In this Issue
June 2005

FIN, FUR & FEATHERS
Spring sprouts turkeys, trout and fiddleheads
By John T. O'Leary, Jr.

John T. O'Leary, Jr.

This evening, on the way to a successful rendezvous with some rainbow trout, the youngster who will probably end up a grandson and I spotted a large tom turkey feeding in a cornfield. After checking his beard out with the field glasses, I handed them to the 8 year old and told him to watch the bird. He loves using the binoculars to watch game from afar, so this was like telling a dog to eat steak. Using a mouth call, I laid a few of the calls that had me legally tagged out on turkeys for the year, on this big tom. Instantly, he went into a full strut and started gobbling. “Wow,” Devonta said, “Every time he gobbles his neck gets way long.” Looks like I’ve got another turkey hunting partner waiting in the wings. And this delightful show came after watching three deer feeding in the field behind Lewis Field at 3 in the afternoon. Life is good in the country. Let’s keep it country, instead of over-developed, God forsaken, Sturbridge North.

Only a person with no sense of grace or appreciation for delicate beauty could fail to love spring in this area. Besides the dainty pastels of the fruit trees, the brilliant whites of others, the maple leaves in their infancy showing red then magically turning green, days later. A walk deep in the woods to an abandoned farm will show their forsythias, iris, crocuses, glowing with no help from modern pesticides or fertilizer. This still life Mother Nature paints this time of year invites up-close inspection, but do it soon; it doesn’t last long. Some late frosts harmed some plants while their neighbors were unaffected. We are hoping it was early enough to not harm the oak trees. Their production of acorns is so important to wildlife food in the winter that in some areas of New York where there were literally no acorns last fall, the snowy winter we just had saw 75 percent of the turkeys starve and/or freeze to death. Let’s hope this cool, wet spring does not adversely affect the grouse and woodcock nesting.

Fishing for trout should be near peak when you read this. Trolling or casting hardware or flies, especially the dark wooly buggers, should keep one in enough action to make battling black flies and mosquitoes worthwhile. It would be hard to fault the rainbow trout the state is stocking. Fish averaging 14 inches-plus with the occasional 4 pound-plus thrown in are certainly bigger than we would have hoped for back when I was a pup, and 6 to 9 inches was the norm. Bass fishing should be fabulous with all the feed being afforded them by the flooded brush. Studies have shown that newly flooded brush and grassy areas abound with insect life, which feeds baitfish, and doubles or better the growth rates of the game fish. Too bad we cannot hold onto these amazingly fertile areas for a few years.

The fiddlehead ferns are ready to eat,
With fresh wild turkey, they’re hard to beat,
Poor man’s asparagus, we hear they’ve been called,
But eat too much, and you’ll end up bald.

I’ll wear a hat and let you guess…

Read previous columns by John T. O'Leary, Jr.