Follow de birds, mon

Bahamian bonefish ordeal reinforces the old notion that the best fishing guides are feathered. From the Spring 2010 issue of Coast&Kayak Magazine. Read the entire magazine online.

by Dan Armitage

I was paying big bucks for a day with a fishing guide, and had flown better than a thousand miles to get to this corner of the Bahamas, a place where bonefish are said to be thick as doctor flies. The flies had painfully punctured my skin as we poled silently along edges of mangroves in search of the elusive “grey ghost.”

I broke the gentle melody of the lapping of the water on the hull of my kayak with a curse and a slap as yet another deerfly-sized bug chomped through Supplex to get at my blood. I waded alongside the fishing guide, trying to beat the Bahamian’s eagle eyes to spot the first fish.

Half a morning later, when neither had yet to see a bonefish, the guide tethered the kayak to the skiff and announced that we were moving.

Poling the boat some 200 yards up the fringe of mangroves to a spot that looked no different from the thousand or so yards we had already covered, we staked the skiff. Under the watchful eye of an osprey perched in one of the low-growing trees, we stepped out of the boat into knee-deep water and began to slowly wade the sandy flat. Less than a minute passed before the guide whispered that fish were approaching from straight ahead at 40 yards. Casting blindly to where he directed, my bead-eyed fly sank to what I thought was bottom. Then he said “strip fast!” and what I thought was the bottom took off toward Africa, throwing a rooster tail of water as it charged across the ankle-deep grass flat.

We hooked several fish and landed two before the action subsided.

When we stopped for lunch, I asked my guide how he knew to move, and to where, since everything above and below the water appeared to be identical to the fishless areas we had cruised all morning.

“’Was de bird, mon,” he replied. “Dat de diff’rence.”

The guide explained that he had used the osprey to show him where the fish were. He told me that flats guides have learned that ospreys hang out in the vicinity of fish activity, including bonefish, and provide valuable beacons for fishermen. I have to admit, learning that the guide was using birds to show us where to fish took some of the mystery out of the classic hunt, but it wasn’t the first time I had heard of birds being used to locate prime angling areas.

The Bahamian bonefish experience was just another example of ways I have witnessed over the years of our feather friends assisting fishermen. On a magazine assignment in the Florida Keys last April, I was paddle-trolling between the mainland and reef in an area known as Hawk Channel hoping to hook into a mackerel. I wasn’t having any luck until I spotted a frigate bird circling high overhead. By the time I got to the frigate it had been joined by gulls and terns that began diving into a patch of water. Kicked to a froth by panicky baitfish being attacked by birds from above and gamefish from below, by trolling my lure through the watery mass I hooked – and lost – a nice kingfish, my first from a kayak.

“Following the birds” is a popular practice among saltwater anglers everywhere, and it’s a tactic I’ve used fishing in freshwater, where gulls are often seen diving into the water. Casting or trolling lures the size of the local baitfish into the area under the birds, we usually catch white bass, but sometimes crappies, largemouth or smallmouth bass as well.

The most recent example I’ve run across of birds helping fishermen came from a catfish guide I hosted on my weekly outdoor radio show “Buckeye Sportsman with Dan Armitage”

(www.buckeyesportsman.net). When my guest mentioned fishing “the plops” I stopped him and asked him to elaborate.

“Y’all ever see cormorants roosting in trees by the water?” he asked with a thick Texas drawl. “Well, they eat shad and other fish and what their bodies don’t use they (‘excrete’) when they are sitting up in the trees. Wherever it lands in the water it acts like chum, attracting bait and fish, and the catfish can be thick under those roosting trees feeding on all that stuff. We bait up with shad guts and cast to water under anywhere we see cormorants roosting – and usually hook into cats!”

So why do they call if fishing the plops?

“Cuz that’s the sound the (‘excrement’) makes when it hits the water. You want to try to copy the sound with your bait size so it goes ‘plop’ when it hits the water.’”

It was a noteworthy radio show, and not my last, thanks to my producer’s fast action with the “bleep” button keeping me one step ahead of the FCC.

Dan Armitage is a boating, fishing and travel writer based in the Midwest.

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