26

Mouse Ears and Hendricksons

When I was a kid, our fishing season officially opened when Charley Watkins called from Maine to announce that the ice had gone out at Sebago Lake. Charley ran the ramshackle cabin-and-boat-rental up there, and he knew that we Massachusetts boys were itching to go fishing after a long New England winter.

“You fellas better git up here yestiddy,” Charley would yell into the phone. Charley yelled because he was stone deaf. “I got Cabin Four waitin’ for you.”

“WE’LL BE THERE FRIDAY NIGHT,” my father would scream.

“You gotta speak up, Mr. Tapply,” Charley would yell. “Must be a bad connection. How’s Friday night for you?”

Shortly after iceout on Sebago, the smelt began swarming in the mouth of the Songo River. Landlocked salmon came from all over the lake to feed on their favorite forage, and they would strike Grey Ghosts and Warden’s Worrys trolled on fly rods off the stern of one of Charley’s clunky old rowboats.

Charley Watkins’ annual call came anywhere from the third week in April to early May. Eventually we noticed that no matter when he called, it was always just a day or two after the apple tree in our front yard—100 miles southeast of Sebago—burst into bloom. “Charley’s gonna call tonight,” my father would say. “He’s got his eye on our apple tree.”

We laughed about it. It was our superstition, one more case of connecting two unrelated events such as walking under a ladder and losing money on the stock market in a cause-effect way. It was, we thought, one of those random, inexplicable things, a coincidence, what logicians call a “post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy,” as if the blooming of an apple tree in suburban Boston actually caused the ice to go out of a lake in southern Maine.

But, of course, the connection between our apple tree and iceout on Sebago was not a coincidence. In nature, explanations are sometimes hard to find. But nothing is random.

* * *

As winter slides into springtime here in New England, we natives watch the trees that grow along the banks of our favorite trout streams. According to folklore—and by actual observation—when the year’s new maple leaves reach the size of mouse ears, it’s time to go fishing. That’s when the Hendricksons—large, smoke-winged mayflies that trout find irresistible—will begin to hatch.

Observant fishermen in other regions have their own, equally dependable, Hendrickson predictors. On certain Catskill streams, for example, the first Hendrickson hatches coincide with the blooming of the dogwoods. On other rivers, anglers look for blossoms on the swamp violets or bloodroot plants.

Everywhere, in fact, the life cycles of riverside flora and aquatic insects and other creatures are intimately intertwined. On some Rocky Mountain streams, chokeberry blossoms signal the beginning of the salmonfly hatch. Golden stoneflies appear when the wild roses burst into bloom along the banks, and green drakes hatch when the marsh marigolds begin to flower. On other rivers, these links do not hold true. But the observant trout fisherman can discover different, equally reliable, signals.

In nature, all life cycles rotate according to the same, mysterious timetable. Migrating birds appear—and depart—in the identical sequence every year. Insects hatch, wildflowers bloom, ice forms and melts, animals emerge from hibernation and bring forth their young, trees turn color and drop their leaves, fish spawn. It’s all ordered, predictable, and interconnected, and observing how it works is one of the pleasures of spending time out of doors, even if you’re not a fisherman.

Early settlers gave the shadbush, a New England woodland shrub, its name. They noticed that along the coast the shadbush’s white blossoms always opened just at the time when the American shad, an anadromous fish, first entered tidal rivers to spawn. Today’s savvy shad anglers keep an eye on the shadbush. It occurs on different dates from year to year, but it always tells them when to go fishing.

Inland and at higher elevations, the blossoming of the shadbush coincides with the hatching of the white-winged caddisfly called, naturally, the “shad fly.”

Of course, it’s not coincidence, it’s not folklore, and it’s not mysterious. It’s a science called phenology, from the Greek word phaino, meaning “to appear.” Phenology is the study of how periodic events such as flowering, breeding and migration make their regular, interconnected, and sequential appearances, especially as they relate to climate and weather.

The more time I spend outdoors, the more phenological links I’ve noticed. When I spot the spring’s first migrating redwing blackbird in the marsh across the street, for example, I know that the trout will be feeding on midges in my local trout ponds—and those two happy events always seem to coincide with my first woodchuck sighting in the pasture behind the barn.

When the iris blossoms open up in my backyard rock garden, I can count on finding smallmouth bass on their spawning beds in the big lake. The autumn’s first blue-winged olive mayflies appear when the sumac turns scarlet along the riverbanks.

For the past several Octobers, I’ve noticed, the flight woodcock have flocked into the poplars on John’s Knoll the very night that the last leaf drops off the old lightning-struck sugarbush beside the abandoned farmhouse at the crossroads.

Other irises, sumac patches, woodchucks, and maple trees don’t have the same predictive qualities as these particular ones. These are my personal phenological connections, and they probably won’t work for you. But discovering your own unique local patterns is the reward and pleasure of becoming an amateur phenologist anyway.

The unfolding sequences of natural events are more or less dependent on local weather patterns, climate, latitude, altitude, and even longitude. Spring moves north at about 100 miles a week—a nugget of ancient farmer’s wisdom that the science of phenology bears out—and it comes earlier along the coast and at low elevations than it does inland and in the hills. Shad bushes blossom—and shad flies hatch—later in the Green Mountains of Vermont than they do along the Connecticut coast. It happens later some years than others, but barring catastrophic events such as flood and drought, the connections among these events are unchanging. They are linked in complex but logical ways to such measurable variables as the temperature of the earth and the sea, the phase of the moon, and the angle of the sun.

Old Charlie Watkins has been gone for many years. Now we have the Internet and the Weather Channel and hot-line phone recordings to tell us what’s going on where, if you want to trust them, and we can still get local updates from friends with telephones. As for me, I’d rather watch the maple trees and shad bushes and redwing blackbirds and let my seasons unfold in their ancient, predictable, and comforting ways.