Silt and its S-tench

 This blog entry will probably be quite short, and has been prompted by a couple of lines in a blog by SideStreamBob  down at Wordpress.com.  So I will get right down to the nitty gritty.

As does Bob, I have always preferred to use groundbait, and hookbaits that blend into the background. I have always tried to avoid anything brightly coloured, thinking that a highly coloured bait might put the fish off.   Bob uses black groundbait, manufactured by some company or other, I forget the name, but it is highly irrelevant.   I don't use much groundbait myself, but perhaps I should, as, suitably used it promotes an area of scent, without necessarily providing much feed.  I more usually go for particle baits, but I have also had some excellent catches on some of those few occasions when more conventional groundbait was in use.

But why black?  Bob provided an answer that I had not thought of.  It is possible that fish would avoid a light coloured area, strewn with a pale groundbait, on the basis that fish would feel instinctively exposed to predators whilst swimming above it.   I wonder if this is true though?  Evolution probably does not, and has not, exposed them to pale bottom of lake backgrounds very often, so why would they instinctively avoid it? Why would such get built into the DNA along with other more common reactions to danger. I stress here that I don't know either way. 

I read an article ages ago where the writer described attaching a blue plastic toy elephant near his legered bait. It did not stop him catching barbel, his target fish appeared unconcerned by the alien beast that had attached itself to the hooklink. So are fish worried at all by colour of the groundbaited area?   Are they even able to see in colour?   A quick google suggests that they can, and that many fish can also see in UV light as well. So the presence of a blue elephant in the swim was more ignored than un-noticed.

So what about hookbaits?  I admit to having been surprised in recent years ( having come back from many years spent away from angling) by baits of all colours and shades of the rainbow, anglers even catching fish on baits of dayglo colours. I would never have expected this, but it makes one think that the contrasting colours are actually attracting the fish.  In retrospect sweetcorn is also not a colour you would easily miss, but it is well known to be effective. In clear water a bright pink popped up boilie would be visible for a fair distance. And in murky water it might just be that extra bit visible at close quarters.  Anyway, I have just bought some pink pop-up boilies.  I don't really like using any boilies, but will give them a go.   I have never caught much at all with boilies, the odd bream or two.  So I have developed a Catch 22 cyclic bit of nonsense about them.   I have not caught much with them, so don't use them much. This in turn means I don't catch much using them, which diminishes the confidence to put one on a hair.  I know the cyclic argument makes no sense,  but there it is.   Adding a pink colour on top of all that, and my next cast will not have the usual high confidence factor that I generally have.

I mentioned seeing a bait in cloudy water just above in the text.  Many of the stillwaters I fish have a very silty bottom.   Thick black near liquid, almost toxic mud, acquired from years of rotting leaf fall, fish and bird faeces etc. Many anglers see this as a problem, and design rigs etc to try and deal with it, keeping the bait "afloat". SidestreamBob also mentioned that maggots  probably dig themselves into it and disappear rapidly from sight. I have never thought that they did, after all the Cheshire meres are largely bottomed several feet deep with the stuff, yet particle baiting with maggots used to attract the bream, when I fished for them there years ago.  

I put a camera into a tench swim a couple of years ago, and it was quickly obvious that feeding tench (and probably other species too) stir up the debris on the lake bottom quite considerably.  Certainly enough to render their sight pretty much useless. Other senses, touch, smell and taste have to take over as the main food finding tools in such lakes. 

I have a garden pond, which has remained unfiltered for nearly 30 years since I built it.  Its bottom had become a good 6 inches deep in lovely Cheshire ooze, thick, highly smelly, and very black.  I have been netting some of it out this year, a good dozen large bucketfuls to date. I am hoping it will not ruin the compost heap. And here was a chance to experiment.  Rain had added an inch or so of clear water above 10 inches of gooey gunge in the bucket. So I dropped in a dozen or so maggots. That was an hour or so ago.

Excuse me now whilst I go to check on them.......

Maggots on Mud

Aha.....the maggots are all still on top of the silt, moving rather less vigorously of course, but it seems that maggots do NOT bury themselves, even in almost liquid silt.  This is understandable; in water they become almost weightless, and are unable to get enough purchase to bury themselves. The best they can do is to wander under leaves or any other detritus that sits atop the mud.  But they don't have the guile to intentionally do this, and so all of my maggots have remained visible.  I tried the same experiment with a couple of brandlings. Initially both seemed to dig themselves in, but when the hour was up, both were visible on the surface.

Once a few fish get into this sort of situation, a baited area, and are hungry, their pectoral fins are going 10 to the dozen and everything turns muddy.  Maggots and bottom detritus are just swirled around, with little remaining visible.

Conclusions: don't worry about bait burying itself. If it gets buried it will be because of fish activity. Secondly, I must give a proper go to brightly coloured baits, even if the sight of a pink boilie annoys the hell out of me.

A Particular Change in the Whether?

Well, there has not been much change in the weather, the last week has been both wet and warm, and the rivers are still a little bit too high for my liking, and so the answer to whether grayling? on the river remained the same.   So a change was needed  and  whether I might have a bash on a stillwater came into the frame.  But what stillwater, and what to fish for?

I decided that, because the weather has been so mild, at least for the time of year, I would have a go for a Winter tench.  Water temperatures in both the rivers and lakes locally seem to be about 5 degrees.  I don't think that I have ever caught a Winter tench before, carp yes, tench no.   In the good old days of tench fishing I would be poised to cast in at midnight on the Glorious 16th of June.   The close season used to ban all coarse fishing between 15th of March and June the 15th.  A good thing? A bad thing?   I won't be drawn on that today, but the 16th of June was always very special.   It no longer is. We usually were successful in that 16th quest for tench, and the thoughts in our minds were that the tench had started to feed maybe just a couple of weeks before the season opened. That they had only woken up in late May.  Most tench used to be caught in June, and by the end of July, they were getting hard to find.  Anglers thought that they fed very well to produce the spawn and then again  to recover their condition, but that after July they mainly changed their food intake to much smaller items, and thus became hard to catch.  We all now know that not to be the case, as I confirmed it myself , having caught a few tench in mid April over the last couple of years.  But how early in the year would they feed?  January still seemed a wildly optimistic prediction.

Yet I felt strangely confident, for despite the cold, 5 degree water, it had been unseasonably warm the last few days, and it was quite cloudy, and had been so right through the night, and consequently I did not have that "today will be a waste of time" thought in my head.   No, I actually had the idea that I would be in with a chance.  I arrived at the water at first light, and was not too surprised to find it a good foot higher than it had been back in June. There is still much water in and on the land that has yet to flow back into the rivers.  Donned the wellies and made for a swim about half way along the lake, one that would give me a good view of the entire water surface.   In the almost complete windless conditions, that lake surface was flat calm, and  as the day progressed it never got to more that a very slight undulation.  It never managed to break into a ripple, but the surface moved fractionally with that "oily" look,  just enough to blur the reflections of the trees on the far bank.   Unlike during the Summer, the lack of leaves revealed to me that the lake was very near the town. In Summer little evidence of dwellings and other buildings is visible.   Within minutes a carp jumped near to the far bank, It jumped four times in quick succession.  Even after much thought and considerable reading, I still have little real and convincing ideas as to why fish break surface in this way, jumping and rolling.   I didn't have the chance to further that investigation, for the fish was the only one, of any species, that I was to see on the top all day.

A flight of birds passed overhead in a "V" formation.  About thirty of them.  They were not geese, but

Cormorants on the Moon

cormorants, and I mentally trained an ack-ack gun on them as they passed.   Thirty is not the most I have seen at one time,  a few years ago a flight consisting of several branching "V"s passed over near to my house. I estimated that there were about 500 of them.   Here is another picture I took a couple of years ago.   I had to run so as to get the moon in shot too, and actually ended up invading the pitch of the Lacrosse game I was watching at the time.  I was lucky to get the picture, and probably lucky not to lose my life in the mêlée  of jolly hockey sticks and heavily armoured players.   Vicious game, lacrosse. Probably why my son likes it so much.

A young great crested grebe positioned itself over my bait.   It was to remain there, seemingly at anchor, for over two hours.  It looked like one of those raised in this last year's brood. The lake being so quiet, I settled down to read  Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms".  I find that, on slow stillwater sessions, I am able to read, whilst still watching the dough bobbins from the corner of my eye. Hey! Proper dough bobbins mate, made from real bread! The day was slow enough to enable me to read half the book.   About 11 o'clock the left hand bobbin twitched a bit. Nothing more, just a twitch.  I reeled in a couple of minutes later to find one sucked maggot, the other one missing.   The most likely candidate was a small roach, but I still had a tinca in mind as the culprit.  My two rods were fishing about 25 yards out, ten or twelve feet apart, and I had chucked out 7 or 8 small feeder fulls of maggots.   The maggots had languished for over two weeks in my bait fridge.  The fridge is probably a little too cold, and when I first opened the lid, the maggots looked to be quite dead. I compensated by not clipping the lid down on the maggot feeders, hoping that, on hitting the water, the maggots would be spilled and scattered immediately.  The maggots did recover and start to wriggle, but it was a full three hours or so before they showed any visible signs of life.   Note to self: back off the fridge thermostat a smidgeon this evening.  The fridge though has been a boon. A freebie from a friend who had had quite enough of both her student tenants, and Manchester council's heavy handed rules for landlords.   She gave me two small fridges, and one now, with the wick turned up full, acts as a bait freezer,  the other has reduced my maggot costs tremendously.

So at about eleven, I had a bite on my maggots, maggots which were lying in a thin small carpet of maybe two hundred other similar maggots. This is worthy of some thought.   How likely is it that a particle bait is picked up by a fish, from amongst an area of scattered, similar particles?  It is possible that only your hookbait has been picked up.   It is equally likely, or perhaps equally unlikely, that yours was the very last to be eaten.  Neither is the most likely scenario.   Provided that your hookbait is no less attractive, nor more attractive than any other particle, then on average, half the free bait will have been eaten before yours.  Some days a quarter will have been eaten, on others 4/5 might have been consumed. There will always been minor, or perhaps major differences in how your hookbait is seen by the fish, when compared to the free offerings, maybe the hook will put the fish off a bit, maybe you have presented it in a way that might make your hookbait more attractive.  Therefore it will never be truly rigorous to apply statistics in this way, but it most certainly can give a general idea.

So, ignoring such bait/hookbait differences we can say:

1) When you get your first bite, the most likely scenario is that only half of your freebies remain. 

2) When you get your second bite, the most likely scenario is that a quarter of your freebies remain.

3) When you get that third bite, the most likely scenario is that just 1/8th of your freebies remain.

4) Regardless of accuracy of the statistics, by the 4th or 5th bite, very little feed will be left.

Is this important: Yes it is.    One other obvious conclusion is that on a stillwater, if you are getting NO bites at all, yet have thrown in what you feel is a sufficiently attractive bait pattern, then there is no point in throwing more in. Just a waste.   Either the fish are elsewhere, not feeding or they don't like the dinner you have provided for them, and maybe they are away getting another of their five a day.

The consequences get harder once you start to get bites: do you feed more, and if so, when?  If you do feed more to enthusiastic fish, how easily and quickly might you overfeed, or might the splashes scare off a feeding shoal?   One thing that is certain when adding bait, the number of bites you have been getting is another factor to consider, along with how many fish are expected to be in the swim, the time of year, how warm the water is, and are they feeding hard or just peckish.  I cannot give precise answers to any of this, it is just one of those questions about which the experienced angler will think, and then strive to get the right answer on the day.   There is far more for an angler to consider, than there is for a golfer facing that 6 foot putt on the 18th green. It is the infinite variability that makes angling so wonderfully fascinating, and which  also gives rise to the mountains of absolute rubbish talked (and written!) about it.

So I put in a small amount of extra feed: two more feeders full.  I was rewarded, if not instantly, by two line bites.  A few chapters later, in the early afternoon, a good bite on the left hand rod, and I hooked into what I initially thought was a perch.   But as the fight progressed it intensified, and was unmistakeably a tench...or a carp...    Tench it was, a nice slim fish of 4-6.   Always a pleasure to see that tench shade of green.   It fought no worse than any Summer fish, although it was initially sluggish.   I had expected a poor fight, but in a cold-blooded creature it might be that the muscles get more efficient as they warm up with use?   The fish was no slouch and gave an excellent account of itself.  My first Winter tench. In water of just five degrees Celsius.  So pleasing when the plan works out.

There were no more bites.   A kingfisher  flashed down the length of the lake, eighteen inches above the water and at speed.   It landed in a low overhanging tree a couple of hundred yards away, just a tiny orange-brown point of light in the distance. It looks as if quite a lot of them have so far survived this Winter, as I see one or more on most fishing days.  A bunch of about twenty finches flew over, each bird flying very randomly in the overall group.   Very untidy looking assembly of birds, each bird exhibiting random motion within the group:  goldfinches? greenfinches? 

There is more thought that can be applied to bite frequency.   In the lazy hazy days of Summer, bites can be frequent.   Even without the use of groundbait of any kind.    It is common for anglers to get dozens, in some cases hundreds of bites in a single day.   So what can we read into this?    Certainly that the fish are hungry....but look deeper.   That single maggot on your hook has been seen and taken dozens of time during the day.   And that means that any other visible food item in the same area of that lake will have been seen by the fish too.   And almost certainly eaten by them.   So the conclusion is simple: there can be very little natural food easily available to the fish, if you are catching fish regularly.    There may be food there, but it must be hidden in the weeds or buried in the silt.    Every small handful of bait you throw in represents a very large increase in the local food supply for the fish.  I may have said this before, but any heavily fished water becomes a fish farm, with MOST of the fishes'  food being hand fed by the anglers. Cold-blooded creatures like fish have a very low requirement for food outside of the breeding season,  very little is needed to retain their body weight constant.  Once anglers supplement that very low food level intake, then the fish can grow easily to the huge sizes we now see in our waters.

All this may explain why, in the past, large fish were seen as hard to catch.  Before the introduction of heavy baiting, large fish were only present in very rich natural waters.  Waters with a lot of readily available natural food.  And so, unless you were able to introduce food that they liked better,  catching the fish was difficult.   All this changed with the introduction of various modern baits, when suddenly there were available a large choice of very tempting items for these fish.   So big fish became far easier to catch, at the same time as they have grown larger and become far more numerous.    And as long as anglers continue to pay for the bait, so they will keep catching. 

Female Blackcap

Not too much news in the garden,  except that all those bulbs I drilled into the lawn are sprouting very early.  It will not be long before we have crocus flowers and snowdrops.   Unless a sudden frost gets them.   Our male blackcap has been joined by a female.  The only female blackcap I have ever seen.  It may have been around for some time, as I initially thought it was just another dunnock...until I looked closer.   Its presence is not universally welcome in the garden, as the bullfinch chasing it away in my photograph clearly shows.  

Blackcap Being Chased Away by the Male Bullfinch

Please Stop my Wife from Murdering the Tackle Shop Owner.

The tench fishing is fading now, and so, maybe, time for a change.    Again, I should probably go and fish for some barbel, but somehow I cannot really find much enthusiasm for the species at the moment.  True: they fight impressively, but they are a little predictable, and I don't really find them to be much of a challenge.   That is not to say I will not fish for them again: just not this week.

So I drew a card from the pack: perch.  And why not,  and I stabbed a pin into a list of locations: Yorkshire rivers.   So, tucking a bunch of lobworms under my arm, I set off.  The venue and species was not of course chosen entirely at random,  more that I really wanted to fish for some perch and fancied somewhere different in which to do it.

On arrival, I noticed a small, tied up, Tesco plastic bag, at the bottom of my rucksack.  Ah yes, I remember. A fortnight before I had placed a few big halibut pellets in the bag, intending to use them for barbel.  The trip never happened, and the bait was forgotten about.  I pulled the plastic bag out, and it disintegrated.  In some way, the oils and other emanations from the pellets had destroyed the plastic bag.   The plastic had become very brittle, and disintegrated in much the same way as burnt paper in a fire-grate does, breaking up into tiny pieces.   Very odd indeed!  Have I inadvertently discovered a way to make plastic bio-degrade in under a month?  Should I nip down the patent office tomorrow?

The venue turned out to be a bad choice, for, after 5 hours my float had not moved, even whilst in the very fishy looking bit of slack water I had chosen.  Again I lie, for it had twitched slightly a few times, nothing worth a strike, and examination of the worms showed that they had been dismantled, probably by crayfish.  No fish at all came to my rod, but I was entertained by several speedy and low kingfisher flypasts, and a solitary sparrowhawk that zoomed along the far bank, chasing nothing.  After a couple of hours of inactivity in the swim, a pike of some ten or twelve pounds cruised slowly past me, no more that a foot from the bank, and had I brought deadbaits, I would have tried to catch it.  I quite often see pike patrolling the river's edge, always heading upstream, often very near the bank in a foot or so of water. Maybe I should be more prepared for them.  Pack the odd lure or two.

A Lively Little Yorkie Pike

By lunchtime it was obvious I needed to change tactics, so I moved downstream to a short stretch of very fast water, much of it very ripply, all of it motoring a fair bit.    A small section of worm was cast into the area where the rapids began to get more sluggish.   A second rod went across to the far bank, still with perch in mind, where it was once again ignored. A while later, a bite on the fast water rod produced a microscopic grayling of...oooh...at least three ounces. My first grayling of the season though, and very welcome. An hour later, a second bite, also from a small grayling.  I reeled it up through the fast bankside water, and as I did so, there was a very large swirl, and something unseen grabbed the hooked fish.   It soon let go, without having revealed itself, although a pike was the obvious culprit.  Obvious, but surprising, for I would never have thought to try for pike in that swim.  The water, I would have considered to be far too fast for pike.  The grayling was rather worse for wear,  alive, but would not make it through the night, not without the aid of a full team of A&E anaesthetists and surgeons.   I quickly rigged up a wire trace on my barbel rod, and free-lined the damaged grayling down through the fast water near the bank.   It was not long,  and very soon I was playing a pike, very much  in the fast lane.   It put up an excellent performance, and I was only slightly disappointed to find its size was a mere seven pounds or so.  Neatly hooked in the scissors, it was returned unharmed, and swam off strongly.  Inadequate net for pike, I know, I know!  But it was to be as exciting as the day was to get.

But, the day did inspire me to  change from perch to grayling for the rest of the week.   In anticipation of this, a trip to the tackle shop was needed.  Maggots, simple maggots, which must surely be the ultimate bait for grayling.   The owner of the shop apologised, for he had only bronze maggots in stock.  No problem, and a couple of pints was soon stashed in my "new" bait fridge.  Wanting a bit of a challenge, and being my usual slightly daft self, I ignored the Dove, decided to bypass the Derwent, and chose to fish a river that is not well known for its grayling. I did initially fish it for chub, but after a few hours of fighting nothing but snags, and losing tackle every time, I then cast further downstream into an area where the water speed looked right for the "ladies of the stream" to be lying.  But first, a couple of out of season trout were to take the bait. See picture. You may well have read that grayling have a pear shaped pupil in their eyes. Look closely though, whilst zooming the photograph, and you will see that trout have pear shaped eyes too. The trout were returned after a quick photograph and eventually

A Brownie, Just out of Season I Think.

a grayling gave a typical, jagging bite, and was landed after a brief scrap.  I weighed it at 1-6,  any grayling of over a pound I consider to be a good fish.  Any grayling smaller is still well worth catching. I have added a photograph of the swim where the trout in the picture came from. As you can see, there are at least five old truck tyres, certainly one pedal cycle, and much assorted other junk in the swim.  It is such a shame that, now the river is clean enough to support trout, it is still so completely infested with these types of rubbish. But I do sometimes wonder whether the human detritus, apart from the tackle losses it causes, would make the river less productive were it not there. In much the same way as I read that sewage outflows, if not too clean, actually help fish growth. This area has a simple sandy bottom, not the best for promoting the growth of weed and insectivorous river life.  The rubbish does provide anchor points for weeds, and hiding places for bugs and creepy crawlies. Would there be many fish at all in the stretch were it not for the junk?

The Swim the Brownie in the Photo Came From

Further downstream, a willow stretched out across the river, just downstream from me, and through its foliage, I saw a heron flying upstream.  The tree was some twenty yards downstream, and masked me from the heron's line of sight.  But as soon as the heron cleared the tree it spotted me.  I was being completely still,  in dark clothing, blending well into the background, yet it still spotted me. Instantly.  It panicked and did a vertical U-turn, with a half roll, to leave it flying back downstream, some five or 6 yards higher than before. Quite a manoeuvre. Herons are quite brilliant, with some superhuman powers.
  

 I more clearly defined my challenge as:  trying to catch a grayling on every trip to the river, spending no more than three hours of time after the grayling , before moving on to another species.   And so far I have shocked myself,  this little river has produced 9 grayling for me in five such short sessions,   smallest maybe 14 ounces or so, best at 1-7.  A great average size. Just as astonishing, if you knew the river, each session has also produced trout.  A few tiny dace and some crayfish have joined in with the party.

A Fair Sized Crayfish

Finally, at the close of the fifth session, something took the bait, in a bit of quite fast water, that was  significantly bigger, and much harder fighting.   It proved to be a chub, as near to 4 pounds as makes no difference, and truly the most gorgeous looking chub I have seen for a long long time.   Had I shaken the scales a couple of times it would have gone to four, I am sure, but I don't like exaggeration, so 3-15 it will have to be. Most good chub I catch seem to have areas of displaced scales, and often look old and tatty.   Not this fish. A pleasure just to look at it.  I am certain it has never seen a hook before. Session three produced a surprise too.  As I watched the river and rod tip, a movement to my right caught my eye.   A crayfish was trying to move upstream. It was half out of the water, and being over-washed by a very powerful, bubble filled current.   I have no idea how it held on to the stone.  I placed my rod between my legs, dug out my mobile phone and tried to photograph the brute.    Not entirely successfully, and eventually the cray was washed away.   Fearing my bait would have been moved from its position, I reeled in, to find my first crayfish of the year attached to my hook.   More coincidence?  Or maybe the crays always appear as twins?   So each of five short spells produced grayling, nine in total, plus 6 or 7 out of season trout.  Kingfishers were present each day too, as well as the ubiquitous grey wagtails, sine waving their way up and down  the stream.

Back home, well satisfied.   Until my wife spotted me.   I was in trouble.  Bronze maggots:  very bronze maggots.  The dye used to render them such a superb colour seems to want to similarly colour the rest of the world, and my hands have become stained in a quite wild shade of deep orangey-yellow.   And it won't wash off. Not even after twenty minutes, of soap,  bicarbonate of soda, lime juice, etc.  Nothing shifts it.

Evidence for the Murder Trial

   My trousers too appear to have gained orange patches above the knees.  So Nina now wants to kill the tackle dealer. My own punishment is likely to be amputation at both wrists. She claims my hands have stained the cushions on the sofa, the fridge door, and I am not allowed within a yard of either her or her best china.  I am eating off a chipped old plate, and drinking from a plastic cup as I write this.   I have warned the owner of the fishing shop of his impending doom.  Good maggots though, to judge by how much the fish liked them.  

Disco Maggots: The Sequel.

Essential reading before this, is the earlier post entitled "Damned Disco Maggots".


...I was lucky.  The cold weather this Spring held back the escaped maggots from hatching.  They were taking a very long time to hatch, so long that I had almost forgotten about them.   My Australian relatives were able to come visit and then to return home without seeing a single bluebottle.  I had lost all fear that my wife would go ballistic and crucify me in nice time for Easter.

Then one day I had cause to  shout at the wife.  I caught her chasing three flies around the kitchen. But  I had a strong suspicion about where those three flies had originated.   So I sneaked down and sprayed the cellar with flyspray. There were quite a lot of flies down there too, forming planetary systems around my head, and buzzing everywhere.  Hoped to get them all, and then went back down then next day to pick up the bodies before she went down there herself. Fair to say that the ground  below ground was thick with them.   But they were all swept up and, after a new burst of fly spray, I closed the door.

A day or so later I went fishing, having told the wife to keep out of the cellar.  I had cleaned it up a second time and told her not to go down there. I didn't say why. 
Of course being a woman......so, next day, whilst I was still out fishing, she went down. And found several hundred dead flies dead on the floor from my last spraying, and many more in flight, obviously hatched after the spray had diluted itself to an ineffective level. She was not amused.

All very Shroedinger's cat. Had she NOT gone down there she would not have known that the flies existed, never mind whether they were dead or alive on opening the box. Anyway I can now tell Shroedinger that if he puts two cats in the box, one will be dead, and the other will leap out and fly around his wife's head.

My readers will now be wondering whether I went unpunished. NO! I had to suffer two days of going fishing with three of four flies buzzing around in the car, and had to drive with the windows open. Some of the damn maggots had escaped before being put in the cellar.

Nearly five quid wasted!

P.S.   the last time my Australian cousins visited a hedgehog died in the garden ( as I discovered a couple of weeks later).  It died of a huge flea infestation.  I thought hedgehog fleas were hedgehog specific fleas.   Not so.  Every time any of us walked past the spot where the creature lay dead, its fleas must have been pouncing on our legs and clothes.  So my cousins and my carpets became flea infested.  The Ozzies went home with flea bites, and I had to have a man in to disinfect the house and garden.

...and Did the Disco Maggots Dance?

Nope:  The maggots that caused so much trouble the night before were sullen on the fishing trip, and refused to parley with the fish. I threw them at the river all day long and the river, in cahoots with all its denizens, ignored them completely.  On a day when I started with supreme confidence, with both water and air temperature about 8 degrees Centigrade  ( only about 1 degree with the wind chill factoring in its evil influence on my hands and feet), the river disappointed me.  Other anglers who packed away their tackle earlier than did I, reported blanks.  The river was low, and I was only saved from a total blank as the light started to fade, when a chub of about 2 & 1/2 pounds took a lump of breadflake. It gave a pleasingly spirited scrap and so I hung on for an evening feeding spree, but should instead have gone home. The birdlife was nearly a disappointment too. By mid afternoon I had seen only swans, mallards, blackheaded gulls ( some with their newly blackened heads), and a solitary black backed gull.   Impressive bird: it flew upstream into a headwind, using its wings only for control, not a flap to be seen. Yet it gained height as it did so.  So much for simple "O" level physics. An oystercatcher, heard but not seen, almost completed the ornithological experiences for the day.

Kestrel

But a gorgeous little kestrel performed a long fly past downriver, and later another, upriver, hovering briefly before perching on a nearby wire during a brief spell of sunshine.

That alone would have made the day worthwhile, but later a very rare event: A couple of avocets landed briefly on some exposed mudflats a little way downstream.  Too far away for my camera, even with the 300 lens fitted, and had I not seen avocets before they would have been too far away for me to properly identify. Waders are not my strongest suit. I will instead add a couple of avocet photographs that I took a couple of years ago near the Ribble.  Such spectacular birds, as indeed are most of those with exclusively black and white plumage. Not as delicate at they look, and can get quite aggressive, especially when their young are in danger.  And such crazy long upturned bills.  If you think the Chinese make eating difficult with chopsticks, be prepared to be amazed what this bird can do with a beak that looks to be totally unsuited to the job.

Avocet With Young



Avocet

And I can now answer the flyspray question, as posed in the last post.  Fly spray, used conventionally, does not seem to bother maggots at all.  Over the following couple of days I picked up a steadily decreasing quantity during each visit to the cellar.    The numbers decreasing only, I suspect, because the remaining wanderers had found suitable crevices in which to hide.   Few more will now be captured, as they have started to pupate.   There will soon be many hundreds of flies buzzing around the underfloor space.   Last time there were only a few dozen, but some still emerged from the cellar into the house at large.   I passed them off to the wife as having flown in through the kitchen window.   It was Summer then, and I know that the excuse will not wear this time.

Damned Disco Maggots

We have all done it I know. I first did it when I was about 13. My father was not happy.  My mother was horrified. She didn't speak to me for weeks.

I came down one early morning to find the hall awash with escaped maggots. Cleared up as many as I could whilst my parents were still in bed...but three weeks later the secret was out...big time, and, as above, my mother and father were not amused.

On that occasion I know why it happened. Leaving the lid a little loose to allow them to breathe, also lets them sweat and escape by scaling the walls of the tin. We soon learn that keeping maggots cool and dry, with the lid off, contains them within the tin. Or it did until the night before last.

The tackle shop did not have my usual colour of maggots, and so I had to buy something called "Disco", a lurid mixture of over the top coloured maggots. They had been left overnight, two pints in a four pint maggot box, lid off, on the cellar floor. All should have been fine. BUT...going down to pick them up for my early start yesterday, the sea level looked rather low. About a pint had gone walkabout. And I have no idea why or how. I blame the tackle shop and his disco branded gentles. These discos were regular Houdinis, who limboed their way over the wall. I rounded up as many as I could, making me a little late for a pre-dawn start, but the effect in three weeks time will do nothing other than reduce the number of megatons falling when the wife finds out. What is worse, in three weeks time my 84 year old aunt comes to visit from Australia, together with my cousin and her husband. I feel my second near death experience of the year approaching fast. I have no idea how they escaped.

Meanwhile: does anybody know whether flyspray kills maggots hidden in the nooks and crannies of a cellar? The tin says all flying insects, but....

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This all recalls an article I wrote many years ago, following another such escape.  I reproduce it here, in exact form, no changes to protect the guilty.

It was entitled:

Commuting with Nature

May I first advise the squeamish to go and squeam elsewhere.

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Years ago now I was a very, very keen angler, a specimen hunter, one of those idiots who sought out the biggest of the particular species in which he was interested on the day. Daytime, night-time, all weekend, often all week, summer, winter, rain or sunshine, it made no difference. If I could get away from work, the lake or riverside side was the immediate destination. Of course big fish and long sessions meant lots of bait, and there were times when maggots, bred commercially on a maggot farm, would be essential. So, in the torrential rain (perfect weather), one day, we were tench fishing at Tabley Mere, Knutsford, Cheshire UK. And here my apologies to the estate gamekeeper, belated though they be: yes! we did break the rules and fish at night (every night actually). God, my soul feels cleansed now! The trip was to last some 10 days, and so the bulk of the maggots were in my old, dark blue Ford Cortina, safe in the boot (trunk). Or so I thought.....

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A bit of natural history now. Whilst maggots are kept dry they happily crawl around in the bottom of a maggot tin, and do no harm at all, presenting no problems to anyone. But when they are wet, the water allows them to crawl up vertical surfaces with ease. Now in the car was not a tin of maggots, but some four gallons of these sweet little creatures. Dyed in various pretty colours, they milled around in a big plastic sort of.....er skip in the boot! Anglers' cars of course get neglected, and mine being no exception to the rule, it had developed a water leak in the boot, directly above half the world's population of best quality multicoloured supermaggots: a tench picnic fit only for the gods. Once wet the maggots quickly emulated Houdini, and by the next time I visited the car, for another gallon or so of Frank's Fishing Shop's best, the vast bulk had gone for a stroll. As I approached the car I realised all was not as it should have been. My dark blue paintwork was covered in little dayglow coloured spots.....and wait......the spots appeared to be moving. Yes folks, every square inch of the wet car was covered with the brutes, all engaged in one great scientific surface tension experiment . Not only that, but, as maggots seek out nooks and crannies in which to hide and pupate, they were crawling everywhere. They were even going around and around inside the car's instrumentation. I had a maggot pressure gauge and the fuel gauge, although still working, merely measured how many gallons of maggots were at loose in the car! Of course the main problem for the moment was the loss of the bait. Picking them off the car one by one was not a practical solution when there were tench still waiting to be caught. I raided the gamekeeper's compost heap for redworms. Two bucketfuls, still mixed with the compost, and we were back in business again. A few short weeks later, episode two: having pupated in the car by the million, a billion freshly hatched blue bottle flies were now engaged in hatching. For a week or so everywhere the car went, it left a trail of emerging flies. Stop at traffic lights, and a swarm of them would horrify any pedestrian within easy flight distance. Park near houses, and the occupants would wonder where on earth all the flies were coming from. Rather like Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" but in miniature.

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I could not of course abandon the car, or take time to de-infest it: No time, I was carp fishing that week! There were other subsequent escapes, in the house, in the fridge (keeps them cool in summer and slows down pupation), but none bring back the full flowing flavour of the moment as did the car incident.