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TROUT FISHING WITH MAURICE RODWAY - Weekly Column: 24-March-00
 Southland, New Zealand

Winter's Advance Guard

Winter's advance guard has trampled on our hopes of a warm autumn. It has sent murky water down stream to defeat our aspirations of days on the river clad only in  short sleeved shirts, shorts and sand shoes. This week ice has rattled our windows and in the evening frost probed hollows in the hills.

Willow trees have started to gather the summer harvest from their leaves then let them loose to sail down river and eventually succumb to fungi and bacteria, returning their elements to the soil.

It will soon be the season of the mallard. Bursting from amongst stream hideaways. Green head, striped eye. A marvelous machine wary of everything, trusting nothing. It flees before we know it is there. Anglers who are hunters will feel an itch in their finger, remembering the opening morning in May when mallards have true reason to be afraid, but when they will return to their stream hideaways. Lured by eager calls and flotillas of seemingly placid kin.

Anglers who are not hunters will rue a mallard's hope of seclusion if that happens to be where late season trout would otherwise be calmly sipping exhausted mayflies in a normally quiet pool amongst gatherings of foam. A fright of ducks leaping from a pool quashes all hope of a tight line and a spotted skin in the pan.

Ducks do indeed play a part in anglers' success through the season. From the parries and their broods in the spring, to a mallard's broken wing display along a small rural stream, and finally to the autumn ducks which spoil a stalk along a yellowed willow bank, every season of the angler's year has a duck or two in it.

But miserable is the angler who despises mallards. They often do save a trout from the prick of a hook but they are part of the riverscape which is the produce of a thousand millennia.  Mallards and shoveler, fantails and stilts. Rare waders like the spectacled black fronted dotterel, or the graceful tern. Lithe swallows or cumbersome shags all have a place. Anglers once wished that all shags were dead, and could not tell the difference between a stilt and an oystercatcher.

Nowadays there are few who do not recognise that each is part of the system that we belong to. Each a rivet in the framework of life. We know that quite a few of these rivets have fallen out, but like a poorly maintained plane we still pilot it over the oceans. We hope that enough are left to hold it together, but we no not how many are required.

A foray into a stream in the autumn requires an extra jersey, and a flask of hot tea. It also rekindles hope that as the winter progresses, enough of the components of the river will survive to the spring to restore the trout, and the ducks to their hideaways again next year.

Maurice Rodway
Southland, New Zealand                           E-mail: information@southlandfishgame.co.nz

Article © 2000 Maurice Rodway, All Rights Reserved.

17-Mar-00

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