Fall Migration

[catman70]

Brian,

When the Browns migrate in the Fall on NFWR; do you see them congregating near the springs at the upper end or do they stay pretty well dispersed throughout the river?

[Gavin]

The do move upstream, but you will find them near good spawning shoals. Cheers.

[Brian Wise]

Sorry for the late reply.

Honestly the fall "run" on the NFOW isn't an ungodly amount of fish coming up the river to spawn. I would call it more "find good spawing water and stay there" than anything else. I can't honestly say that we catch bigger fish during this time either. If you think about it the "runs" we have around this region are most renowned on the tailwaters where there are several hundreds of thousands of fish and they can only "run" so far (then they swim into a dam ) Now on free flowing waters....totally different story, there is good spawing water every few hundred feet (pretty much) and NO overcrowding.

I would rather fish the NFOW in the Fall as anytime though, it is just constistantly solid fishing.

Brian

[catman70]

Fished from Patrick to James on Sunday with spinning gear. Dad broke off a pretty big brown on a black and gold Panther Martin - too bad it was his only one. Caught a few rainbows on pink lady glo balls and one small brown on a Shad Rap. All and all not too bad for a couple hours of fishing before the rains came. There were some folks at James Bridge where we took out that had caught a really nice brown (and others they said were not large enough to keep) using minnows.

Also, saw a whole lot of waterfowl that resembled mallards, but with slightly differnt coloring. Does anyone know if they are mallards or a different species altogether?

[Terry Beeson]

Describe "different coloring..." Wood duck?

Click here and try this website to identify ducks....

[Brian Wise]

Teals??

Brian

[Gavin]

We floated Kelly to Sunburst on Saturday. Water was really low and clear but I managed to hook and land a few rainbows on a crawdad pattern. Moss wasnt too bad for this time of year, and we saw some really nice browns in the usual places. The highlight of trip happenend right below ROLF. An immature eagle came down and snatched a fish out of the water when we were about a hundred yards below Cave riffle..Lots of other birds out too...saw one bunch of teal, several bunches of wooducks, two osprey, several herons, and red & black headed buzzards. Cheers.

[catman70]

COuld have been teal. Looked just like female mallards, but there was just something different about them that made us believe they weren't mallards. Perhaps it wasn't so much different coloring as it was a different pattern of coloring. Looked at the site from Terry and a female Black Duck looks very similar to a female mallard, but I don't think they'd come down this far this early in the season.

Maybe they were female mallards that had some of their stripes scared off them after seeing Gavin's casting technique on Saturday!

[Kicknbass]

Teal are a small gray duck that could look somewhat like a hen mallard from a distance. In flight, the blue wing teal have a distinct blue wing patch that is very visible from a distance.

[RSBreth]

Most likely Gadwall. There are so many on some rivers (and Taney)in the fall/winter I often think of packing the shotgun when fishing. That's one way of keeping a good hole to yourself!