Baker's Branch

  Bait. We need bait. Have you got any? Well, then, if you don’t, then you need some, too.  It’s all about bait. Everything. Not just fishing.  I do not know how much bait I have gathered in my life, starting at about age five. In weight? Time spent? All wasted? It is incalculable. I am still doing it.  The other day when my grandson Lane Webster, and his cousin Ethan Sartin, of Sand Springs, came out to our place to spend the night on the Branch, I promised to take them fishing. That was my end of the deal. Pam’s end of the deal was to feed them better than they deserved.  “I’ve never eaten curry before,” Ethan said.  “Wow!”, Lane said, “It’s my favorite!”  “I thought meatballs were,” Pam said.  “Yes!” Lane said, “Them, too!”  I told them if we were going to go fishing, then they were going to have to gather bait, that was their end of the deal; that I was not going to pay for bait with today’s dollars.  I didn’t care: I told them they ...

It’s light enough, now, to thread a needle outdoors at six in the morning, and cool enough to make you wonder why anyone ever complains about the heat in Oklahoma. Concrete workers, and roofers, know this. So do cat fishermen.   In July, in the hot, hot summertime, in the rocks, you’re going to find the catfish, three species, spawning; no roofers or concrete workers. If you do see the latter, just keep moving, gaze averted.   One cool morning this week, right after a pleasant nighttime shower, you would’ve found me there. I was catching fish, nice, fat channel cats up to about three to four pounds; one bigger that broke me off. Channel? Blue? Flathead? I don’t know. I was using live bait, so it could’ve been any of those three mentioned, the flatheads almost always preferring live bait to dead. It was big, whatever it was.   I say “live bait,” and that would include earthworms and crawdads, wouldn’t it? Over the years I’ve caught more cats in the rocks using what they ca...

  The way today’s news and current events are reported, it’s easy to forget that there are still more good people out there than bad. I was reminded of that this past weekend when I met with an old friend I hadn’t seen in years and met a new one I had never heard of. The first was Josh Lamb, certainly one of the toughest ever kids to wrestle for the Charles Page Sandites, and the other was an older gentleman, Barry Quackenbush, with a heart for others as big as Josh’s own. I knew Josh when he graduated from Page back in 1990. I never had Josh in class, but had taught many of his relatives, a stalwart bunch, all. In that time and place, everybody seemingly knew Josh, his reputation as a two-time state qualifier on the mat and knew him as well to be as friendly off the mat as he was ferocious on it, all of that while getting around on two bad knees you wouldn’t have handed off to your worst enemy. Josh was never a complainer, smiled all the time (off the mat), and was tough, tough, t...

  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...