Shedder and Shorts

We took a trip to Oregon this week to visit family. I’ve never been here before and was skeptical because I really like Michigan and really really like Maine. It’s been great to be here though. There’s loads of great thing to see, and the different wildlife and plants have kept both Anna and I one our toes. The dry, cool weather has been a great break from the miserable heat and humidity in Lansing and the varied terrain, including pine and douglas fir forests have been inspiring. Maybe best, there’s more spots I’m excited about seeing next time we come out here. Also, on a day other than those listed below, we saw two blacktail deer from the car (a first for me).

Anenome

Pacific City. We came out to Pacific City today and spent a few hours playing with Anna’s nephews on the beach near haystack rock. The beach was fine sand, with sandstone cliffs to the north and dunes behind them. Checking out tidepools, we spotted sculpin, anenome, hermit crabs, etc. While we were there some boats came into the beach from salmon fishing. The guys on one had two chinook salmon they’d caught. A wildlife researcher or officer or something came over and asked them about the catch, checked the length and weight, and scanned them for RFID chips that the Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife plants in hatchery salmon before release (these two didn’t have chips). After the beach, Anna and Aaron and I took a hike out to the tip of Cape Lookout through temperate rainforest. It was about three miles each way, first through woods and then along the edge of very high cliff. Conditions on the north side of the cape were wet but the air on the south side was dry. The pines and fir were thick and tall and beautiful and made for a very different kind of forest experience than those to which I’m accustomed. We saw a ground beetle and banana slugs and cormorants on this hike. As we neared the tip of Cape Lookout the air began to smell fetid; Aaron surmised there was a rookery on the cliffs below. This looked to be a pretty good judgment, as in some places we could look down and see manure-covered ledges just above the surf. At one point on the trail was a marker for a plane crash site. We looked it up when we returned and found that a WWII B-17 on a training mission had crashed into the cliff, killing all but one airman.

Silver Falls

Silver Falls. Silver Falls is a state park east of Salem. We hiked a seven mile trail around the park that took us past an astounding nine waterfalls (out of ten in the park). The landscape was formed by two volcanic explosions, and see the striations in the volcanic rock that surrounds the gorges into which the water falls. Anna pointed out that the geological time periods affecting this area were far older than those referenced in Michigan, where the glaciation that marks the landscape occurred just 12000 years ago. (This was one of the first times in my life geology has seemed interesting.) Saw some turkey vultures circling at north falls. At one point on the hike, Anna and I spotted a large rodent emerging from a burrow beneath the path. It had some ferns in it’s mouth and paused slightly to look at us, about five feet away, then scurried away. We weren’t sure what it was, but when we described it to Aaron he identified it easily as a nutria. We were disappointed that it was an introduced pest, but, again, it was fun to encountered something new and different in the wild.

Detroit Lake

Detroit Lake. I had wanted to get out to the Cascade Mountains on this trip, and while I wasn’t quite able to fit that in, this trip to a reservoir just west of them was pretty rewarding. There aren’t very many lakes in Oregon, and those that I was able to spot on maps were all impounds. Detroit Lake is formed by an enormous dam in the North Santiam River, constructed in 1953 for power generation and flood control. It’s also a very popular spot for boaters; there were loads of them out on the water. We rented a canoe from a marina in Detroit. We paddled across the lake, against a headwind. There were very nice views of the eastern cascades to the west. I fished a bit but didn’t catch anything, despite the fact that the lake was stocked with 100,000 trout in June. I haven’t done well with trout. Hopefully that will change. The eastern edge of the lake was very shallow, with lots of stumps standing a few feet above the surface. From there, we saw a bald eagle. This was another great spot to spend a day, although in the future I might pick one of the smaller reservoirs, as there was more activity on this lake than I enjoy.

I recently visited my family in Maine, at Great Gott Island. I’ve spent a lot of time on the island over the years, but, as a youth I took for granted a lot of the naturalist’s fodder in this isolated coastal community. The time I spent outside on this trip involved going places and seeing things I’ve experienced hundreds of times before, but looking a little more closely this time around.

Deer skeleton

Woods. On the first afternoon I went for a walk through the woods, out towards the east side of the island. The island was completely deforested late in the 19th century, but now these woods are thick spruce. Very little sunlight penetrates and moss and mushrooms cover the granite ledges that emerge from the soil. These woods are rarely walked by people, and, consequently, are a web of deer trails, eight-inch wide swaths cut through the needles and moss. One of the first things I noticed out here was that most of the deer scat was very really soft, which didn’t surprise me because my dad said they eat a lot of blueberries. There aren’t any nut-producing trees on the island, so the deer mainly feed on the apple trees and berries. About a mile into the woods I found a nearly complete deer skeleton. The skull was missing, but almost everything else was there.

Pollock

Fishing. Fishing has always been a big part of what I do on the island. Usually, I’ve fished for mackerel with silver jigs or colorful trees meant to mimic very small herring. People on the island have rarely caught cod or flounder in my lifetime, but the lore is that it used to happen all the time. These waters used to teem with ground fish. History books are filled with descriptions of these waters in the 18th century, carpeted with fish that could be speared without getting one’s pant legs wet. Today, overfishing has pretty much eliminated the commercial ground fishery. By the time I was a kid, catching a cod on a long line was a rarity. In the last 10 years, it seems like there are fewer mackerel, too (probably tied to the reduced herring fishery, which spelled the end of the prospect cannery). Pollock is now the most common catch for recreational anglers on the island. There are exceptions, though, and people seems to feel that the ground fish may be gaining numbers. I caught a cod on a rotten hotdog in 2001 and another guy got one two years ago on a clam. Then, this year, someone else reported he’d been finding flounder in his lobster traps. Emboldened by this undeniable trend, dad and Larry and I set out fishing. We tried a few spots on the east and south sides of the island, running bait on the bottom and lures beneath the surface. In the end, we came up with four pollock. I blame it on our timing: the tide was ebbing, while the fish seem to be more likely to move on the incoming tide. We also saw a porpoise about 50 yards off the boat. It surfaced maybe three times within our view.

Meadow. Got up early the next day and headed for the north field. I was hoping for a nice view of the mountains in Acadia National Park as the sun rose. Unfortunately, I forgot that the sun rises a lot earlier in Maine than in Michigan and when I got up at 4:45 it was already light out. It didn’t matter, though, because there was thick fog anyway, and there would be no view of the mainland. I walked up to the field with a lawn chair and binoculars and sat down facing north, with an apple tree 100 yards before me and the clay cliff before ocean 100 yards beyond that. Before too long I noticed some shadows in the fog, and then spotted a doe. I watched her for a bit, and then a spike buck came into view a ways beyond her. While I watched for the next 30 minutes, the fog shifted continually and both deer faded in and out of view. I was watching the doe through binoculars when she first caught my scent, snorted and bounded in the forest.

Kayaking

Kayaking. I think the current popularity of the kayak should be some sort of marketing case study. They were a rarity on the Maine coast 25 years ago but are everywhere today. And, I’m all for it. They’re easy, and safe, and practical. My dad got one a few years ago and I took it out on a beautiful day. I paddled west to Placentia, an unoccupied island maintained by the Nature Conservancy. After beaching the kayak I took the trail up to the foundation where the Kellam house used to stand and then continued into the trail-less forest. I’d never walked through the interior of Placentia before. There’s a rock wall across a portion of the island, and a lot of swamp. The walk was really quite difficult, as the terrain was so thick. Anywhere a tree had blown down, scores of small spruce were vying to take its place. By the time I reached the western shore, I was dreading the return trip, but managed to make it back. I saw diverse and abundant mushrooms in these woods, too. I took pictures of maybe a half dozen and plan to identify them. I haven;t paid much attention to mushrooms in the past, but these were so different from one another, and some exotic looking, that I they really captured me. On the paddle back, a seal popped up nearby the kayak, but for some reason, didn’t turn around to look at me. Usually seals are super interested in people, but this one floated about 30 yards off the kayak for five minutes, only showing me the back of its head. I wouldn’t have thought I could become a bigger fan of seals, but this defiant behavior was completely endearing.

Made plans last night with Sandwich, Matt Pantone, and Lunch Box to go hiking and fishing at Lake Ovid today. When I got up at 8:00 this morning it was already 82F outside. I my fishing stuff and a lot of water into the car and headed to Sandwich’s house. We picked up some worms and arranged for a boat rental at the store at Round Lake on route to Lake Ovid at Sleeping Hollow State Park. The boat was an eight foot aluminum job with some messed up oars that had failed us by the end of the day. It leaked a little bit, too.

Lake Ovid Bass

Lake Ovid’s fairly big. We had been provided along with the boat rental with a contour map of the depths, but the size of the lake and wind really restricted just how much ground we could cover in the rowboat. We managed to row out against the wind until the island was just to our windward side and could sit calmly there and fish. I caught a bluegill and a very small bass. Sandwich spotted a deer on the far shore. We moved after a while into some weeds, where everyone hit on some bluegill. They were even taking Sandwich’s bare hook (he also got a bass here). We ran out of worms and the action slowed a bit on plastics. Then we rowed back to the island, where I caught a decent largemouth on a chartreuse mister twister.

We’d been out on the water for about four hours when we called it quits; never did any hiking. Got some decent sun and had a nice day. On the way home we spotted two sandhill cranes in a fallow cornfield on Shepardsville Rd.

Had a big day planned and it turned out okay, but not great. The intention was to fish the Muskegon River east of Newaygo, then do some hiking in the southern end of the Manistee National Forest. The fishing on the river was a bust, mostly because the spot where I thought I have good access, off Thornapple Road, is a State Boating Access site. The first annoyance there was that my State Parks sticker doesn’t count at a Boating Access Site, so I had to pay the DNR another $24 for another sticker, even though I wasn’t boating. The second annoyance was that this spot is a popular staging area for folks to float down the river on tubes and rafts and things like this. They have a lot of fun, which I can appreciate, but in sections like this there are a lot of them and they remove any sense of remoteness from time spent of the river. There were no hiking trails here, just a poison ivy laden path 300 yards down the river. I fished for about 30 minutes and left in a funk.

Headed up past Newaygo into the national forest and parked at an unmarked lot 50 yards into the woods off 40th street. This is a North Country Trail head. I hiked south for about twenty minutes with traffic never out of earshot. Crossed state highway M37, some railroad tracks and a bunch of dirt roads, at which point the trail ended (this point is marked as a “temporary connector”on the map). Turned around and walked back to the car, then kept going north for another 20 minutes to a parking area at M37. Walked back to the car and left. If I ever decide to section hike the NCT, I will really appreciate having already completed this part.

Drove back down through Newaygo, which seems like a very nice place. If I had this to do over again, I bring Anna, hike some spots further into the forest, and get lunch in Newaygo. As it was, I just cut east and headed for home. Made a brief stop at at Marl Lake on M46 near Edmore. Lots of small bluegill in there, caught one. Saw a guy with a stringer of five/six fat bluegill and a nice looking kit-built kayak from Chesapeake Light Craft. Helped him load the kayak into his Econoline and then drove home.

Today’s plan was to go to Sleepy Hollow State Park, rent a boat and fish Lake Ovid. Things changed, tough, when I found that the boat rentals at the park were being handled by a party store on Round Lake in Laingsburg. Once I drove back down to Round Lake to rent the boat, a 12 ft. aluminum rowboat, I figured I might as well just fish there.

Round Lake is fairly small and lined with houses on about three sides. There scenery from the boat was not very pretty. I rented the boat from Don’s Party Store (sign says “beer, boats, bait and pizza”) and also bought some red worms. I liked this store a great deal, it reminded me of the markets in central Maine where I grew up. The weather was a bit grim, hot and humid and threatening to rain. I was on the water for two hours, fished worms, spoons, spinners, and twisters, and caught three fish, each on worms.

Bowfin

I wasn’t fishing for long when I hooked something large. I was using a worm and bobber rig, and after it hit the worm the fish surfaced. I had to work it for several minutes before I could get a look at it, at which point I realized I had no idea what kind of fish it was. It was about twenty inches long and had a very long dorsal fin. It fought pretty hard; when I had it close to the boat it would dive deep under the boat. As I was working it in, two guys in a Lund pulled alongside, offered to net it for me, got it under control and then gave me some education.

They said it was a dogfish. This was interesting to me, since in Maine a dogfish is a small shark. I think they call it a dogfish as a variant on catfish. They pointed out to me that there were no barbs like a catfish has on this fish. They also said it was an undesirable fish in the lake, as it outcompetes popular gamefish like bass and pike. Once home I found that a more accurate name is bowfin, and that it’s a prehistoric species, not generally valued as a gamefish. After the bowfin I caught the smallest bluegill I’ve ever seen, and then a good-sized largemouth. I decided to keep and eat the bass.

Anna and I went to Pinckney State Rec Area today. It’s a little ways northwest of Ann Arbor and the drive from Lansing in about an hour and fifteen. We brought a lunch and planned to make a hike or two, as there are lots of trails. One of the most interesting is the Waterloo-Pinckney Trail, which stretched out for 36 miles. Working from the book “50 Hikes in Michigan” by Jim DuFresne, we opted to take the Losee Lake trail first. This is a foot-traffic only trail and we joked about DuFresne’s anti-mountain biking hangups as we drove into the park, but the value of knowing which trail would be void of bikes became immediately apparent. The parking lot was full of chachis in super hero outfits, talking about their graphite frames, titanium seat posts, and how bad their balls hit the crossbar at that one race last summer. I was looking forward to being rid of them.

The first trail we took was a 3.5 mile loop through some wetlands and around the edge of Losee Lake. The first half was maple and beech forest. By the time we got to Losee Lake the habitat had turned to reclaimed oak woodlands. We stopped at the lake to fish. There were not a lot of access points, so we opted to fish at one just off Dexter Town Hall Road. The northeast side of the lake is private land, and there were folks out over there, but otherwise no one around and traffic on the road was sparse. We caught two bluegill on worms and a slip bobber. Both were very small. I also tried a hula popper. The ‘gills nibbed at it, but nothing big enough to get hooked showed itself.

Turtle Eggs

We got back on the trail and almost immediately saw a slew of broken turtle eggs. Whether they hatched or were predated, I don’t know for sure, but, we assumed some critter ate them. There were maybe two dozen at the edge of a sandy path about twenty yards from the lake and fifteen feet higher. Any potential hatchlings would have had to cross the road to get to water.

After the Losee Lake trail, we had lunch at the beech unit, which had gotten crazy busy while we were walking (about two hours). We found a shady spot and ate some snacks, then rested, and decided to take the Silver Lake trail to Pickerel Lake, about 2 miles, round trip. Mountain bikes are allowed on that trail, which requires some special erosion control measures. On many of the grades, there are combed mats sunk into the trail. For whatever reason, bikers tend to avoid these, instead riding just to the outside. I’m sure the erosion control measures make for a bumpy ride and offer unsatisfactory traction for climbs, but, the result is that the trail is often up to three feet deeper than the area immediately surrounding it, and, in some places, considerably more erosion is evident. This whole area was rife rife with poison ivy (and, in the wet places, sumac, too), with leaves growing to the size of dinner plates and climbing trees to greet us at face level. When the bikes went by, we had to step aside, inevitably exposing ourselves to the ivy, which was annoying (I realize I have a hang-up about poison ivy).

At Pickerel Lake there was a bridge and we could see a number of bluegills swimming about in the shallow water, but there was no decent access point for fishing. There was a beach from which boats could be launched, but all the rest of the shore, was wet and marshy. We looped back, and then decided to extend the hike by heading on the Potawatomi trail further southeast. The previously sweet habitat yielded a thick understory of nasty invasives and the third act of our day had all the tension of a Shakespearean play. The extension we’d selected added about four miles onto our walk, and we began to lose steam. By the time we got back to the parking lot at Silver Lake we were both tired and thirsty. Anna had a backpack full of garlic mustard she’d pulled, and said she’d “got rid of a number of populations.”

All in all, a great day.

Finished fishing the Rogue at about 1pm and still had plenty of day left, so I headed to the Ionia State Recreation Area in Ionia, MI, which surrounds Sessions Lake. I got there around 2pm, bought a park pass and got a trail map. Sessions Lake looked to be a smallish, irregularly shaped and shallow lake. I parked at a spot on the north east edge, near where the state runs a campground, and decided to hike around the lake on the 3.5 mile long trail. I brought my rod and camera with me. Walking along the lake, I could see the small panfish darting about in the shallows. The east edge of the lake has a fair bit of topo as the trail winds through a forest of beech and maple. There were a number of bridges constructed by the conservation corps and boy scouts spanning streams and ravines. This part was a very nice hike.

Sandhill Crane

At about the halfway point, the trail breaks out into reclaimed agricultural land. It’s a mowed trail at this point, and the vegetation includes a lot of autumn olive. It’s the kind of nature Anna calls “junky.” It was hot and the trail was all in the open, lots of sun. At one point, I came to an old parking lot and saw a deer hanging out on the pavement. A hundred yards down the trail, I startled the same deer again, and as it bounded off I spotted two sandhill cranes in the grass about twenty yards away. I’ve never knowingly spotted a sandhill crane before. These were pretty big birds and made a racket.

At the north edge of the lake there’s a spillway, which created the first adequate fishing access of the hike (the rest of the shoreline was far too shallow). Standing at the edge of the spillway retaining wall, I could see bluegill and sunfish nests in the shallows. I hooked a bass that spit the hook once I tried to land it and then caught another one. By this point, I’d been out for about three hours and I headed for home.

Took a personal day and drove up to the Rogue River, just north of Rockport, MI. Book’s list the Rogue sizable Michigan trout stream nearest to my house. I had great visions of trout as I parked the car at a lot near 12 Mile and Summit Roads in Rockport. As I crossed the street to the river I noticed a turtle making the same trip.

Turtle on Summit Road

I tied on a spinner and started wading upstream, fishing across. The river was 15-30 yards wide and fairly shallow. The bed was mostly gravel, some areas were rocky and other muddy. As I waded upstream I passed an engine on the bank that had been retrofitted from some large piece of machinery to pump water from the river up to a nearby farm.

There were lots of fish jumping, but they were pretty small. Sometimes I could see them darting through the water, and those ones were even smaller. Once, a fish rose to my spinner as it broke the surface, but didn’t get hooked. Saw to farm hands one the stream, soaking their shirts to cool off, and two kayakers.

The river wasn’t as remote as I would have liked, there were houses along it and I could here traffic all the time, first from Summit Road to the east and then from US-131 to the West. I waded upstream for about an hour and then returned. I didn’t catch anything. When I climbed out of the river and crossed the road, the turtle was also returning from the river, easing onto the pavement in the direction opposite from which I’d seen it before, this time covered in mud.

Matt and I went to Lake Delta on Saturday, May 22. Nestled nestled between state and interstate highways a few miles southwest of Lansing, in Delta Township, Lake Delta’s got a fairly industrial feel. Stonehouse told us he’d been out a few days earlier and caught a number of small sunfish and crappie on a worm and bobber rig. We parked in the parking lot off Canal Road, at te northwest end of the lake. There are two fishing platforms, which had a number of people on them, so we followed a trail around the west side and fished a few spots from the bank. We got a lot of our bait stolen by some very small fish (I could see them swarming around the hook and picking the worm off it, could set the hook. It was a really unpleasant place to fish, as the noise from the highway was really loud and unceasing. There were some good-sized deer tracks on the path, but I didn’t really notice anything remarkable in the way of wildlife. We fished for about an hour before deciding to head for another spot.

We drove straight north on canal road up to Hunters Orchard Park, also in Delta Township, but in a more picturesque area. The Grand River runs through the park, which is beautiful and sports picnic tables, a platform out over the river, and a paved walkway about a quarter-mile long. The river was very high due to the recent rain, and there wasn’t much bank from which to fish. We managed to find two spots where we could actually get up to the water with enough space to cast, but we ended up spending more time redressing snags and pulling lures out of trees than actually fishing. Matt lost a nice crankbait in a tree. There was poison ivy everywhere, which always makes me nervous. The city parks I go to have a lot more poison ivy than the state game areas. Anna says poison ivy thrives on disturbance.

This was a nice day to spend with matt, but the fishing was terrible.

Haslett is a fancy town to the north east of Lansing. I met Jeff in the parking lot at the middle school and he drove us over to his friend Jim’s place. Jim’s got a real nice pond behind his house, maybe an acre big. It looks like the sort of pond that would hold all kinds of fat and eager bluegill and bass, but we caught nothing. We fished it for about an hour and a half and then went up to say hello to Jim. Jim was disappointed we didn’t catch anything. He found a number of dead fish when the ice thawed and he’s worried the winter kill might have been severe. Pop’s mentioned that there were lots of tadpoles for fish to eat and Jim said that made him think there weren’t any fish to eat tadpoles.

After striking out at Jim’s we went back over to the school to fish Mud Lake, a spot I’d never heard of before Pop’s hipped me to it. We waked about a quarter mile behind the high school on a cross country trail and then another quarter mile east on a very muddy foot trail. We came out on a fairly large pond, about 5 acres. The shoreline was all packed vegetation, very wet and spongy, and there were lily pads covering most of the shoreline, out to about 20 yards. Jeff caught 4 large mouth bass in a row, very fast action. He was using a tandem spinner, in black and red. I tried a black and red Mepp’s spinner, and a pink Mister Twister on a yellow jig, and finally a yellow Hula Popper. I got nothing. After those four bass, Pop’s went dry.

There were two deer carcasses on the shore, picked pretty clean but still gross. They were too complete to have been dragged out of the woods by dogs. I wondered if they had been wounded by a hunter, since wounded deer tend to head for water, from what I understand. I walked about Mud Lake to the east side. Along an inlet at the south-east corner, I saw turtle in a hole. It was pretty big, about 16 inches across, and dove into the water in the hole as I was getting my camera out.