Somebody gave me a new saying for weather times like these: “If we get April in March, we’ll get March in April.” Similar, that one, to my favourite: “If we don’t get winter when we should, we’ll get it when we shouldn’t.”
This year, for the first in many, I missed my annual April fool slalom up roads winding north and west along the North Raven River seeking signs of spring, and also any indication that the threat of gravel pits at the headwaters springs of Alberta’s top trout stream had been called off.
But April Fool’s was too grey, gloomy, windy and snowy to be much pleasure, or picturesque, in the sense of bright, sharp, publishable pictures, so we stayed home.
But signs of spring there were, right outside the door: blooming wild crocuses, the earliest ever (the same day the first were found 350 km south on the family ranch west of Pincher Creek), and robins, foxed on fermented mountain ash berries, singing off-key like tavern tosspots as they crash into anything (mostly the house) between them and the crabapple cider tree in the back yard.
Suddenly the season’s open! This year the first report of anyone going fishing and actually catching fish comes from friend and fellow stump rancher, Ken Short, from three west Central Alberta streams, the North Raven, of course, and Prairie Creek, where he caught some prime brown trout, mostly on streamers, and a top-secret spring creek where he took, on a dry fly, a gorgeous little brook trout that had been rising for a hatch of tiny Blue-winged olives.
The past two year’s Season’s Open! winning fish have been holdover stocked rainbow trout from Blood Indian Creek Reservoir way out there in east Central Alberta’s Hanna-Youngstown-Oyen country.
This spring what I am hearing from Blood Indian regulars is great concern about carp in the reservoir, no doubt illegally planted there by the bonehead bait bucket “biologists,” of which Alberta has more than its fair share.
The problem is that, at certain water levels, the reservoir spills into the creek, which eventually empties into the Red Deer River.
Out there, the warm water kills the escaped rainbows, but the carp, a warm water species, would probably survive and eventually infest the whole Red Deer system with a bottom-feeding, scum-sucking, non-native fish to compete with our native fish, the populations of most of which are already in serious trouble.
In days not so long past, a crew of biologists and technicians would electro fish, net and trap the reservoir to determine how many carp were there, then probably poison it out with rotenone and start over.
But that requires equipment, materials, manpower and money, and an informed person, who had best remain anonymous, doesn’t know if either Environment-Sustainable Resource Development or the Alberta Conservation Association has enough of any of it for this type of project.
Meanwhile, we do have money galore to inspect pleasure boats entering Alberta to see if they bear any trace of zebra mussels, for example, or Didymos, aka “rock snot.
The Blood Indian carp solution? Introduce yet another non-native fish to do the job for us. Informed Person believes “they” are going to introduce tiger trout, a brown-brook trout hybrid to control the carp, a job the resident pike apparently can’t handle.
Albertans are starting to get the message about ATVs and the damage they do to public land, including the beds and shores of rivers, lakes and streams.
Two ATV “events” scheduled for public land near Cochrane and Coleman in May and July respectively have been cancelled because of concerns raised by neighbouring private landowners and the Alberta Wilderness Association.
Better still, reader Wayne Howse sends me materials indicating provincial court judges in Rocky Mountain House are getting fed up with people charged with ATV offences on public land, particularly stream beds and shores, and are levying stiff fines, starting at $1,000 and occasionally ordering forfeiture of the ATV to the Crown.
Most of the charges are under the excellent section 54 of the Public Lands Act, which has languished unused for far too long, and which states, in part:
“54(1) No person shall cause, permit or suffer
(a.2) activities on, or the use of, public land that is likely to result in loss or damage to public land,
(d) the doing of any act on public land that may injuriously affect watershed capacity,
(e) the disturbance of any public land in any manner that results or is likely to result in injury to the bed or shore of any river, stream, watercourse, lake or other body of water or land in the vicinity of that public land, or
(f) the creation of any condition on public land which is likely to result in soil erosion.”
I live for the day when the clear cutters, the major destroyers of Alberta’s headwaters, start getting charged under this section.
Bob Scammell is an award-winning columnist who lives in Red Deer. He can be reached at bscam@telusplanet.net.