Mike Yauk, Lansing put this 30” walleye in the boat Friday afternoon. He caught it on a B-Fish-n Tackle B3 blade bait. The fish eighed over 10 lbs.
President Lincoln was probably focused on restoring the union when he declared November’s fourth Thursday a national holiday of Thanksgiving in 1863. This topic will probably surface around many holiday tables as Americans strive to induce a communal tryptophan induced coma around the dinner table on Thursday.
Before, and perhaps after, many folks in the Driftless force themselves to consume an isosceles wedge of pumpkin pie topped with a dollop of Cool Whip they will sally forth into our abundant outdoors to cash in on the bounty climate change brings to the area at precisely this time every year.
My personal experience with this phenomenon only dates back a half-century or so. But I’ll wager those who lived here during the time when this nation was engaged in its first great civil war spent some time harvesting nature’s bounty made easy by seasonally driven climate change.
Thanksgiving week has ushered the “big push” of waterfowl down the Mississippi since before I was born. Decades spent in focused pursuit of webfeet teaches the “little flight” occurs shortly after Halloween, causing angst from wondering if precious days would be better spent in a tree waiting for Bullwinkle to stumble by looking for love during the peak of deer rut.
Northern ducks are starting to flutter into backwater sloughs along the Mississippi now. There are more pintails in the area than I’ve seen in years. A few black and white and red and white divers are starting to show up on the lower end of pools.
But numbers are nothing like we see during the fourth week in November when the second major cold front of impending winter pushes ducks to wintering areas in the southern United States and beyond.
Vast numbers of scaup will push through the Driftless this week, headed for Louisiana’s Lake Ponchatrain. Scaup populations have decreased in recent years due primarily to an intestinal disease. When these “bluebills’ push back north in March many too weak to complete migration will be floating belly-up on the River headed downstream between massive chunks of receding ice.
My dad was a serious duck hunter. He survived the Armistice Day blizzard of 1940 hunkered under an overturned boat down on pool 13 with a buddy. Hundreds of duck hunters perished up and down the River during this storm. A lifetime on the River gave my father the epiphany “geese fly by the calendar, ducks by the weather.” His observation still rings with ultimate truth.
One caveat is tundra swans. They show up in the Driftless with the first push of serious seasonal change. This year this climate change occurred on Oct. 27.
They will stay in the area until three days prior to backwaters locking up with ice, then disappear almost en masse, vectoring toward the Chesapeake Bay. Last year intrepid bucketers started light-footing out on the hardwater Dec. 5.
One week ago, smallmouth bass were still biting aggressively. The water temperature was 45 degrees. They continued to bite until the temperature dropped below 43 degrees this past weekend. When ducks start pushing north again in the Spring and water warms to 43 again the brown bass bite will start up again. At 55 degrees fishing for bronze backs will be crazy good and smallmouth migrate up into tributaries and other places they will spend the summer.
From this point forward until ice locks up the main channel just before Christmas walleyes will be the major focus for open water fishers. Walleye migration on the Mississippi is more vertical than horizontal. These dual dorsal denizens of the nether light “stair step” shallower in the water column as temperatures warm, sliding deeper into wintering holes 30-plus feet deep as temperatures drop into the low 30-degree range.
When the first cold front pushed through on Oct. 27, fish dropped from 12 down to about 16 feet. The warm-up which occurred since then found them active in the water column from six feet down to about 16.
One week ago, they were holding in 16 down to 20 feet. Snap-jigging blade baits and slowly retrieving plastics along these contours tore ‘em up. Water temperatures have tumbled to about 40 degrees since then. It will likely drop to the mid-30-degree level by month’s end.
From the limited perspective of more than a half-century spent on almost daily adventure in the Driftless outdoors, it seems to me climate and seasonal change are identical and profoundly predictable. Human nature is much more vexing and irrational. From this old river rat’s perspective, the major difference between 1863 and 2023 this Thursday is football on TV.
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