Tuesday, April 6, 2004

Take a Gander at those Old Lures Two-for-One day (blog posts, that is...) I've been spending so much time in the local Gander Mountain stores lately, they are starting to feel like a home away from home. Just last week, I stopped at the store in Franklin and ran into Chris Hauser sitting in the Gander Lodge. He was there buying old fishing lures. If you go to any of the winter fishing or sports shows in the Milwaukee area, you've seen his collection on display. Chris calls himself a "piscatorial lure-ologist." I picked up a flier showing lures and lure boxes he will pay cash for. He likes old wooden baits, but will look at anything. A Neverfail Underwater Minnow box will net you at least a hundred bucks. A wooden box for a Dowagiac Minnow will bring $200 or more. That day he showed me a muskie-size Cyclone Spinner he had just bought. It looked something like a Globe, with propellers, a jointed wooden body with chipped black paint and rusty old treble hooks. He gave the former owner $100 for it. The Puls Wenka Company, at 15th and Ramsey in Milwaukee, made fewer than 200 of that model through the late 1960s, he told me. The company made another 6,000 bass-size baits out of plastic after that before closing its doors in 1974, he said. Chris is a walking encyclopedia of such info. If you find Grandpa's old tackle box in the attic, let him paw though it before you put it on the dollar table at this spring's gagage sale. Chris will be at the Gander Mountain store in Germantown tomorrow, April 7, from 2:00 to 7:00 p.m. Or you can call him at 262-860-1004, or e-mail him at heddonccbc@aol.com.   He will give your lures, boxes, reels, rods, advertising, catalogs and other fishing-related items a free appraisal. You might have just a pile of junk, but you might also have a bait or two worth enough money to buy a new muskie rod. Later... 9:54:45 PM    comment []

Global Warming? Every April for about the last ten years, at least one pair of wood ducks has shown up in the beech woods that surrounds our house. Last year, there were three pairs. The hens fly from tree to tree, searching for a hole suitable for a nest. The drakes tag along, as guys often do. They couldn't care less what the hens choose for a temporary home, as they will likely never set webbed foot inside it anyway. Beeches often rot out where branches have broken off, creating perfect nest sites for wood ducks and other cavity nesters. Some 20 years ago, an ice storm took the tops off a lot of beeches in our woods, and in the last decade those damaged trees have ripened to the point where they house a lot of squirrels and starlings and apparently the occasional wood duck. There may be screech owls nesting out there, too, for all I know. I hear them trilling now and then at night, but have yet to see one here. What's most interesting about the woodies' return is the date. The first time I noticed a pair out the kitchen window was on April 12 about a decade ago. The next year, a pair showed up on the 11th. The next, it was the 10th. Until last year, the date of the woodies' return never varied outside that three-day window. Last year, three pairs showed up on April 8. Yesterday morning, my eye caught the unmistakeable beat of duck wings. Sure enough, a pair of woodies made two passes over the trees south of the house, then disappeared. I did not see them light in a tree, although they may have. I was gone before dawn this morning, so I don't know if they came back today or not. I'll look for them tomorrow. Of course, I can't be certain that my first sighting each year marks the date of their actual return, but I do keep an eye out for them, and I do not recall seeing woodies earlier than that at this latitude. As is often the case with wildlife observations, seeing them raises more questions than it answers. Is it always the same pair, or at least the same hen, since many wood ducks are shot each duck season? If not, are the hens that return the offspring of the first pair I noticed? Or is our wood lot just good wood duck habitat? And what about the earlier sightings over the last two years? Chance? Or maybe another sign of global warming? One thing is certain: it is past time to clean out the nest box I hung in a tree next to my neighbors' pond. Wood ducks have used it just about every year since I put it there, maybe eight years ago. One year, I found the empty shells of hatched eggs, but never saw ducklings in the pond. Another year, several hens used the box as a dump nest. At the end of the nesting season, it was full of unhatched, stinking eggs. Two years ago on Memorial Day, a mink killed a hen on the nest and left her partially eaten body to rot on top of her doomed clutch. Later, when I cleaned the box out, I broke open a couple eggs before leaving them in the woods for the possums and coons. They had died a day or two at most from hatching. The first year we saw woodies here, a pair nested successfully somewhere in the woods behind the house. I never saw the hen again until that Memorial Day. I was in the garden when she flew low overhead, squealing as she went, and landed on the pond. Later that day, we found one baby woodie in the yard. A neighbor found one in his garage. The neighbor closest to the pond found another wandering around in the woods. We gathered up those wayward ducklings and plopped them into the pond. One neighbor saw mom and four little ones for a day or two. Then there were three, then two, then they all disappeared. I have no idea how many wood ducks the beeches in our woods and those of our neighbors have produced over the years. It is a treat to see a pair of adults show up about the same time every year, though. After a long winter, the woodies' return -- more than the trumpeting of sandhills in the marsh just north of us, the crowing of a rooster pheasant in the hedgerow or even the lusty gobble of a tom turkey in the oaks across the tracks, all of which have been going on for mearly a month already -- is a sure sign spring has finally arrived. Later... 9:42:01 PM    comment []