New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

Sun spring and lots of outdoor time.

Sunday 03/12/2006

What a great week it was last week. I got out to do some more duck boxes in a remote location in Deerfield. It is about an hour snowshoe in most winters, but this one I was able to drive within a quarter mile. My life-long friend Rick Hamlett joined me for safety reasons as he had a couple days off last week from work.

There was almost no snow left in the woods by early March. Conditions were so different than most years I have checked the duck boxes on this 170 acre tract of woods owned by Fish and Game. There are two beaver pond on it and I have boxes at both ponds. The first one was an easy hike in and the ice was surprisingly thick. The arctic blast of the week before produced the best ice of the winter.

There were lots of deer tracks all over the place. The deer are fairing very well this winter. In fact I slanted up hill north of the upper beaver pond to take a quick look at the deer yard located there. No deer use this winter at all, other than the deer moving about. Hardly a heavy trail any where. There were signs that deer where scouring the ground under the oaks finding the few left over acorns. Many years I have snowshoed in to this yard with snow up to my waist under the hardwoods. Not so this year. We did take a quick break for lunch. I had a bag of hot dogs to roast as we enjoyed the warm sun under a cloudless sky with little wind. What a fantastic day we had.

Of coarse we managed to top the day of checking duck boxes and deer yards on Wednesday by a sun baked warm day fishing the Merrimack River on Friday. I was all set to spend the day working on my house with a remodeling job underway when Rick called to say he had the day off. For those of you who are not fishermen you would probably wonder how I could decide which to do. Work inside on the house which is all torn apart, or fish. For me there was not a decision, that was made by the phone ringing. Any ways the wind was calm and the temperature climbed to near 60 degrees by mid day. I'm talking early March here! Wow what a great day with lots of bass caught. Rick did toss out some worms too and landed a whole bunch of different fish from suckers, blue gills, pumpkin seeds, black crappie to a number of small bass. I stuck with the shiners and caught a half dozen bass, almost all small mouths running 2 to 4 pounds.

The ice has completely gone out of the Suncook River. All snow has melted and the ground is quickly loosing it's frost. We are well into the beginning of spring. I don't believe there is any turning back this time. Still no red wings here though.