A Submerged Beaver Skull

One day while I was fly fishing in some relatively shallow water, I noticed something unusual underwater. When I picked it up and studied it for a while, I realized it was a beaver skull.

This particular river had plenty of muskrats, but I’d never noticed beavers. Although, I’d seen plenty of trees they demolished.

A snake in the mountains

In the above video you’ll see a snake I encountered while at high altitude in the mountains doing some fly fishing.

While it doesn’t look like a standard black-and-yellow garter snake, I do think it’s a western terrestrial garter snake (Thamnophis elegans). If not, it’s a striped whipsnake (Masticophis taeniatus).

Whatever it is, it had good size and was fun to find.

Small Creek Sturgeon, anyone?

If I hadn’t added the white arrow to the above photograph, you’d probably have wondered what you were even looking at.

Well, that white arrow is pointing at a 6-foot sturgeon that I discovered in a small creek.

And yes, I hooked into it. And yes, after a 15-minute fight it rocketed three-quarters of the way out of the water and threw my weighted streamer back at me in mid-air.

Then it went back to what it was doing as if nothing had happened. I left it alone after that.

Oh, and don’t bother asking where the creek is 🙂

Gopher Snake Swimming

Near the end of a particularly productive and memorable day of fly fishing for trout one fall day, I happened to notice motion near the shoreline.

I waded closer and realized it was a +/-36 inch snake swimming across the river. Clearly it was intentional on the snake’s part–is this a method some snakes use to travel distances? I’m skeptical, but what other explanation is there?

I believe it was a gopher snake (Pituophis catenifer).

A Spiderman insect

Here’s an insect I found on my vehicle door handle after a day of fly fishing a local river.

Never before or since have I seen an insect like it.

After some research, I believe it was a blue-winged wasp (Ageniella coronata). Super cool bug.

Caddisfly larvae

One day while I was wading through some shallow river water in search of some rises, I noticed several moving objects below the surface. They resembled those tiny hermit crabs you can find on some saltwater beaches.

These in fact were caddisfly larvae. What’s so interesting is that they build a protective “shell” using small pebbles. Pretty cool insects.

And, one day, they’ll emerge as caddis flies and fly away.

Huge (bird?) nest

From a distance, this appeared to me to be a bee hive. But as I got closer, I saw that it was actually a nest of some sort.

The tree it was in was growing right on the river’s edge.

If you know what built this, please send me an e-mail so I can update this page.