirt.

    I stand in the bow, Gray sits in the back with her sketchbook, and John mans the oars in the middle, giving me welcome advice on where to cast and how to retrieve.

    John Waller, guide, holding one of the Smallmouth Bass I caught, Gray sketching in her fleece jacket. We tropical geezers are not unhappy with our extra clothing.

    Most of the day I happily cast a topwater frog fly (Umpqua Swimming Frog, 1/0) against the shoreline on John’s lovely Thomas & Thomas 8wt rod, strung with a 2x overweighted line (SA Titan Long).  To my delight, I don’t make a complete fool of myself. My experience casting flies under mangroves for snook comes in handy pitching the frog fly under sycamore bows for smallies.

    Umpqua Swimming Frog fly, size 1/0, a deer hair bass bug based on the Dahlberg Diver.

    We also mess around with poppers (let it drift, not much popping), streamers (2 hard strips, and a pause), and floating a wooly bugger under an indicator (cast, mend, wait). These setups catch fish, but without question the topwater frog is the most fun. As with dry fly fishing for trout, it’s a hoot seeing Smallmouth Bass rise to the big deer hair frog fly. I especially enjoy watching one that comes up, stares at the fly, then changes its mind… three times in succession.

    Around 3 pm, after seven hours of throwing that heavy fly line, my casting hand gives out, so I switch to the other hand. John looks at me and muses: “You waited all day to tell me you can cast left-handed.”

    In all, I catch 20 Smallmouth Bass (3 big ones) and three Largemouth Bass (all small). John says that Largemouth are becoming much more common. Warmer times.

    One of the big ones. (Photo by John Waller)

    Another plus, l learn how to fish the river, or imagine I do.

    Forty-five minutes after we get off the water, the weather explodes. Sheets of rain and gale force winds blow down the river. A tornado forms 20 miles north near Luray. Lucky timing for us.

    Day 2. more wind

    Today is also windy, gusting to 33 mph.  Plus my brother Andrew came by to visit.  Not a great day for fly fishing, much less from a kayak. Instead we fly Andrew’s stunt kite from a nearby field, fittingly situated on Kite Corner Road.

    Pretty cool kite, beyond my capability to handle, but Andrew has it mostly figured out. Check out the video:

    Looking the other direction toward Kite’s farm. (watercolor, Gray Read)

    Before sundown, I rig one of the kayaks at our rental with parachute cord and carabiners, lower it down the steep steps, and tie it in the river for tomorrow. I fashion a kayak anchor by putting smooth river stones in a nylon mesh bag that I’d brought along for that purpose. I’ll take the kayak out in the morning and see how I do on my own.

    Day 3. Kayak fishing

    The air temperature was 49° F when I rose this morning. After seeing my brother off, I put on multiple layers and head out in the kayak to fish the section of river around our rental cabin. Across the river, Wild Turkeys gobble as several deer eye me suspiciously from the bank.

    My homemade kayak anchor (v1.0) works OK, but slips a bit in the current. I find more smooth stones on a bar and added them to the bag (v1.1). I also find a folding stool concealing a big hellgramite (Dobsonfly nymph) in between the muddy folds. It crawls into the river, taking its chances with bass unknown over the large creature that I am.

    I cast the swimming frog fly under and around every sycamore tree that overhands the river, but cannot get a bite. Ditto for the indicator/wooly bugger rig that John Waller showed me two days ago. This section of river by the house is shallower and faster than the places upstream and downstream where these methods caught fish: the topwater froggy drew bites in slack eddies and the wooly bugger dangling deep under the indicator (a light float) caught fish lurking in deeper holes.

    In frustration, I tie on the old faithful black & ginger #6 Clouser Deep Minnow with red eyes and gold flash. That was the fly I used two years ago to catch dozens of small bass in the river. Doink! It hooks up on the first cast. Small fish, but one fish is infinitely better than zero. John Clouser invented this fly for fishing Smallmouth Bass before discovering that it catches everything.

    Black over ginger Clouser Deep Minnow with gold flash, tied on a #6 Gamakatsu B10S. The painted lead eyes on this one have seen their share of rocks and the bucktail has been chewed down by many Smallmouth Bass.

    Smallies strike the Clouser 30 feet from shore, retrieved from down current with little strips (strip-strip-pause). The third fish, a big one, comes partway out of the water to take the fly, fighting longer and harder than the one I was holding in the photo above. I switch hands when my right wrist tires, then switch back when my left wrist tires – what a great fish! I’d heard that among North American fish species Smallmouth Bass are the strongest fighters for their weight. Now I believe it. When the fish is close enough to see some flashes in the water, I reach for my landing net and – OH NO – slack line. The fish got off! Rats!

    If I’m not fishing for dinner I don’t need to lift a hooked fish from the water to be content, but I do want a good look at it before it takes off. Location noted. I will be back.

    Anchor v1.1  worked great this morning until the mesh wore out from dragging along the rocky river bottom, allowing the stones to escape.

    The last remaining river stone, caught in the act of escaping the mesh anchor bag.

    Time for lunch. The owner of the house stops by to survey the storm damage we’d reported to her. She kindly unlocks the shed and invites me to scrounge for anything I could use to McGyver up another anchor. Digging around I find a stack of iron horse shoes, the kind you throw, and some plastic coated wire cable to bind them up. Kayak anchor v2.0.

    Birding break: I hear a male Prothonotary Warbler singing from a tree near the porch. He cooperates as Gray and I get good views through the binoculars. Quite the looker, described by eBird thus:
    “Shockingly bright warbler of swamps and wet forest. Adult males have gorgeous yellow head and body with greenish back and blue-gray wings.”

    Prothonotary Warbler, photo © Ryan Sanderson, courtesy of eBird. https://ebird.org/species/prowar

    I attach the horseshoe anchor to the kayak, photograph a Black-nosed Dace (minnow-type fish) in the shallows, and spy on the tame young woodchucks living under the porch.

    Young woodchuck savagely devours a hapless leaf.

    Two fishermen in a guided drift boat come by, working the shorelines below the house. We exchange the typically terse fishermen’s infochat: “a good morning, slow afternoon, subsurface streamers working best.”

    I will have to try casting my untested Black-nosed Dace subsurface streamer patterns against the shoreline.

    Late afternoon bird-fish report. Tree Swallows have a nest with babies in a sycamore snag and Baltimore Orioles have a nest in the living part. A Warbling Vireo sings nonstop, but I haven’t found his nest. My first cast of the Clouser catches a fish. A young Bald Eagle flies over in the middle of my next cast. I “Clouser” the kayak while gawking at the eagle instead of minding my backcast. A few more small bass, then a medium-sized one hooked so tight I destroy the fly taking it out with the hemostat.

    I needed an excuse to try out my new Black-nosed Dace imitations.

    Black-nosed Dace in the shallows.
    My imitation dace streamer fly, tied with craft fur, black flash, and a mono weed-guard (more of a rock-guard in this river).

    No action on the shoreline but out in the middle, above the rapid line, my dace fly gets a hit every cast. Adding a stinger hook will catch the short-strikers.

    After dinner I go back out for the evening rise. Right on schedule the air over the river fills with big brown mayflies, but no fish rise to eat them as they had two years prior. Bobby, a neighbor spin fishing from his deck, tells me that in normal years smallmouth rise to mayflies at dusk, but this year the river is up 2-3’ from the rains and fish habits had changed.

    I cover the same sections that had been productive before dinner but cannot get a take. Hurrying back in at 8 pm to join Gray for cold watermelon in the hot tub, I pause to cast at the shoreline and hook up four times. Huh. Maybe river fish move around as much as flats fish do.

    Day 4. Working it.

    I catch that big smallmouth again, or at least one of similar size in the same spot, on the same fly, at the same time of day, and which puts up the same interminable fight. This time Fishy stays hooked until released.

    How about those stripes, huh? Back you go.

    All day, I only kayak-fish the 1/3 mile section of river in front of the cabin between the class 1 rapid upstream and the class 2 rapid downstream. The upstream rapid was a mere riffle two years ago through which I’d easily pulled the kayak on foot.

    I ponder running the lower rapid and think better of it. I am an experienced kayaker, skilled in low braces and competent to roll. I also know that no matter how adroit one is with a paddle, attempting to get over rocky drops in  a large-hatched kayak, with no flotation bags or sealed hatches, no spray skirt, no helmet, a heavy unsecured anchor, a floating backpack loosely fastened to the deck, an expensive fly rod between the knees, and no one to assist if something goes wrong, is the epitome of a bad idea. Possibly the anchor gets loose and jams between two  rocks, my kayak goes taught against the anchor line and turns crosswise to the current. Secured by the anchor line, the kayak does its very best to tip into the current, filling the open hatch with water and rolling it. Very hard not to break the fly rod. Worst case, I tangle in the paddle leash and/or hit my head on a rock and drown. John Geirach’s friend Archie “A.K.” Best put it this way:

    “I enjoy fishing too much to risk my life at it. 
    Death can really cut into your fishing time.”

    An inflatable raft is the way to go.

    The day’s final fish count when I quit at supper time is 34 smallies and one Pumpkinseed Sunfish, all caught in the safe span between the rough waters. (I counted the fish I caught in homage to my friend Jay Levine, who always counts his fish.)

    Pumpkinseed Sunfish caught on a red / white Clouser bendback.

    Day 5. Downstream

    Before we leave for home, I really want to catch another fish on the swimming frog topwater fly that John Waller gave me. I snuffle some more around the shed and find a couple of ratchet tie-down straps. The kayak thus secured on the car’s roof rack, I drive downstream 1.5 miles, bypassing a couple of sets of rapids, to the Grove Hill Boat Ramp (“Boat ramp” might be an Appalachian euphemism for a mudslick bulldozed out of the riverbank). My intent is to look for slack eddies where fish might feel sufficiently rested to attempt a frog.

    I spend an hour fishing an eddy shelf 2-4’ deep and 150 yards long. There I catch seven ambitious Pumpkinseed Sunfish and miss a dozen more strike attempts in which the sunfishes fail at stuffing that big fly into their tiny mouths.  I don’t see or catch a single Smallmouth – so different from the area near the cabin. I feel like there’s a lesson for me somewhere, but mainly I come away appreciating John Waller’s inflatable drift boat and his proficient oarsmanship.

    Good-bye, river. (watercolor, Gray Read)

    The next day we drive out, by way of Luray Cavern, which I’d been wanting to see for the past 58 years. Well worth the wait.

    © Philip Stoddard