A gray, wet Tuesday morning, rain pelting down, backyard brook up a little and running muddy as the dogs crunch dry nuggets from rusty, cast-iron Wagner skillets on the concrete floor just inside the cook-shed stoop.

It’s looking more and more like this morning we’ll just walk the brook a short distance once they’re through eating, me taking special precautions, wearing my light green rubber Crocs with bald, slippery treads indeed underfoot. But then, as though ordered from the heavens, the rain lets up considerably and I figure, “Why not take a ride to the site of our daily rambles and give it a shot, see what develops?” At the very least, I surmise, we’ll get in a short walk, maybe even complete the whole loop if the foggy drizzle lingers long enough.

I load the animals into their Porta-Kennels and buckle down the capped bed of my Tacoma to drive perhaps a mile to our preferred site I’ve named Sunken Meadow. On the hayfield plain above, behind a greenhouse, I park, walk to the back of the vehicle, drop the tailgate, open the Porta-Kennel doors and watch as the dogs spring down enthusiastically and run off through knee-high red clover, heads up, noses on high alert in the damp, still, pungent air.

We make our way east to a slim treeline border capping a 20-foot escarpment overlooking the flood plain and hook a gentle right toward the locked aluminium gate barring the double-rutted lane down into another verdant flood plain, our Sunken Meadow. The quiet, enclosed little sanctuary is slowly transforming into its late summer mode with hints of purple and yellow along the edges, green apples littered about on the ground, a few premature fallen nuts here and there, likely windblown from oak, hickory and butternut trees standing proud sentry along the upper periphery.

At the base of the short ramp down into the Christmas-tree plot I notice Chubby, ears perked up alert, with palpable caution. There’s something on the ground eight or ten feet in front of him. As I approach, I recognize the object of Chub-Chub’s cautious curiosity as a small black-shelled turtle that’s smaller than a dessert plate and larger than a tea saucer. Standing over it and looking down as it retracts its head and neck into its shell, I’m wondering if it’s a Wood Turtle, a Painted Turtle or some other rarer species I’m not familiar with. Knowing it’s not large and definitely not a snapper, I have no fear of reaching reach down to turn it over for a look at its under-shell, which, if it’s a Wood Turtle, with be decorated with six or eight small black tabs the size of nickels along the outer rim. That, I learned that last year after snapping off a photo of a dead turtle killed by a tractor, incorrectly identifying it as a Painted Turtle and receiving several emails and a phone call from a friend to correct my misidentification. It was a Wood Turtle, not “endangered” but under “protected” status in the Bay State nonetheless.

As I reach down to briefly turn the critter over, I can detect a soft hiss emanating from the front compartment its head has retreated into. It’s not a Wood Turtle. The under-shell is a bland, faded orange with not a mark visible. There seemed to be some lines of color on its head and neck but, because it had unfortunately disappeared by the time I circled back to the site perhaps 20 minutes later, I had no opportunity to re-examine it more carefully. I remember no distinguishing colors or spots on its carapace, just a bland, domed, patterned shell, nothing flashy.

Clearly, the turtle was there to lay eggs in packed sandy soil. That was clear when I saw the half-dollar-sized hole under its tail end. I have passed several similar holes in recent weeks that look like something a rodent or snake would make. My guess now is that all of the holes have been made by turtles of various species, including Wood Turtles, though it seems a little late for egg-laying to me.

At work, I Googled “Massachusetts turtles” to see if I could from memory identify the critter I encountered by studying online photos, but I was unable to pin it down. The biggest problem was that I was unable to find a site showing the under shells of turtles displayed. That plus the fact that I hadn’t pestered the critter long enough to get a good read on any distinguishing characteristics or colors. So now, I have a mystery that’s bugging me a bit.

Hopefully, I’ll run into this critter again, or maybe there’s more than one down there laying eggs at this time, which, again, seems to me a little later than I’m used to seeing. That said, I do have vivid memories of discovering a nest of emerging snappers emerging from a sandbank overlooking a “crick” running along the back property line of my Uncle Bob’s suburban Twin Cities home outside Minneapolis in the early 1960s.

I think I’ll throw a camera in my pocket and stay alert in coming days for that same turtle or another like it, just in case.

Maybe it’s one of the state’s rare turtles biologists want reported when spotted.

That’s what I like about walking the wilds. There’s always opportunity to learn something new in a place you know well. For me, it’s what makes the world go round and awakens me each day with a positive, enthusiastic outlook.

To me, I see this as a dredging chore. That is, write in detail about a skill I honed years ago, have not used in many moons but am confident I could quickly remaster if, on a whim, I decided to dig out equipment and head to my old lower-Deerfield River flyfishing haunts.

The dredging image my imagination presents in vivid color involves a muddy-bottomed, spring-fed meadow pond — my aging mind — and the murky depths of sediment that must be activated to recreate an activity I perfected long ago before moving in other directions. I think I can do it. And even if I mis-remember, or some young whippersnapper writes to say he does it differently, well, so be it. Maybe we just fish the same hatches for the same trout with slightly different artificials or by slightly different methods using the same fly. No problem. I can live with that.

What brought me to this subject was a pre-midnight sighting of a fluttering, flickering insect casting a shadow in bright onion-lamp light Tuesday night out by my carriage sheds. Not five feet from my face, a solitary cream caddis fly soared away from me to the dark heavens, its erratic upward flight immediately drawing my attention and reminding me of a conversation two days earlier. Speaking on the phone with my cerebral brother-in-law, a retired college professor and observant man, as usual, he was reporting this and that from his secluded Montville, Maine, retirement farm and naturalist’s Nirvana.

Somehow we had touched upon his stocked trout ponds from which he harvests many brook trout each spring, and he told of standing on the bank with his mate and noticing peculiar, tubular, inch-long, clumps of small sticks underwater near the shore. Suddenly, his lady friend, Leigh, pointed down and said excitedly, “Look, those sticks are moving.” And, sure enough, upon closer inspection, they discovered a well-camouflaged head and a couple of legs protruding just enough for whatever was inside to walk along the pond floor.

“Yes,” I told him, “I’m quite familiar with that aquatic insect from fishing. I call it a stick-case-building cream caddis and used to have great fun catching trout with a wet-fly imitating the pupa that exits the case and soon pops to the surface like an air bubble to fly away as a winged insect.” The strike and the ensuing battle are always worth the trip when they’re hatching.

But, hmmmm? Why do these things happen to me at such opportune moments? Not that it’s unusual to see caddis flies in my yard. With a clear, clean trout stream acting as my rear property line, I often see Mayflies and caddis flies around my home. But I can’t recall seeing a cream caddis this summer and, planning to dredge the depths of my flyfishing memories for a column this week anyway, I had an ideal segue and an exciting subject in the world of flyfishing. Coincidence? Uh-uh. I believe things like this happen for a reason.

Nonfishermen who pay little attention to stream entomology would probably identify the fluttering insect I saw that night as a tan moth because that’s exactly what it looks like in flight, day or night, the flight pattern similar to that of a woodcock without the accompanying whistle. I know it because it was my favorite Deerfield River fly. Astream, the first clue that such a hatch is underway is the athletic rises of trout chasing it to the surface. First you identify the rise. Then upon closer inspection, you notice cream-caddis flies flickering toward streamside vegetation perches. The next step is to dig out your flybox for a cream-caddis pupa or sparkling emerger, which can bring exciting angling indeed when the artificial is manipulated with the rod tip to simulate the quick upward emergence of this fly that’s tied in several styles, some winged, some not, some shiny, others drab. You can make them all work, though everyone has a favorite. Old fishing buddy and commercial fly-tier “Indian Al” Niemiec of Chicopee used to tie a couple of beauties that produced many nice trout for me over the years.

Myself, I had more success with the cream-colored wet-fly version in the larva and pupa stages. But I always carried identical flies in olive green to imitate a pebble-cased caddis cousin that hatches from the same waters and can be fun. Though it’s been a long time since I’ve wet my line in the Deerfield, I remember such flies being effective at riffle tails dropping into deeper channels with strong current. The first clue that trout are feeding on cream caddis pupa is aggressive rises exploding skyward like torpedoes, fish out of the water head to tail. The reason for the urgency and energy is that the caddis emergers don’t dilly-dally on the surface like many other flies, which float for many feet while drying their wings for flight. Not so with cream-caddis emergers, which shed their stick cases from the larva to pupa stage and leave the water in a hurry when ready, rising from the stream bed like a released bobber and forcing trout to pursue them with a quick, powerful surge that carries them through the surface totally airborne, landing with a loud, showy splash.

I used to fish this fly most often using sink-tip line and a short leader. Floating line and a weighted fly works, too. I’d cast 45 degrees upstream and swing the fly down a 135-degree arc, basically sacrificing the first 45 degrees to mend line and get the proper drift with my rod-tip low. Then I’d lift the rod tip to sink the fly to the bottom before twitching the rod-tip upward several times and letting the fly sink again before repeating the process throughout the final 90-degrees. Sometimes feeding trout would take the hook on the upward motion and clear the water with hook in mouth. Other times, you’d get an aggressive strike on slack line in the process of letting it sink before another erratic twitching ascension. When they’re hitting, it’s a ball. If not, you go to plan two and dig out another fly you’re comfortable with.

The beauty of flyfishing is that you’re always occupied with casting and fishing, not to mention mending line and manipulating the fly to entice a strike. Plus, there’s always other chores to keep you occupied, such as tying tippets, changing spools from wet to dry lines, and selecting different flies when nothing seems to work. When the action slows, you can always move to another spot and give it a shot. Or maybe just surrender and call it a day.

The name of the game is identifying what the trout are feeding on and having something in your flybox to fool them.

I guess it was the two galvanized tubs hanging among cobwebs high along the carriage-shed’s north wall that stirred uplifting memories on a gray, still Tuesday morning — air heavy, storm brewing — on my way out back to the kennel.

The smaller, round tub is familiar to one at my previous South Deerfield home and that of my great-grandfather, Willis Chapman Sanderson, who was discovered unconscious in the road from Whately and carted to the Greenfield hospital. There, he died a few days later (Jan. 23, 1913), a week shy of his 47th birthday. A milkman, grist-mill electrician and town constable, foul play was suspected but never proved, thus the final life-insurance ruling of accidental death by fall from carriage on the way home for supper. Officials figured maybe the horse got frisky and dislodged him airborne from his seat and onto the back of his head.

My father used to play basketball in his late grandfather’s large dairy barn out back. By my time, though, it was totally dismantled, only a memory, the outline framing grandfather Waldo Willis Sanderson’s large summer vegetable garden with a battered chicken coop and broad ash tree standing sentry on the west side.

It was in that backyard between garden and driveway, then in the old north pasture behind the garden, on Frontier Regional School property taken at some point by eminent domain, where my youthful, intermittent night-crawler hunts began on hot summer nights with wet, dewy grass covering rich, foot-deep black loam. Unfortunately, that prime soil was trucked away to who knows where during the Frontier athletic-field upgrade of the 1990s. All I know is that the project was well underway when I decided to pull up stake and move to Greenfield in the spring of 1997.

I truly believe there was no better place on earth to pick crawlers than on those mowed green acres book-ending north and south my Pleasant Street home — a sliver of which dated back to Revolutionary times, when Scots-Irish Colrain soldier William Anderson and family bought a 60-acre parcel. The first owners I remember finding in deed research were three Deerfield soldiers who had obtained it as a land grant following one of the French & Indians Wars that consumed the first two-thirds of the 18th century.

In the cellar, on a waist-high mound of dirt supporting the piled-stone footing for the kitchen fireplace — near a narrow, white rectangular gravestone wearing the initials T.A. — I kept my night crawlers in a squarish-round galvanized tub covered by a window screen for air ventilation. Inside was six or eight inches of moist loam covered by a thicker layer of wet leaves that fell far below tub top. About once a week, or on the day before predicted thunderstorms and flash flooding, I’d mix in wet grounds from a morning pot of coffee, just to keep the bait caffeine-buzz lively, oh-so enticing to feeding trout in sanctuary pockets of muddy-brown storm water. How I appreciated those deluges as a young man, heading off on eager trips to West Whately and Conway streams that were always productive at such times.

Although concealment could be a factor that draws big feeding trout out of hiding places and into muddy water during summer rains, I believe the primary reason for coming out is to take advantage of the diverse feed liberated into the flow by turbulent water. The increased flow riles up the sediment and accepts runoff carrying unwilling insects, reptiles, rodents and even unfortunate baby birds out of nests along the banks and those of tiny storm tributaries. Never is it easier to catch nice brown trout you would otherwise doubt existed in such streams when running slow and low. And it’s not only browns. There are also big brookies and even rainbows that come out in high water but are rarely caught from low summer daytime streams. Not even from deep, dark pools, where little trout and immature salmon tend to bite instead.

It’s not rocket science. Once streams recede to their shallow summer trickle, most big trout hold tight out of sight and become nocturnal feeders. All you catch during the day are fingerlings, which many meat fishermen prefer, anyway. Not me. I like big fish that tug hard and leap into the air like sky pilots trying to shake free of the hook.

Astream, it helps if you can identify lanes, pools and eddies where feeding trout lurk — in other words, know how to read water. But even beginners ignorant of such stream dynamics will catch fish, and very nice ones, during summer rains like this week’s. You must experiment with different sinker combinations to get your bait to the depth at which fish are feeding, and you may find a need to add or subtract a split-shot from location to location. That’s fishing savvy. In fact, you’re better off in some spots with a fat crawler and no weight at all. Honest.

My preferred routine, whatever the flow, is to cast upstream 45 degrees and dead-drift the live, frisky “speed-worms,” which contract and expand through feeding lairs. There, usually on the final 90-degree swing, is usually where you set the hook start the entertainment.

You can catch fish on fly tackle using the same dead-drift, but roll casts and back casts under overhanging foliage on small streams requires expertise. For brooks, I always preferred and open-face spinning reel, a five- or six-foot ultralight graphite rod and 4- or 6-pound test line. With it, I’d lob delicate pendulum casts upstream, quickly correcting the loop by mending line to create a realistic bait drift. If you allow the loop to precede the bait, an unnatural drag alerts wise fish that something’s amiss.

It all comes down to presentation, reading water and knowing where fish feed. Once you learn the basics on small streams, it will transition nicely onto larger streams like the Deerfield, Millers, Green, Falls, North and Sawmill rivers.

Rainy summer days can’t be beat for trout fishing. And, while you’re at it, get a good, light, hooded raincoat with elastic wrist bands.

Yes, it came out of the blue a couple of weeks ago by email from someone I did not know. No, her question was not unique. In fact, it seems I am asked the same question on every visit to my longtime vet’s office, and often in the public square: Are you finding a lot of ticks?

Now, let me say I can understand why folks figure that, because my dogs and I routinely patrol off-road habitats with thick cover — traipsing through chest-high hayfields and swampy edges — ticks must be a recurring annoyance. Well, I hate to disappoint but would not rate ticks as a vexing problem in my world. Why? I can’t say for sure. Entomologist I ain’t. But I have thought about the subject often, usually in conversation with friends, readers or people I meet socially. Not only that, but I’m confident I know the answer resulting from simple comparative analysis of habitats visited and the seasonal occurrence of ticks in different cover.

Let me begin by saying I am certain ticks prefer sandy, woody terrain like, for instance, the pine barrens of Montague Plains, where I have never walked for any length of time without finding ticks on my dogs and/or me during snowless months. Another sandy plain along the South Deerfield/Whately line, minus the dense scrub pine and oak of the Montague Plains, produces reduced tick issues but increased occurrence nonetheless.

Plus, never have I removed more ticks from my dogs than after killing frosts during the fall bird-hunting season. That’s when the little buggers seem to most aggressively search out warm bodies, including humans, on which to burrow in and get warm and comfy in moist spots, such as the crevice between your clavicle and neck, armpits and nether regions, where they’re not always easily detectable and can thus linger long enough for Lyme-disease complications to develop.

Also, as I wrote to my latest inquirer, my travels tell me I’m more apt to pick up ticks in woody terrain than in open, fertile, loamy fields, be they hayfields or goldenrod/aster patches on colorful wetland cuffs. On the other hand, move a few feet from these flowered tangles and into alders, sumac, poplar or other bushy, woody swampland, and the possibility of picking up ticks increases dramatically. Same can be said of upland forest from personal observation, which again most often occurs during the fall, in my mind clearly “the season of the tick.” Apparently others differ with my assessment, suggesting spring as the season they find most problematic. And I will admit that I did occasionally pick up ticks during the May turkey-hunting season, when my dogs never accompanied me, removing prime tick targets and guinea pigs.

Thus far this spring, I have seen a total of six ticks, all of them wood ticks that do not as far as I know bring dangerous Lyme Disease into the mix like minuscule deer ticks. Three of those little, creepy, crab-like buggers were detected walking on the back of my hand after morning walks. Another came off my neck after I twice knocked it off my temple with the back of my hand while reading after a shower. Other than that, I pulled one engorged bugger from behind bitch Lily’s left ear one night a couple of weeks ago, and I removed another attached to my cat’s neck more than a month back.

So, despite many opportunities to collect ticks in my travels or by transference from my three pets, I would not consider ticks a problem in the flatlands I patrol.

Before I transition briefly to another pressing subject, just a little gimmick pitch to throw off your timing. Either last year or the year before, probably in April, I took a walk on my colleague’s fertile produce farm less than a mile south and west of the spot where I have walked daily for many years without encountering tick problems. After an hour or so in the field exploring wetland cover, I returned home and, sure enough, pulled two ticks off the back of my hand and another later that day off of dog Chubby.

During that pleasant walk, I ventured maybe 100 yards through a narrow strip of woods hiding a spring brook between fields, broke through the perimeter of wild rose and alders in another spot way out along the back corner at the base of Greenfield Mountain, then went a short distance into the woods at the site of a old dried-up pond, now marsh, where Chubby got jacked up and flushed a couple of whistling spring woodcocks. So, again, same plain yet different types of cover.

I’m convinced that we picked up the ticks in the woods that day, and my colleague concurs. In discussion this week, I asked him how often he picks up ticks working his family’s vegetable plots and hayfields, the hay typically harvested up to three times a year.

His answer?

Never.

’Nough said.

q

In case you missed it, deer hunters participating in the two-week shotgun deer season this year will be able to kill random black bears that cross their path.

All deer-hunting regulations will be in effect except for the use of buckshot, which will not be permitted during a extended slugs-only bear season.

Hunters have for years proposed bear-hunting during deer season like way back when. Now, the state has finally accepted the rule-change I long ago predicted was inevitable as a partial solution to a problematic expanding bear population without ample bear hunters to stabilize it with sufficient annual harvests.

Now, with the burgeoning bear population spilling into pockets of suburban central and eastern Mass. communities, apparently MassWildlife believed it was time to act. The fact is that, with the hunter density greater during deer season (60,000 statewide) than any other time of the year, the new measure will help but not solve the growing bear-population issue.

More will likely have to be done in the not too distant future to maximize the bear harvest in a state where the last population estimate in 2011 was 4,000 to 4,500, with an estimated annual growth rate of eight percent.

Another population assessment is due next year.

Gray, damp, windy. Storm brewing. Wild-rose buds bursting into fragrant white blossoms emitting that sweet, unmistakable scent that money can’t buy. I look forward to the two weeks it annually lingers, making our daily rambles all the more pleasant.

I should have known what was coming next. So predictable if you keep a journal. Yes, as is customary when the sweet fragrance of multiflora rose fills Sunken Meadow and my front yard, I can expect turtle migration from marsh to field to lay eggs. And, sure enough, there one was Monday morning, a wood turtle standing, perpendicular, right on my trodden trail. A big one, she’s the biggest I have ever encountered, and the first I ever heard hiss as she retracted her thick neck, head and all four clawed legs into an enclosed, solid defensive posture. I do hope she escapes mower blades that can’t be far away.

Last year you may recall I found two dead wood turtles, invisible victims of modern mowing machinery. Apparently that big, green, noisy mower didn’t get them all, though, a comforting thought. The protected marshland turtles wouldn’t be there if they didn’t serve an important role in the habitat, and the same can be said of their more aggressive cousins, snapping turtles, a big one of which I heard hit by a mower with my own ears last spring. It was a horrendous, crunching, grinding racket that jammed the machine to an abrupt halt, creating total momentary silence.

I think I had run into that turtle two or three previous springs before it finally ended up in a vulnerable place at the wrong time, which proved to be its last. Like I said last week about fawn carnage during mechanized haying season, these things didn’t happen in the old days when hay and grasses were cut with a curved, sweeping, long-wooden-handled farm tool called a scythe, which did the trick with far less death and destruction of field beasts.

Which brings us to a reader affectionately known by friends as “Sheik,” a man who, as he often has over the years when he has something to say, chimed in by email Sunday evening about freshly dropped fawns hidden in tall hayfields awaiting their first cut. As it turns out, he wrote to recount a two-day sequence of events that ended with a tiny spotted creature popping up from its
West Whately nest and cautiously walking away from him.

It all started Saturday when, during a pleasant after-supper evening walk from home with his wife, they spotted two deer run off in opposite directions from a field, and the pretty sight got his wheels spinning.

“I thought immediately of your column about fawns hiding in fields and was wondering if there were any there,” he wrote. “Then, about 20 minutes later, my wife heard coy dogs howling in the general area of our sighting and we hoped they hadn’t found a fawn.”

The next day, Sheik thought it high time to address a lingering project and took one of his boys for a quick ride across the field from which the deer had fled the previous day. The chore was to clear a large winter limb that had broken off and was still lying along the perimeter. Once there, he hollowed out a space in a patch of bittersweet vines along the edge to make room for a pile of smaller branches before attacking the downed limb with his chain saw. That’s when the cute little surprise popped up out of nowhere.

“When I went to start the chain saw, a spotted fawn jumped up a couple of feet from where I had just been working,” he wrote, astonished. “I can see why a farmer could run one over hiding in a hayfield. Curled up, they would be real hard to see. This one tiptoed away, hopefully to lie down and wait for its mother to return.”

So there you have it, fellas. It’s fawning season and some of the little ones are already on the ground. A telltale sign is tiny hoofprints the size of a quarter.

Since his sighting, the Sheik’s neighbor told him of a recent fawn playing tag in his yard with his little lap dog, which the Sheik took in stride, ending his message with, “I haven’t seen a hen turkey with a brood yet. But tis the season.”

Yes, indeed. Tis the season of birth and nests and the most nutrient-rich green growth of the year.
•
Speaking of deer, the farmer who owns the property I walk daily stopped Sunday morning to shoot the breeze about this and that. When we got to talking about mature, shoulder-high, blue-green winter rye with wheat-like seed heads he was cutting in his cornfield, plus the mix of grasses in his adjacent hayfields, I told him about the migration of spring deer I had witnessed to the lowlands the minute they smelled the deep green clover stubble clinging tightly to his hayfield soil.

“Yes,” he answered, nodding in agreement, then. “I counted 15 in the field one evening. There’s one big one among them.”

Yes siree. That’s a fact. He’s speaking of the buck mentioned here last week — the now 5-year-old I’ve watched since a spotted fawn still being nursed by its mother many summers back. That mature buck’s track, which I have seen many times, developed a distinctive, exaggerated splayed hoof print I am always on the lookout for.

That deer by now feels like a neighborhood pal, a night traveler running high and low, one that has likely had enough close encounters with hunters toting bows and guns over the years to have learned to avoid them. Sooner or later he’s likely to make a mistake. But it might not be for the benefit of human consumption. Perhaps a winter, deep- or icy-snow coyote pack or random passing automobile will ultimately get him. Then again, maybe he’ll succumb to old age in these days of a dwindling hunter pool.
•
Sticking to deer, good news from the wilds of New Hampshire, where the white-tailed deer population has shown zero evidence of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), based on data gathered during the 2014 hunting season.

First identified in 1978, CWD remained isolated in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska for about a decade, but has found its way a far east as New York, Pensylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. Thus the concern in New England, where it has not yet reared its ugly head.
•
Oh yeah, before I go, back to the subject of snapping turtles. I saw one, medium sized, trying to cross Colrain Road north of Harper’s Store in the Greenfield Meadows Tuesday afternoon on my way into work. It reminded me of something a longtime friend shared with me last spring in response to a column I wrote. Not that I mentioned it in the column, but he was perplexed why he passes so many ugly messes in the road left by runover snappers.

“Why do people run them over?” he asked with anger in his voice. “They move slow and are easy to see and avoid. People must run them over on purpose.”

If you’re one of the people who do so, then you better hope my buddy isn’t around to witness it.

“If I ever catch anyone running one over, I’ll confront them with something like, “What the *&^% is wrong with you, anyway?

“It’s hard for me to understand people like that.”

He’s not alone.