Fishing season moving along — but slowly
By DENNIS APRILL, Outdoors Columnist
There were some anglers wetting their lines in the West Branch of the Ausable last Friday when I drove to Lake Placid, but it still may take some time before spring fishing heats up. I’ve been out only once, for a short time, on a stream that was rushing near capacity, its cold water spewing over boulders, making it a challenge for even the best of live bait or fly fishermen.
The water remains high in the mountains and still there is, as of this writing, ice on many of the higher ponds. From my experience, I’ve found Mother’s Day weekend, give or take a day, as the best period for brook trout fishing in mountain ponds. There have been exceptions. The largest bookie I have landed in New York-a three pounder back in 1985-was caught in a half frozen pond in mid April. Late May, just before the Rotary International, is a good time for lake trout fishing on Lake Champlain.
Speaking of the Rotary, there will be some rule changes this year for the tournament that starts at 6 a.m. on Friday, May 31 and runs through 3 p.m. Sunday, June 2. On Friday, all weigh-in stations open at 10 a.m., and all but Snug Harbor will close at 6 p.m. Snug Harbor remains open until 8 p.m. On Saturday, Snug Harbor opens at 8 a.m., all others at 10 a.m. The closing times will be the same as Friday. Sunday openings are the same, with the tournament ending at 3 p.m.
In other fishing news, the Department of Environmental Conservation announced March 31 that Governor George Pataki has earmarked 1.25 million dollars from the state’s Environmental Protection Fund to acquire additional public fishing rights and easements over the next five years.
4/14/02
Wolf, mountain lion sightings, claims continue
By DENNIS APRILL, Outdoors Columnist
It wasn’t the sound of a partridge drumming off in the distance or the woodpecker pounding some nearby tree while I walked on my woodlot last Wednesday that made me think of some of the strange things that have been reported to me recently.
It was the still unanswered questions.
First, there was a dairy farmer who called and said he thought he had two wolves near his barn. A heifer had died earlier, and couldn’t be buried because of the frozen ground, so it was moved behind a barn. The wolf-like animals immediately began feasting on it.
In late January, Emily Brown, who lives in West Plattsburgh, saw an animal she thought was a wolf behind her house.
She describes it this way: "The animal looked to be the height of an adult German shepherd dog, tan in color with a buff underbelly. The nose was long and narrow and black."
A second one, almost identical to the first, followed it into the yard.
From the photo she sent me, it looks to me like a coyote, especially with the black tip on its tail and very pointy snout. But, it does appear to have very long legs for a coyote.
That’s the problem with identifying our coyotes, actually hybrids with red wolves. Some are very big and wolf-like with large feet; others resemble smaller Western coyotes.
One-thing researchers do know is that the so-called coy-dog exists only in speech and in the mind, and not in the wild anymore. If there were wild coyotes with a good percentage of dog genes, they would breed at almost any time of the year, their young being born in times of short food supply. Whatever dog genes the coyotes once had when they first colonized northern New York in the 1930’s are now repressed or mostly bred out over time.
The name coy-dog will, however, stay with the eastern coyote for a long time.
After thinking I had the wolf sightings worked out, or at least Emily Brown’s "wolf," I got a call two weeks ago from a person who had just seen a mountain lion in the Altona area.
This sighting was not far from where I had received similar reports of lions earlier in the Chazy-Sciota area. This cat crossed in front of his car and was, the caller said, about 80 or 90 pounds, well within the average for a female mountain lion. From all I could gather, it was a very credible sighting.
This may turn out to be an ongoing story, or, at the very least, make for some interesting articles yet to come.