Some March Trout Stream Updates

     

    The witch-hazel outside my building had burst into springtime in a series of swirling, spiky, golden coronas that shines just that much brighter on a dreary March day. They explode like the deaths of golden suns and scatter the planets of seeds far and beyond where the wind can carry them. These are also the days most conducive to Blue-winged Olive hatches, those dull and beautiful little mayflies that mark some of the first good hatches of the Springtime. Mayflies wear the mantra of "live fast, die young" right atop of their sail-like wings. The nymphs rise up into the water column where they hatch into Dunns, Dunns that glide atop of the water until their wings turn from colored to crystal clear and they become Spinners. This final part of the evolutionary stage, or at least as final as a section of a circle can become, involves a magnificent orgy atop the water's surface where mouth-less mayflies glide in and out, blending into each other and laying their eggs into the water on their one perfect given day before they die in the dusk. 

    During all this time, I've seen small trout rising like little sharks. It's strange how a species with such little piscivorous nature in that little moment of time suddenly becomes in a micro scale a circling, violent, surface predator. I've been catching some fish on dry flies here and there. Mostly, I just sit back and watch, observe the lust of mayflies and gluttony of fish and whatever other sins these denizens of water have been cursed with. 

    One of my favorite fly patterns recently has been the Ausable Ugly, a muskrat nymph wrapped in a grizzly hackle feather and beaten to near-death with a toothbrush or dubbing tool to give it a haggard appearance. I've caught all three Eastern trout species on them, swinging, tight-lining, stripping, and bobber fishing. The pattern has become a favorite of mine for small streams especially, for drifting through plunge pools when trout are not in the mood to eat a dry fly. 

    In the limestone streams of the lower valley, things are looking about as green and gold as one can hope for. Beneath that green flaps the gilded fins of native white suckers building spawning beds as they've done in that primordial gravel for thousands of years in the spring. Right behind them are egg-eaters. 

    The tree frogs are back. 

    Everything will be okay.