Baker's Branch

  Has shad died off this past winter? Sure. It was supposed to happen, and will again some winter down the road. Will it affect your ability to catch fish this summer on Lake Keystone, the Arkansas River, and other area lakes? Probably, but maybe not in a negative way. Hold off on your crying and moaning at least until early June when the first extensive fish catching reports will begin turning in the evidence of the extent of the die-off damage. It's possible as I just suggested, the die-off could work in your favor. Maybe.   Shad, two species, are the forage base of several different sport species found all over Oklahoma. Those two shad species would be both the gizzard shad and the threadfin shad. Without those two shad species swimming around in Oklahoma lakes (and rivers), fishing as we know it, all of it, and I'm talking about the fishing industry, boats, tackle, marinas, etc. as I am anything else, would not exist. Without food to eat, shad, gamefish cannot exist. ...

  It’s not weather, alone, that governs bird migration autumn and spring. It’s the amount of daylight in the sky. I’ve watched skeins of ducks and geese fly into the teeth of advancing cold fronts straight out of the north when the days lengthen in spring. In fact, I watched it happen last week on a trip to a family funeral in Nebraska. My three brothers and I were there to bury Dad. My brother Vernon and I drove with our wives straight north on Highway 81 out of Edmond into that southeastern corner of Nebraska often referred to as the Rainwater Basin, so low and waterlogged is the country there at this time of the year because of the winter’s melting snows. Roadsides in every direction were only recently opened, and three-foot snow drifts were piled high. Grandpa Harry Vollertsen had a dairy farm there that started our father’s life, and consequently our own. Ducks, geese, and sandhill cranes choked every available body of water, no matter the size, as far as you could see. If you...

  I had only one rule when I was a kid and it got me into both a lot of trouble and into some of the most amazing experiences at the same time. My mother said she didn't care where I went all day, but I had better be home by dark. She pretty much turned me loose; a good thing because I hated staying indoors. I should've drowned two or three different times, but I didn’t. Here I am bothering you about it. I had an old fat tire Schwinn no gears bike with a wire basket on the front that held Dungeness crabs, blue crabs, crawdads, fish. or anything else I wanted to throw in there. The snakes, which I searched for constantly, I secreted into odd pockets of “stressed” blue jeans ahead their time fashion-wise. Mom loved me for that as it made her daily laundry chores a lot less mundane than they might otherwise been. A kid carousing the country daylight to dark in the same mode as me is apt to see things others don't. Once on a leave from his sea duties, my dad, the Captain, check...

  There’s not a better way I know to check the current population of cottontail rabbits than to walk about after a recent snow looking for “sign”. I did that a couple days back after our most recent light snow, about an inch, out here on Baker’s Branch. There, right in front of the carport where I park the truck, was a nice, clean set of cottontail tracks. So clear and sharp were they, they might’ve been chiseled there by a master artist working in hard, white clay, and perhaps they were; a reminder that not all things move about in daylight where we can observe and control them. There are years out here when so populous are the rabbits, and numerous their trails, that I cannot follow by separation in the snow one sinuous line of hop, hop, hopping's  from another. The tracks are everywhere, and so are the rabbits. This is not one of those years. Wildlife biologists know that rabbits, like grouse in the North Country, follow a cycle of wax and wane, that encompasses roughly eig...

  There are two types of clam chowder worth eating. One is made in New England, the other in the Chesapeake Bay area of Maryland and Virginia. My mother, who made both remarkably well, grew up a redneck girl way down yonder in Little Dixie, and by all rights and pretenses never should’ve had the opportunity to learn how to make either, but then the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor and flip-flopped possibilities for lots of things, and the rest, as they say, is history. That war brought Mom and Dad together (so to speak), and she spent the rest of her life following dad’s naval career over half the world and absolutely every watery niche of the U.S.A. pulling me along with her. When we lived in New England, she learned how to make New England clam chowder. When we lived on the Chesapeake, she learned how to make Chesapeake chowder, a far, far greater thing than she had ever learned to cook before down yonder in Little Dixie. Of the two, I preferred Chesapeake chowder. It lacked the rich, ho...

  You can’t give away all your money to every conservation organization that comes floating down the polluted stream, but you can give away a little. Be picky, and choosy. Giving a little something to a favorite conservation charity is as sure a sign as I know that you have finally grown up. Kids don’t do it. I know some kids forty-five years old. When times were a little more flush out here on Baker’s Branch, and I was working five different salaried jobs, and sleeping four hours an evening (really), I gave yearly to the Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, Ducks Unlimited, The Nature Conservancy, Trout Unlimited, and The National Rifle Association. Yes, the NRA: It works to conserve gun owners. I had organizational magazines piled ten feet high all over the house, and I read them when I wasn’t sleeping; sometimes when I was. I felt strongly by most of the issues favored by all of those organizations. I still do. As time went by, and I began to rely more and more on ...

  I found some the other day out in the Oklahoma Panhandle a little southeast of Guymon. I hauled a travel trailer out there and parked it in a RV park just west of town, set up, called Jack Test and his sons Bryon and Ben, put a pot of coffee on, and sat back to see what would happen. It was cold outside. While Pam was battling ice and trees crashing down all over the yard back home along the Arkansas, our weatherman in Amarillo was calling for blowing and drifting snow out yonder along the wild Beaver River. Kiowa country in the old days, Jedediah Smith died not far from here surrounded by Comanches back in 1836. I have always liked hunting country smoked up by the gun battles of history. I was about to the bottom of the first cup of coffee when Bryon called back with a set of plans to put some cock pheasants in the pan. Spike The Wonder Dog and I were to meet the Test boys and their dogs at Jack's upholstery shop on Fourth Street, and "caravan" outside of town to an am...