Tim Smith

Lake Greeson Arkansas has historically had a few albino channel catfish. It has been over 20 years since I've been there and I have no idea if they are still there.

I was in Lubbock Texas recently. Last year's record drought cut the previous record low rainfall in half. Things are a little better this year but they are far from being out of the woods. Their city council meetings are turning into debates about what industry uses the most water and who should be regulated more heavily. Farmers over the Ogalla Aquifer are screaming that the communists are out to get them because they're being told that their water usage is going to be regulated more heavily. And now the effects (beyond the dry reservoirs and dead fish and animals) are rolling through recreational fisheries in a very tangible way. From the AFS newsfeed: February 22, 2012 Fish Hatchery Closure Possible Due to Drought ATHENS—Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) may temporarily close the Dundee Fish Hatchery near Wichita Falls during the upcoming production season due to a declining water supply. “Although we have not officially made the decision to suspend operations at Dundee for 2012, it looks like we will not have water to operate this spring, and we do not plan to put any ponds into production unless conditions change within the next couple of weeks,” said Todd Engeling, hatchery program director for TPWD. “Although we have had restrictions placed on our water use in the past due to drought conditions, as far as I know this is the first time that it has resulted in a temporary suspension in operations at any of our facilities.” Located in Archer County below Lake Diversion, the Dundee Fish Hatchery has 97 ponds and 84 total acres of water, representing 34 percent of the state’s available freshwater fish production capacity. It is the state’s primary producer of striped bass and hybrid striped bass, turning out 3 million to 4 million fingerlings annually. Originally constructed in 1927 and renovated in 1994, Dundee receives its water supply under contract with the Wichita County Water Improvement District No. 2, which provides water primarily for irrigation and municipal use. The hatchery gets its water from Lake Diversion, which is a constant level reservoir fed by Lake Kemp. “Severe drought in that part of the state has left water levels in Lake Kemp very low, resulting in restricted water use,” Engeling said. “Under the water district’s drought plan, the hatchery is not allowed to divert water when water elevations in Lake Kemp reach 1125 feet above mean sea level. The water elevation in Kemp is currently 1126 and is expected to drop to 1125 early this spring when irrigation activity increases.” TPWD operates four other freshwater fish hatcheries. They are the A.E. Wood Fish Hatchery in San Marcos; the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens; the Possum Kingdom Fish Hatchery near Graford; and the John D. Parker East Texas Fish Hatchery near Jasper. Water supplies at those hatcheries are not in immediate danger but could become impacted if the drought continues. “That is not to say that operations at the other facilities will not be impacted,” Engeling said. “Continued production of striped bass and hybrid striped bass fingerlings is a high priority, because they support valuable and popular sport fisheries throughout the state. We may need to adjust normal production plans and shift efforts at other facilities away from largemouth bass to produce these fingerlings. Our goal is to balance the priorities and needs for both species in supporting fisheries management efforts with available hatchery space.” TPWD typically produces 8 million to 9 million largemouth bass and 4 million to 5 million striped bass and hybrid striped bass fingerlings each year. “Largemouth bass populations should be fine with a short-term reduction in stocking numbers,” said Dave Terre, the fisheries management and research program director for TPWD. “Unlike largemouth bass, fisheries for striped and hybrid striped bass are almost totally supported through our stocking programs.”

My post complimented hunters who donated game. My point is that there aren't enough deer or turkey or anything else to feed many people in the population and those donations are a drop in the bucket compared to human demand for food. There are 46 million Americans receiving food stamps right now. How many deer would it take to feed them? Every last deer and then some. That's not a knock on the donor program. That's just a simple fact that there's not enough game to meet the need. Living off game isn't a viable or sustainable lifestyle for any large demographic of people anymore. When I was born we had 200 million people in the country and now we're up to 300 million. The fact that we have MORE deer now than we did when I was a kid is a direct result of reduced hunting and management. We may think times are hard just now but we've been living fat, even in the recession. Get a REAL depression started and see what happens. Jamaica? No fish. No game. 3 million impoverished people on an island and it's an ecological wasteland for game species. Haiti? Even worse. Honduras. El Salvador? Maybe you could hunt stray dogs there. Just about everything else is gone. Survivalists who think they're going to retreat into the woods and be Daniel Boone and live off game if things go bad are headed for a serious disappointment. Hobbyist hunters donating meat are doing a good thing but it's a drop in the bucket. Agriculture gets paid to NOT produce food. If you want to feed people that's how it's going to happen...hopefully WITH EPA regulations on pollutants. Most of us that have something to fish for have it because the EPA makes it possible. I don't see how you get out of the realities the modern world gentlemen. You may not like it, but those are the realities.

...sigh. Giving away the gems, SIU. Since we're giving away spots, I have a question. The range map for smallmouth shows a small population on the far southern Ohio River drainages in Illinois. Did you ever encounter them there? Are there enough for a fishery?

There's no point in "admiting" anything because I've always known that poor people hunt and fish to supplement their diet. I've never been one of those people but I've certainly worked and lived with them. You seem to be hopped up on the idea that there's some kind of double standard going here...but you're more or less pathetically wrong. Harvesting game is a legitimate use of the resource..although in the lower 48 just about any hourly wage at any job would provide more food than hunting and fishing and if too many people do it they're going to eat their way through the game that's there. There simply aren't enough deer out there to feed that many people. You may not have noticed that almost every single Indian tribe hires resource managers to keep from overharvesting (although I acknowledge that doesn't always lead to good practices). Everyone needs to manage their resources. You're flailing at a straw man by bringing up government food banks. It raises points that have nothing to do with this conversation, it degrades your relevant points and makes it hard to take you seriously.

Points: 1. We don't know if 70% is enough public support for a state wide catch and release to be accepted. Maybe it's enough to try. I'm sure there are policy experts out there who have done the math and know the answer. I bet some of them work for the MDC. 2. I do wonder about Missouri sometimes. I don't live there but I drive through a lot and I've fished it quite a bit. I have fished rivers in over a dozen states and nowhere except in Missouri have other people on the water made me feel unsafe. So yes, you've got some a good share of people of low character. They're everywhere and you've got your share. Maybe more than average. I agree with Eric that in those cases the only thing that will ever with those people matter is brute force and the likelihood of being caught. 3. F and F is also completely right about the need to keep lines of communication open where you can. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a criminal. There is hope for most people. 4. However you deal with them, giving in to anger doesn't help you. Name calling is almost always counter-productive.

HA!! He's right, Phil. Except there shouldn't be any smallies on that stringer.

I wouldn't say do nothing. Law is only one tool of conservation. Where laws aren't supportable the better course is to make the case for conservation until you have enough consensus that your objectives win support. You'll never persuade everyone, but you'll get a lot further if you're not determined to deal with people in generalized groups like "rednecks".

But that's not what he's saying. All policy is a balance between what is ideal and what can be achieved. If law becomes too far removed from what most people are willing to follow, it becomes counter-productive and undermines respect for the institutions that enact it. If you set the speed limit at 55 (or better 45) you have safer more environmentally friendly roads, but virtually no one will follow the law and you get a serious backlash against the credibility of the people making the laws. Force is expensive both morally and economically and it generates an opposite and equal force against it. I've watched this play out in Belize where virtually none of the local fishers except for the guides follow the extensive catch and release laws. There's no money to enforce the law and it has brought all of conservation under a cloud. Worse, many fishers with whom you could once have a conversation about how best to manage the resource are now hostile to any notion of regulations. Now you can barely get a hearing with local fishers to fine tune the regulations because they've decided that government is out to get them. They just do what they want and give the Fisheries Department and Park Rangers the finger. Those laws haven't done much good except with tourists and the backlash has made it harder to get compliance in the future.

From the AFS newsfeed: The Robert M. Jenkins Award is presented by the Arkansas Chapter of the American Fisheries Society. It is an exclusive award given to organizations that show outstanding achievement in their field. It was last awarded in 2009 to the Arkansas Bass Association of Outstanding Conservation Achievement. This year, the Central Arkansas Dead Drifters Ichthyological Society (CADDIS) was presented the Robert M. Jenkins Award for its work to educate youth in the Arkansas River Valley about the sport of fishing. "It's unbelievable," CADDIS President Jerry McKaughan said. "We never dreamed we'd win this. We just do this because we want to educate the children ... first and foremost about being outdoors." Nothing shows CADDIS's dedication to teaching kids about fishing like their annual Trout Day at Pleasant View Pond - an event CADDIS has put on since 2004. It is held on the first Saturday of December. "Trout Day represents our participation in the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission's (AGFC) Family and Community Fisheries Program," according to CADDIS's website, www.caddisflyfishers.org "This year we had 119 show up for our trout clinic on a Tuesday," McKaughan said. "We always have over 200 on average out for Trout Day." Trout day was CADDIS member David Snellings' brainchild. In 2004, Snellings had an idea to "Catch a limit of trout in Russellville." "We got ahold of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission," McKaughan said. "We reached the Russellville Parks and Recreation Department - Parks and Rec are a big part of this because it's their pond - and everybody said sure, let's do it." The trout are furnished by the AGFC and come from fisheries north of Harrison. Trout are a cold-water fish and won't live in Pleasant View Pond after the water warms up in the summer. "We get the fish two days before the event," McKaughan said. "Typically they bring about 600 trout unless I press them, then they might show up with 900. They'll bring about 400 more in January, February and March." All you need to trout fish in Russellville after Trout Day is have a trout stamp on your fishing license, or be under the age of 16. "We're a fly fishing club, but Trout Day is about the kids," McKaughan said. "We give away 50-60 light-tackle rods and reels. We bait the hooks for the kids, we rig them for them." About CADDIS CADDIS is a group of men and women of all ages and levels of experience that enjoy fly fishing. The club's main goal is to promote the sport of fishing, of all kinds, with future generations. To that end, the club offers club memberships to students at a discounted rate. CADDIS also promotes conservation. Members are kept informed on the current issues regarding all Arkansas fisheries. The group encourage catch-and-release fishing to promote population growth, but respect all anglers right to harvest their catch. Club activities include fly tying, rod building and fishing. CADDIS meets on the second Monday of each month at 7 p.m. at Western Sizzlin' in Russellville, 1105 East Main St. For more information, visit the club's website www.caddisflyfishers.org Read more: <http://www.couriernews.com/view/full_story/17582405/article-Trout-Day-earns -CADDIS-award?instance=top_news#ixzz1mrMzX0Tv> The Courier - Your Messenger for the River Valley - Trout Day earns CADDIS award

It's in the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois which has some gradient. Go check out the USGS hydrograph for this creek (the name's in the video). Ten foot raises in nothing flat. I was doing a statewide survey on water quality and we almost chose this as a "pristine" site (there aren't many places that meet that criteria in Illinois). We just didn't see any safe way to leave the data sondes in the water. Good to know there's bass in it. I had often wondered.

This is extremely likely to be true. It's very hard to estimate events like that over the short term. I don't know about MO, but in IL creel clerks are hired seasonally and there is NO possibility of estimating winter harvest.

Points: 1. Cricket, if you lipped 500 bass in a day, based on normal percentages of hooking mortality you probably killed more than a limit just from the random few that caught a hook in a pulmonary artery or gill or swallowed the hook. Catch and release has effects too. Go fish the Fox River in Chicago and see if you can land something without hook wounds in it's face. Those affect growth and probably contribute to mortality as well. 2. Strongly agree with back caster's practice of keeping panfish only, but there should be limits there too. I remember as a kid when we measured the success of bluegill fishing trips by how many ice chests we filled, not how many fish we caught total. Those trips might actually have paid for the gas and time but they're not sustainable and if those lakes had been properly managed we would not have been allowed to do that. 3. There is more to a slot limit than has been discussed here so far. The back half of the slot can be just as important as the front. Big fish make better eggs with higher lipid content, more eggs, and often have better genetics than smaller fish in the population (they got big and old for a reason). Keeping those few old fish in the population makes a big difference in the overall quality of the resource. I keep seeing people say that very large fish don't reproduce because they are too old but that's really not true until you reach the extreme ends of a fish's life. Keeping harvest pressure off trophy fish has benefits for the population as a whole. It's harder to measure those benefits, but they're probably real. 4. When we were working on the conservation philosophies at the ISA, there was some discussion about how to frame policy about catch and release. The success of catch and release is pretty much undeniable. The fact that it has been embraced so widely is probably one of the more stunning conservation victories of the modern era. So in some ways it didn't make sense to fix what wasn't broke. Keeping that ethic in place and not confusing the message that releasing fish is a good thing was the first goal. It's probably ok that some people take it overboard because there are probably other people out there who might behave destructively if they though no one would take exception. Creeling a supper from time to time isn't a terrible sin but it was decided that it's probably better just to keep things simple and say catch and release is what we support.

Check out the Stream Team thread further down on this page, Dylan. There should be groups like that near Branson.

We're mostly on the same page I think, Ron. I honor your conservation approach and I appreciate most of what I've seen you post in here. I just question whether regulations are a major cause for declines in fishing and I would argue that we're all better off if we can promote the sport among people who have the maturity to learn the regulations and the reasons they are there. Are we really stuck with the bottom of the barrel people who approach the sport from a selfish perspective? Will our demographic always be people who are prone to go off on public tirades about the MDC if they don't get everything they want? I don't think we are stuck there but we do need people to think and take responsibility. We need that among the populace as a whole on just about every issue we face in life. There's a reservoir of frustration out there because life has gotten complex. But as a whole we simply are going to have to cope with these things. We need limits. We need the MDC. While we're at it, I also question just how much fishing is declining in terms of total effort. If it is declining, is that necessarily a bad thing? I'm sure there are those monitoring the profits of the sport fishing industry who would like to pack us onto the streams like sardines. I'm pretty sure that's a pretty destructive approach.

That meat didn't have to come from game. Good for the hunters for sharing, but agriculturists were willing to share, could ante up far more than that with much less effort.

This one is a big can of worms that connects this issue to some of the central issues of our day. We've moved beyond the days of Daniel Boone. Laws are complicated because keeping the resource intact has gotten complicated. As Chief argues above, we have gotten back a reasonable return on our investment through improved fisheries. But the options for an unfettered retreat to unfettered simplicity are substantially reduced. There are enough of us now and we have such huge technical capacity that without self imposed limits there simply won't be a resource left for us to enjoy. It may be that some of these regulations could be scaled back, but the overall trend toward more regulations is not going to go away soon. I think you frame the urge to rebel against the current realities and responsibilities in exactly the right context...adolescent immaturity. Yes we need democratic control over policies. Yes, we need outlets for frustration. But we also need to face the fact that our reality is a complicated world with more people and more impacts than we have ever had. We do need to keep laws as unobtrusive as possible. We need to find ways to simplify what we have and guide free markets to do the jobs that regulators are doing now. But ultimately we must have limits unless we're willing to settle for a hugely degraded resource. The way forward clearly seems to be to cultivate a more conscientious outdoor demographic. I think we're all better off if the ones who can't accept limits decide to stay in town.

Cats are certainly capable of killing quickly, but apparently they don't generally accomplish it. Most people who are attacked survive. It's not always about who's stronger, it's about how expensive it will be to follow through with a kill. If there are other people around or the cat is taking damage they generally give up. The advice that's generally given is to fight hard. You will almost always win. We had a series of coyote attacks on preteen children in the outlying areas of Denver this year. All of the kids survived with a bite wound at most. Everyone pretty much agreed that it was shocking that the coyotes even tried. Somehow the animals in that area decided to take a shot. All of the attacks were on greenways inside the city. The coyotes ran up to the kids and grabbed them by the arms. After some screaming and kicking they ran off. Sucks that the kids all had to get rabies shots. I suspect there will be substantially fewer coyotes in the Denver area in the future.

That's right. The trickier one to tell apart are Northern water snakes (the really common ones in Illinois at least) and cottonmouths. They're both dark with a banding pattern and they occur in the same habitats (and you often see them in the water). They're also both comparatively aggressive. To me the best way to differentiate is head shape. It usually takes a second or two to get a good look, but that fat triangular viper - water moccasin head is pretty distinctive.

There is only one know instance of a jaguar killing a man in Belize and it was a captive animal that escaped during a hurricane and killed a neighbor of the owner. People are certainly afraid of jaguars, but it's all just grossly overblown.

That's right...and yes, the Field Museum is the right name of the museum.

Interesting point about rabies. There's quite a bit of that out there...especially among smaller mammals like raccoons, skunks and coyotes which exist in the millions all around us (and you can add things like round worm and distemper to that disease mix as well). If the defining argument here was that we should reduce exposure to rabies and diseases, we'd work hard to have more top predators because they have historically keep these mesopredator numbers low and they reduce overall exposure to rabies. http://northernwoodl...-mesopredators/ "In northern New England, mesopredators are not generally viewed as a threat to livestock or crops. Their biggest threat to human health occurs during cyclical rabies outbreaks. From an ecosystem perspective, the biggest impact these animals have is on their prey species. By eliminating the top dog and top cat, and thereby releasing the mesopredators, we’ve ended up putting pressure on the animals farther down the food chain. Restoring the wolf and cougar would relieve this pressure, but only by redirecting some of it back towards us." http://www.cof.orst....sopredators.pdf http://www.ebd.csic....s_Am_Nat_99.pdf In the case of the boy who was attacked here, it's probably not rabies. Texas had their worst drought ever this year and nothing was able to reproduce. There's no game out there. The experts dealing with this felt the lion who attacked this boy was young and injured and probably starving. Also an interesting story at Tsavo. There was a movie made about that a few years back. It should have focused more on how incompetent and greedy a company was to expose their workers to that much risk...much easier to pretend the lions were supernatural beasts. Their skins are on display in the Chicago Museum of Natural History. I saw them about 15 years ago there. African lions are more similar to grizzly, polar and coastal brown bears. They're big and inexorable. Mountain lions are a fraction of the size and risk.

Forget the mountain lions. Now I'm scared of 6 and 8 year olds.

That's a pretty good bottom line.

Skeeter I'm out among these cats almost every week. I've been tracking them in hopes of getting a picture since October and I've been over all the statistics and I'm fully aware of the risks so lets pack away the superior knowledge card and look more closely at facts. The number of attacks on children is vanishingly small and the number of attacks on adults is vastly smaller than that. Statistically, your chances of being hurt barely exist. Big Bend has 300,000 visitors a year every year for the past 30+ years. There are less than 10 recorded attacks (if memory serves) in all that time and it's one of the worst sites for mountain lion attacks in the whole nation. We've been through this. You're right there are more attacks recently but it's probably statistically the same as it ever has been per number of exposures to risk. More people are in the woods these days. The exceptions don't prove the rule but yes I agree that you have to be ready for them on the very slight chance you find a hungry one like this one was and yes it changes how you use the woods. When I'm in the woods with my daughter where predators are around I'm prepared. You should be too.