18 September 2011

The hook

Nothing spoils your day more than watching a wild creature dying a cruel and unnecessary death.

Such was the situation I encountered when I stopped at a city park in a small Wisconsin town last weekend.  I sat down on the grass next to a bubbling stream to eat a sandwich, then noticed a fluttering in the air above me.  There, hanging vertically below the branch of a tree above the stream was a cedar waxwing, intermittently fluttering its wings.

At first I thought the bird was trapped in a spiderweb, but a moment's study revealed a nearly-invisible line extending above the bird to the branch.  Apparently some fisherman had gotten a fly tangled in the tree and cut his/her line, leaving the lure (with its feathers) dangling above the water.

I was unable to reach the bird, having nothing longer with me than my trekking poles.  I stopped two passersby, but none of us could bend or climb the tree.  The hook appeared to be embedded in the bird's beak, and the bird would occasionally place a foot on it and try to pull himself up, but seemed unable to get a grip on the small lure.

I was just a half-hour from my house, so I returned home to get the longest tool available (here in the midwest, that item is a roof rake).  My wife came with me on the return trip and brought a wire cutter and a needle-nosed pliers.

By the time we got back, the bird was gone, and only the hook remained.  I hope this means the cedar waxwing was able to leverage himself off of the barb and fly away; we didn't find any evidence of a carcass in the underbrush, though he might have fallen into the water and washed downstream. 

A cautionary tale for anglers.  Perhaps some birders have seen similar situations, but it was a new one for me.

8 comments:

  1. I was a teenager fly fishing in the Big Horn Mountains in WY and a bird swallowed the fly in mid-air. It did not go well for the bird and really put a damper on my fishing trip (yes I know that I was hoping it would be a fish that swallowed the fly)....

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  2. Horrible experience. I think we can assume the bird lived!

    The bird wouldn't have just slipped off the hook AFTER it died.

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  3. No, it wouldn't have slipped off the hook after death, but it might have been too weak to fly and might have fallen in the creek. Or I suppose a raptor might have spotted it...

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  4. Did you manage to get the hook cleared away?

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  5. I flyfish, and regret to say that I have left more than a few flies high up in trees (and on underwater snags and in the brush behind me). The only consolation I have is that I routinely squeeze the barb down on the hooks, so that fish (and, I guess, birds) can be released more easily.

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  6. This reminds me of a terrible/weird experience I had. I was fishing once and accidentally threw my line over a willow branch extending over the water. As I jerked to free my lure, which I did, I accidentally dumped a baby chick out of the nest and into the water. It managed to stay afloat, and was sort of bird paddling (dog paddling?) in place. I quickly shed my shoes to go and save the chick, when suddenly "Sploosh!!", a big fish ate it.

    I spent the rest of the evening trying to catch that fish because...well, it was HUGE!

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  7. As a ranger in Yellowstone, I can tell you that more that once I encountered floating dead ducks wrapped in discarded fishing line.

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  8. Skipweasel, it came off with one swipe of the roof rake.

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