I remember the elevated tempers and harsh language when they contemplated NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Senators would pound fist on podium insisting it wasn’t fair to us and how the abolished tariffs and transparent borders would benefit our neighbors much more than ourselves.

Now, I find myself in a similar precarious position, how commerce between us and the rest of the world doesn’t seem aquatically balanced, especially so with invasive species.

Them nice fellows in Scotland are pissed senseless and on a war of extinction with the American Mink, how it’s eating cats and dogs, pillaging defenseless salmon, and scarfing all their water voles …

Heaven forbid we should lose a poodle or three …

Meanwhile the rest of Europe is declaring Jihad against the American Signal Crayfish, which any sportsman knows is %$#@ freshwater lobster – requiring nothing more than kite string and a rancid chicken liver to catch all .. you .. can .. eat.

Now that all them Scottish dames has scored a coat our vermin are no longer good enough. Ditto for crayfish now that all them rich sauces have laid both French & Danes low … that red wine immunity overcome by bushels of Mud Bugs and all the butter they swizzled while sucking them down.

Meanwhile we’re dancing around Rock Snot, Rock Vomit, and the leftover ichor from forty years of  horror movies as unwanted guests.

You can’t eat them, nor can you wear them, so where’s the equity in this trade? I’d suggest that while we had the best interests of our eurotrash cousins at heart, they haven’t repaid the favor – at least not in like coin.

… perhaps some invasive Dutch Chocolate, or at least a scone or two.

In a little “tea-party” muscle flexing, scientists from Sarah Palin’s home state reveal that the American Bald Eagle, symbol of American might and pride, is an invasive species…

Let the name of Moses be stricken from every book and tablet, stricken from all pylons and obelisks, stricken from every monument of Egypt. Let the name of Moses be unheard and unspoken, erased from the memory of men.

Now what are you going to do? Erase all those stamps will be a bother, but the currency is near worthless which should prove to be a relief for the treasury.

With 200 years of symbology invested, removing the eagle would be nigh impossible. We’ll have little choice but to rethink most of our invasive policies, and recognize that as humans speed up and the crust warms, we’re witnessing Darwinism and evolution, and nothing more.

P.S. Listen to the National Public Radio piece closely …

I missed the third digit of the snowpack measurement yet instinctively I knew it really didn’t matter. Three digits means a repeat of last year’s watery excesses, and while I resolved myself to keep working on the dry flies like I’d planned, they were unlikely to see much action.

There’ll be plenty of opportunities for fishing, but you can start ticking off the hatches that are off their timetable due to a high water year. Their predictability a thing of the past as they dribble off in smatterings versus the more traditional en masse emergence.

Shad will be for the lucky few, those folks that know their river well enough to seek the proper depth despite the torrential release from the dam upriver, and those that own boats …

… or seek guides, who have boats …

Fishing is like rooting for the home team, and some years there’s that sickening feeling when the quarterback slumps to the ground clutching his knee, and the crowd begins to deflate with, “there’s always next year.”

Sure I’m whining, but only because it’s tough to get mad at something we so sorely need. A billion people without water by 2050, and I’m already making excuses why twice as much has already prevented me from catching a damn thing.

I’ll giggle madly when I get to set down all this drab and mottled, so I can tie another 20 dozen of the brightly garbed beadchain bling, most of which will still be unscathed in the box for next year. I moved to the second box of Shad flies last year, a mixture of anticipation and restocking followed by two years of high water and forced to go cheek to jowl at the few spots it wouldn’t sweep you off your feet.

A single fish hooked for all my efforts.

Again I’ll have an entire week’s vacation primed for the first hint of fish. My boss will gaze at me each Monday morning expectantly, and I’ll be gazing at the floorboards – wishing I could tell him this was the week he would have to make due with the second stringers  …

…while I treat the steady stream of casting injury and sunburn, complain about sore shoulders and limp wrists, and how I can still cast twice as far but only for half as long.

I’ll confess to a morbid fascination with the larger invasive species issue, I spend far too much time reading about all the horrors headed our way.

With national parks mulling all manner of restrictions, before banning humans outright, it’s indicative of a war against an enemy that can’t be beaten.

Just insert “seed” for diatom, and you’ll understand why your narrow ass is completely toxic to native flora and fauna. You’re carrying hundreds of them in the folds of your shirt, pressed into the bills of your wallet, stuck to your rubber shoe soles, imbedded in hair, mouth, and anything else that has direct contact with the atmosphere.

As we’ve demonstrated so many times before, the pendulum will swing far past intelligent, until we get into the truly rarified spaces. Our good intentions morphed into some sort of foreign plant Jihad, that’ll spread into secondary markets and accomplish little other than to anger everyone.

 … but the idea of ballistic husbandry, to allow me to rid my yard of my neighbor’s furry passions, and the hides that will result, that I will not curse.

… yea, that’s right, were going to put “rabbit” back on the menu.

A lifetime of uncaring neighbors loosing “TinkerBelle” to crap wantonly anywhere she feels like it, lay waste to any birds I may have sheltered through the winter, and scent my mornings with the penetrating aroma of cat urine…

…  you little furry Motherfu**er, them days is over. You’re going to rediscover camouflage and stealth, leave the quail in my yard alone, or I’m blowing daylight through all that Purina.

Biologists claim that domestic and feral cats are an invasive threat that along with store bought exotic plants, reduce the meager Big City green belts ability to compete with all those discarded invasive plants.

New Zealand and Australia already allow hunting of feral cats, but our domestic population is still killing about 500,000,000 birds per year, which compounds the problem of city blight, whose meager green belts are filling up with invasive plants those missing birds might have found delicious.

Household cats were introduced in North America by European colonists; they are regarded as an invasive species and have few natural enemies to check their numbers. “They are like gypsy moths and kudzu — they cause major ecological disruption,” Dr. Marra said.

– via the NY Times

It’s still comforting to know that once we get a ways down this path, absolutely everyone will be pissed off, not a single invasive will have been diminished, and the cops will be plying the billy club to old Missus McGillicutty whose got a death grip on Cho-Cho, despite the city ordinance to the contrary.

“Salad Days” for the fly tying community coming, with a goodly chunk of Maltese making up for the lack of Eastern Cottontail.

The lack of commentary on our previous article suggests fishermen are a stoic and heartless lot, unwilling even in the face of  insolvency to spend less of the government’s cash to balance budgets, bomb Libya, or any other semi-humanitarian act …

So we’ll pose the question again, this time with science insisting that were we only to close our most sacred fisheries for a couple of years periodically, we’d have more fish, bigger fish, and they’d all be stupid again.

You heard right. That fearless kind of  Stoopid.

Enormous hungry fish unafraid of the harsh glare from your Magenta reel, no longer skittish of your Orange-Orange florescent weight-forward hurtling overhead, and uncaring that your sticky rubber wasn’t – and while you wring the Didymo from your sandwich with much cursing, they’ll continue to feed unhurried and within arm’s reach.

” It seems that by closing the area off, communities may not only build up the amount of fish in the area, but make them easier to catch, which helps meet the goal of having fish for a feast. But this may pose a problem where temporary closures are used for conservation rather than community goals.”

“Our results highlight a previously unconsidered mechanism through which a rapid and large decline in fish biomass may occur when a closed area is reopened to fishing; reduced flight distance resulting from protection may increase some fish species’ susceptibility to spear fishing,”

– via PhysOrg.com

If science insists special regulations may be needed to protect all them fatties lolling in the current once the fishery is reopened, then it’s the closest thing to “guaranteed” ever.

Weigh the sacrifice before insisting on being heard. A couple of marginal years spent hardscrabble fishing for foot long federales, versus a couple years at a new venue resulting in unmitigated slaughter upon your return.

Think, Gents. How bad can a few days off your home water hurt, compared to the larger picture?

I remember reading a Flyfisherman magazine back in the Eighties that attributed the exceptional size and growth rate of the trout in some Pennsylvania creek to an upstream cheese factory, whose rich effluents imbued the entire waterway with curds and whey.

Sure, it was white and unsightly, probably adding a little foam to the fast water, and stank like sour milk in summer – but who wouldn’t overlook any indignity if it grew bigger trout.

We were young and gullible then, and assumed that occasionally fish could win an industrial-age lottery, and while most creeks were imbued with things that rhymed with curds, somewhere we’d achieve symbiosis, where the fish received something from us that assisted their growth, instead of retarding it.

Now I’m questioning whether our UK brethren had it right all this time, that trout once stung by the hook will never take the artificial again. The only reason catch & release was ever successful is because the industrial age guaranteed both wastewater-borne and factory flushed – and we’d addicted a couple of generations of trout to painkillers, which neatly explained why they took our flies multiple times.

Pharmaceuticals turning up in streams and rivers have made headlines in recent years. Now for the first time in the U.S., researchers have shown that such drugs may come directly from plants that manufacture them. Research published in Environmental Science & Technology (DOI 10.1021/es100356f) documents that treated sewage effluent from drug makers can deliver to streams concentrations of painkillers that are as much as 1,000 times higher than levels in effluent from other sewage plants.

– via Chemical & Engineering News

Now that I’m aware of the issue, I’m not so sure I won’t lead with a couple of large rocks followed by a fleshy cannonball, it’s plain I’ll have to get down there and fight for my chemical teat, as them lazy arsed fish are deep and serene while huffing on leaky pipes.

… it’s either that or leave the barb up, once them mandibles are like a sieve it’ll be more for the rest of us.