Category: Warmwater

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Smallmouth Bass (Micropterus dolomieu)

I’ve caught smallmouth twice, once on the Devil’s River in South Texas and once on the Shenandoah River in Virginia. Neither is in the smallmouth’s native range. The Shenandoah is a bit west of where smallmouth should be, over and down a mountain range, but smallmouth in the Devil’s River is a real stretch. As I recall they were imported to Falcon Reservoir on the Rio Grande and moved up into the Devil’s. The Devil’s is so far out of the way that you don’t go there except on purpose, so however they got there it wasn’t an accident.

That USGS map shows both the smallmouth’s historic range in mustard and (except for Canada–this is a USGS map) the expanded range in brown. Historically smallmouth were south of the Great Lakes, west of the Appalachians, along but mostly east of the Mississippi, and roughly north of a line extending along the southern border of Tennessee. It’s an area well out of my native range. Now they’re in Canada and in every state but Florida. They’re aggressive, adapt easily, mature quickly, and as often as not live long and prosper where people put them.

Their range is generally north of the range of their kin the largemouth, and they thrive in cooler water. They are more heat tolerant than trout, and are expected to expand north with global warming. We haven’t fished for smallmouth in their native range. Illinois will be a first.

Small-Mouth Black Bass (Micropterus dolomieu Lac.), 1910, Annual reports of the Forest, Fish and Game Commissioner of the State of New York for 1907-1908-1909, (13th-15th), Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon Company.

Smallmouth live both in stillwater and rivers, but they tend to grow larger in lakes. The all-tackle record smallmouth, 11 lbs, 15 oz., was caught in 1955 in Dale Hollow Reservoir in East Tennessee, which is not only a smallmouth Mecca but sounds exactly like the kind of place you’d find in East Tennessee.

Smallmouth are commonly 12 to 16 inches, with females generally larger than males. They’re usually olive with vertical bands, but can also be dark or light green. Colors vary depending on habitat. Dark waters, dark fish. Sand bottom, clear water, light fish.

A smallmouth’s jaw extends to a vertical line from the center of its eye, while a largemouth’s will go to the back of the eye. A smallmouth will eat most any protein thrown its way, including fish, insects, frogs, and crawfish. I’ve read that they’re not as partial to topwaters as largemouth, but I suspect that may be more a matter of time of year than disdain. Even largemouth only turn to topwaters when it’s hot.

Especially in colder environments smallmouth move into deeper water in the fall and start moving into shallows in the spring. They don’t really feed in cold, so they’re not an ice fishing target, but neither is anything else as far as I’m concerned. By the time we fished the Wisconsin River in late September the smallmouth had already moved out of the river and into the deeper lake.

Sherman Foote Denton, Watercolor of the smallmouth bass, 1897, Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fish, Game, and Forests of the State of New York.

Smallmouth begin to spawn when they’re three to five years old. Temperatures drive the spawn, and romance blooms in the spring when the water is around 60°. Males build circular nests in sand, gravel, or rock, in depths less than ten feet. In lakes nests are near shore and in streams in areas protected from strong current. Nests may be 2″ to 4″ deep and up to several feet across. From year to year males will typically build their nests within 150 feet of the prior year’s nest.

Males wait for females to come into the shallows, which sounds about right for male behavior generally. Colors are more intense during spawning, and males get into fights with other males, which also sounds about right. Mature females may contain up to 14,000 eggs. The eggs mature over time, and eggs aren’t dropped all at once. To drop some girl stuff the female settles at the bottom of the nest, while the male settles next to her. Hooray! The female drops small batches of eggs, fewer than 50 at a time, in intervals of under 30 seconds, so for 2000 eggs they’re going to be at it for awhile.  It’s all very romantic, with soft lights and music and candles, and the male is required to pay for dinner. 

Smallmouth aren’t particularly faithful, and a male may spawn with several females in the same nest. A female may visit more than one nest, dropping a few thousand eggs at each. Eggs hatch in a few days after fertilization, and males guard the nest for about a month, until the hatched fry begin to disperse. The males do the child-rearing, arranging for pre-schools and driving the carpools, and the females head to deeper water where they lie on the lake bottom to recover. Reproduction is hard work.

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Illinois

Over the Labor Day weekend we’re fishing in Illinois. This year we’ve fished in the Northeast, the South, the West, and Hawaii, and we’re on our way to Idaho, but we’ve made no trips to the Midwest. I have this premonition of us coming down to the last states with Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Indiana the last on the list, so we’re making a special effort to knock Illinois off the list. I’ve been to Illinois plenty, or at least I’ve been to Chicago plenty, but Illinois isn’t a fishing destination, no matter how much I might otherwise like Chicago

And I do like Chicago. Chicago overwhelms the state, but the population in the corporate limits of the city is declining. In 1840, Chicago’s population was 4,470, St. Louis’s 77,860, and New Orleans’ 116,375. Midwestern trade ran down the Mississippi on steamboats from St. Louis and points north to New Orleans. While St. Louis and New Orleans thrived, Chicago was a frontier settlement badly located in a muddy swamp. Trains changed everything. By 1900, six years before one of the great Chicago novels, The Jungle, the population of St. Louis was 575,238 and the population of New Orleans was 287,104. Chicago’s population was 1,698,575.

Chicago won the 19th Century.

McCormick Harvester Company advertisement – Front page of The Abilene reflector, Kansas, May 29, 1884 – scanned by US Library of Congress http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84029385/1884-05-29/ed-1/, from Wikipedia.

Three things built Chicago: meat, grain, and railroads, and Chicago’s rail and Great Lakes access to producers and markets and processing of meat and grain shaped the settlement of the the rest of the Prairies. With a McCormick reaper purchased on the installment plan (and other stuff purchased by catalogue from Sears, Roebuck), Chicago carried the Prairies into a market economy that was something new, something different. In the 18th Century Long Island farms produced grain. In the 19th Century Long Island farms converted to truck farms for produce.

Hog Butcher for the World,
   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
   Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
   Stormy, husky, brawling,
   City of the Big Shoulders:

Carl Sandburg, Chicago, 1914.

Sandburg’s not much in vogue, but explaining the City of the Century in 22 lines was pretty good work.

But still, Chicago is only one city in Illinois. In 1900 the population of Chicago was 1,698,575, the population of Illinois was 4,821,550. In 1950, Chicago’s zenith and three years before Saul Bellow published another of the City’s great novels, The Adventures of Auggie March, the city’s population was 3,620,962. By 2010 the city’s population had declined to 2,695,598.

Augiemarch.jpg

But in the 2010 census Illinois remained the sixth most populous state with 12,830,632 people, behind, in order, California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Chicago proper may have shrunk, but greater Chicago, the municipal statistical area known as Chicagoland, had a population of 9.5 million. There’s Chicago, and then there’s Chicago.

For Democrats, Illinois has been a dependable presidential vote, and Hillary Clinton carried the state in 2016 by 55.83%. There was, however, a decided rural/urban voter split, with Donald Trump carrying the rural counties.

Al Zifan, Illinois Presidential Results 2016, Creative Commons Attribution.

Illinois and Chicago also have a long and distinguished mastery of political corruption and political incompetence. Four of the last seven governors of Illinois, three Democrats, one Republican, served time after leaving office. The most imaginative may have been Rod Blagojevich (D), who tried to sell the appointment for Barrack Obama’s successor in the US Senate. Its most famous congressman, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R), plead guilty to structuring bank withdrawals to avoid reporting requirements, but is perhaps better known for admitting to molesting boys as a high school wrestling coach. Other well known Congressmen included Dan Rostenkowski (D) (mail fraud, 17 months) and Jesse Jackson (D) (mail and wire fraud, 30 months).

There’s also a special level of City of Chicago corruption, best captured in its 50-member Board of Aldermen. Patronage drove Chicago politics at least through the modern age, but even in the modern age the corruption is magnificent: The Economist quotes Dick Simpson of the University of Illinois, who estimates that of the 200 aldermen serving since 1969, 33 have served time for corruption. That’s only about 15%, but one suspects that there’s plenty of undetected malfeasance, and it’s 15%. Think of it being the norm for 15% of your co-workers going to work for fraud. That would be a special kind of office culture.

Of the places we’ve been, only New Orleans and Louisiana can hold a candle to Chicago and Illinois.

Chicago, Illinois. Union stockyards, Delano, Jack, 1943, U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War InformationChicago, Library of Congress.

And the incompetence! Chicago’s pension deficit is $28 billion and there’s no real plan to fix it. And as crippling as that is, it’s a drop in the bucket when stacked up against the estimated $214 billion state pension deficit. Standard & Poor’s rates Illinois’ long-term debt at BBB-minus. Junk. Illinois government is broke and failing.

There’s plenty of good stuff to say about Chicago. The University of Chicago championed the social sciences, there’s the magazine Poetry, a fine symphony and opera, the Art Institute, and Prairie Style architecture and the modern skyscraper. There’s the White Sox. Of course there’s also the Black Sox.

Illinois did give us our greatest statesman, A. Lincoln. One can put up with a lot for A. Lincoln. And I thought Barrack Obama a very good president, and he’s at least as Illinoisian as Lincoln was.

Abraham Lincoln, Matthew Brady, 1860, National Portrait Gallery.

Of course we’re going to go to Illinois to fish, and it’s not known for its fishing. I thought about trying urban fishing in the city, but honestly that feels presumptuous. It seems to me that urban fishing may be best left to local residents, and this exercise is stunt-like enough. Plus I should at least once get out of Chicago. We’ll go looking for smallmouth out of the City.

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Alabama Bass, Spotted Bass, Redeye Bass, Tallapoosa River, Alabama, May 26, 2019

We postponed Kansas because of wind and lightning. Wind and lightning aren’t abnormal for Kansas in the spring, but it was lots of wind and lots of lightning. The New York Times said there were more than 300 reported tornadoes in the Midwest over the last 30 days. Of course whenever I read now of weather that’s a bit more than it should be I wonder if it’s climate change, and whether I should be buying land in soon-to-be-tropical Minnesota instead of going fishing. Being reasonably short-sighted I went fishing.

We fished mid-state, halfway between Birmingham and Montgomery. I picked mid-state in part because I found a guide, East Alabama Fly Fishing. The obvious play for us was the Gulf, from Gulf Shores or Mobile, but we’d already fished for redfish in Mississippi and Louisiana, so we drove four hours further and fished for bass and sunfish. Of course I would have liked to fish for redfish in Alabama, but we only had three days. Choices must be chosen.

So bass. How many species of bass are there? Nine, though it’s not the most settled thing in the world. Fish species identification has a way of being uncertain, even for the best known game species. The nine that are currently agreed on? Largemouth, smallmouth, Guadalupe bass from Texas, Florida bass, Alabama bass, shoal bass from Georgia, Suwannee bass from Georgia and Florida, spotted bass, and redeye. Our guide, Craig Godwin, said we would fish for spotted and redeye on the Tallapoosa.

There’s a problem with that, and it’s a complicated problem. spotted bass, also called Kentucky bass, and Alabama bass, also called spotted bass, are almost indistinguishable. When I thought about it later I had no clue whether we’d been fishing for Kentucky bass or Alabama bass. There’s an easy test. All you have to do is count the pored scales on the lateral line. Alabama bass usually–note the usually–have 71 or more scales with holes. Kentucky bass typically have 70 or fewer. If you use a magnifying glass and don’t lose count you can be pretty certain of your fish. Usually. Since we didn’t have a magnifying glass, and since we haven’t yet been to Kentucky and will likely never go back to Alabama, I’m claiming victory and declaring our spotted bass in the Tallapoosa River as Alabama bass.

Since I’d caught a largemouth just last week, and a smallmouth last year on the Shenandoah, I’m only five species away from a Bassmaster BASS Slam! I may make something of myself yet.

Back to the river, I had never heard of the Tallapoosa. I’ve heard of a lot of rivers, but before we left for Alabama if you’d asked me to name a single Alabama River, I couldn’t have named one. I knew there was a bridge in Selma, but I had no clue what river ran under it. It’s the Alabama, by the way, formed where the Tallapoosa and the Coosa meet near Montgomery.

We met Craig at the put-in at Horseshoe Bend National Military Park, considerably north of where the Coosa and the Tallapoosa meet. Our raft float to the Jaybird Creek boat launch was five and a half miles and a bit more than five hours. It’s a big river by my lights, not Mississippi big, but except around island channels where it narrows it’s at least a football field from bank to bank, and where the river falls it’s a limestone boulder garden. And there’s plenty enough fall. There are Class II and and even Class IV rapids on the river, though thank goodness no class IV where we fished.

It’s a tailwater, with four separate power dams. We were below the H.L. Harris Dam and above Lake Martin and Martin Dam. Craig said that the level of the river was driven by power generation at H.L. Harris, and that the river elevation could vary greatly. Maybe I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem that the dams have changed the fish in the river. These are native fish, the fish that were there before we were.

It’s a clean river too, though no river I’ve ever fished was clean enough that I could see bass in current. Ponds, sure, if a pond is clear I can see fish, but these aren’t stillwater bass. Spotted Alabama and redeye bass hunt in the current and we fished the pockets back of rocks and the lines where the speeds of the river changed, and as close to the banks as we could manage to cast.

They were clean, beautiful fish, perfect for the river. First things first. Redeyes do not have red eyes. Some we caught had a red spot on the gill plate, and that may be where the name comes from, but frankly we saw more red in the eyes of spotted bass. They also aren’t big, and the redeyes we caught in the river seemed to be in the neighborhood of a pound. But the dark green and black backs paired with the turquoise lower jaw and belly was so colorful, they’re an unforgettable fish. They also have on the edges of their fins the slightest tinge of white, a hint, a tell, a joy to discover.

The Alabama bass are larger, and frankly I’d have confused them with largemouth if I hadn’t known better. The colors, even the lateral markings, often aren’t that different. The most obvious difference is the jaw. The jaw on a largemouth extends back behind the eye, the spotted bass’s jaw is in front of the eye. Plus there’s the whole current thing. Largemouth don’t live long and prosper in current.

We both fished five weights with floating lines, and most of the float we fished poppers. It was funny popper fishing though. We cast the popper, let it drift like a dry fly, and now and again gave it a twitch. Do you know how to fish a popper on a pond? There are lots of ways I suppose, but my best luck is to cast the popper, let it sit until the ripples die, then give it a nudge. Then let the ripples die and give it another nudge. I guess this was similar but in the absence of pond ripples the popper drifted. It was like fishing dry flies on a drift, except for the now and then pop.

Sometimes the sunfish would hit it, but the poppers we were using were just a bit much for sunfish. Look, I have to admit it, and I had to admit it to Craig, give me a choice of any fish in the world to catch I’d probably catch a sunfish. I loved them as a child, and I love them now. I love to see their colors and to try to parse out the species. I love their ferocity. We were catching bass, yeah, and there’s no nobler calling, tarpon or trout-be-damned. But this year I’ve caught a paucity of sunfish. Late in the day I switched to a Barr’s slumpbuster I’d tied up for Kansas, because I knew I would catch sunfish. I caught sunfish. Craig said these were longears, and I’ll go with that.

Just a note on fishing with Craig. I’ve fished with a lot of guides. I’ve fished with well-known guides and I’ve fished with extraordinarily skillful guides. I’ve fished with guides who were too young to be guiding and guides who were fun to fish with precisely because they were old enough to have seen all they could possibly see, older even than me. I never fished with a guide who took as much joy from the place or from me catching a fish.

Late in the day a fish on Kris’s line went under a rock and couldn’t be brought up. Craig went in after it. That’s service, or maybe you just can’t keep an Alabama boy from noodling.

That’s Southern humor, and I can get away with it. Don’t you try it at home.

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The Native Fish Society

When I was reading about Oregon I didn’t find a conservation organization to donate to. There was nothing like the Tarpon and Bonefish Trust that reached out and gave me a good shake and said we’re doing good work. A week or so later I got one of the usual fishing emails,  this time from The Venturing Angler, announcing the Native Fish Society Native Trout-A-Thon in Oregon.

I looked at the Native Fish Society website, and they were what I had been looking for: a Pacific Northwest conservation organization for the protection of salmon, steelhead, and trout. They need to work on how easy they are to find on search engines, at least by random folk like me.  I sent them some money, and they promised to send me a ball cap. I am now a member of the Adipossessed Society of the Native Fish Society, clipping of the adipose fin being the marker for hatchery fish. Adipossessed. Cute.

If I had been willing to donate $5,000, the Society would have sent me a C.F. Burkheimer custom spey rod inscribed with “Native Fish Society Lifetime Member.” That seems like a pretty reasonable price for a Burkheimer Spey rod, but alas, I have no current need.

I can always use another ball cap. 

From the 2016 Native Fish Society Annual Report. 

Meanwhile in Houston it’s the prettiest time of year, which could only be better if the Astros were in the World Series. This morning I went out early to hand out push cards for a neighbor who’s running for Congress–his mother had called and asked if I’d work the polls for early voting, and how can you turn down someone’s mother? It was in the mid-50s, and clear and bright and excellent people watching. By the afternoon it was in the 80s and I went out and fished for largemouth at Damon’s. Lately I’ve started each bass trip with whatever fly was successful the last time (unless it was lost in the trees) and then moving on if that’s not working.  Today I moved on to a dark blue and black Clouser, which never works. Today it worked, I think because the water was clear with the cooler weather and in the bright sun the dark color was the thing, maybe. In any case, what’s more fun than casting to a particular fish then watching it take, whatever the fish?