Fish Tales

When someone asks why I release nearly every fish I catch, I have a friend who says “Tim likes to play with his food.” I didn’t always do it this way. Much like Howell Raines, I was schooled in the Redneck Way. Sure, fishing was fun, but a bucket full Read more…

In 1983 John Syrgemaki shot a 400 pound black bear while hunting near his home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Still wearing a blaze-orange vest with the words DON’T SHOOT, I AM A MAN stamped across his back, John described his kill to a reporter from the region’s lone television station. “I Read more…

Michael Delp The Mad Angler Poems Deep Wood Press   You pray for a second coming, the sky to open for people to be carried off, raptured. I pray each morning for whole counties to vanish, the boardrooms of big water and big oil to warp out of existence, cities Read more…

But it required a few years before I perceived what a science teacher’s job really is. The goal should be, not to implant in the student’s mind every fact that the teacher knows now; but rather to implant a way of thinking that will enable the student, in the future, to Read more…

In the sprawling territory between Princeton and Cornell, a storied river cuts and bends its way through land that is as wild today as it was when John Voelker called it “a forgotten region which was virtually ignored in the westward surge of population.” The river is home to the Read more…

A strong emergence of drakes for three straight days. Then, finally, a warm evening. Love was in the air. (click on the photo to enlarge)

I’ve read that a little brown bat eats as many as 1000 mosquitoes in an hour and a dragonfly eats hundreds per day. Some bird-house manufacturers have claimed that Purple Martins eat thousands per day, but that turns out to be a not-so-subtle deception intended to hoodwink desperate consumers into Read more…