Take It Outside’s widely-regarded Wisconsin Field Editor Don Bluhm bagged this well camouflaged gobbler with an even-better camouflaged 1100 Remington, hiding there to the right.

By KW

Donnie Boy Bluhm
come blow your call
The Tom’s in the meadow
he’s likely to fall

But where is the gunner
who makes turkeys weep?
He’s back in the hunting blind
fast asleep.

Actually, Donnie Boy - who will spend a week in South Dakota in late June chasing the wily trout with the W&W team (Woster and Wintersteen) didn’t sleep through the turkey hunt. In fact, he bagged a beauty, 17 pounds, 11 ounces, early April 22 over in the Red Wing area.

His hunting partners shot a couple even bigger.

And while he might have dozed off momentarily in that comfortable-looking blind, Bluhm was wide awake when the moment came.

Snuff.

A gobbler in the bag.

The turkey-death hut looks innocent enough, unless you’re a gobbler strutting your stuff nearby.

From the inside out, a look at that world, and a turkey, too, through the blind’s eye.

Bluhm’s hunting partner, Dean Schweisberger, had to stand in for camera shy Donnie Boy.

OK, so they aren’t as scary as I thought.

By KW

All right, you guys win.

Deer.

Still, they were kind of spooky for a while, at least to me.

But I spook easy.

Especially in the dark.

Our main Junior Duck Stamp contest man Eric Davis - who also knows a bit about motion cameras, and nighttime eyes - put the PhotoShop to my spook show and turned it into grainy reality.

Thanks a lot, pal. For that, you owe me another lion video….

What the heck are they, anyway? Or who?

By KW

OK, so you’re out goofin’ around in the dark.

In the Black Hills.

Somewhere down by the Black Hills Playhouse.

Then you see two eyes, glowing in the dark.

Then two more.

Then, uh, one more.

Hmmm.

A five-eyed creeping night stalker?

Two lions, and a one-eyed owl?

Or….?

Brenda Prachell holds the maybe-mightbe-couldbe 18-pound walleye that a paddlefish research crew, including Prachell, caught in a net in the Fort Randall Dam tailwaters earlier this month.

By Kevin Woster

It’s a toad.

But is it a state-record?

The big walleye taken during a paddlefish-netting operation below Fort Randall Dam has biologist talking, and guessing, and wondering. If the scale used by the research crew is correct, the fish weighs about 18 pounds.

Actually, “weighed” would be more appropriate, since the once-egg-bloated female, which was released, has certainly spawned by now and lost (How much would it lose in the spawn? Hanten? Riis? Lott? Sorenson? Stone? Anybody?) some weight.

But when Brenda Prachell, a graduate research fellow at the University of Nebraska, got her hands on the big walleye, it was a record shattering (if somebody had hooked and landed it) 18 pounds, she said.

It was “round as a football,” to quote an e-mail by Prachell, who added: “Although this picture doesn’t do the girth of the fish justice.”

It looks pretty girthy, however. The length of the fish, at about 29 inches, wasn’t so impressive. And they didn’t measure its girth. But the fish weighed in at 8,200 grams, or about 18 pounds.

Which would put it well above the current state record of 16-pounds, 2 ounces.

Georgine Chytka caught that marble-eyed hawg in the fall of 2002, by the way. I remember writing about it enviously for the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls.

Oh, and she caught the record walleye in the Fort Randall Dam tailwaters.

They obviously grow some big ones down there, in case you’re thinking about a state-record hunt.

With snow moving into on Saturday, 10-year-old Alex Stevenson and Frank English reel in the last rod.

By KW

Frank English isn’t playing good samaritan when he loads up the pickup with rods and reels and heads for the nearest fishing hole with his little buddy Alex.

He’s simply giving back what was given to him, many years before.

“You gotta do it,” English said Saturday at the little pond along the Deerfield Road west of Hill City. “Somebody did if for us, didn’t they? And we gotta do it for them. It’s important they have that.”

Not that taking the 10-year-old neighbor kid out fishing is tough duty. Alex has a knack for the angling game. He showed it Saturday by taking his five-trout limit fishing canned corn on the bottom, while Frank was still two trout short when they decided to pack up their stuff and head back to Rapid City.

“He pays attention. He listens,” Frank said. “And it ain’t so much like I take him out. He comes and takes me out.”

Frank grinned at that. So did I.

However it starts, the combination of a man, a boy and a fishing hole is good for all concerned.

Frank knows that. And Alex is learning it fast.

I’m guessing he won’t forget, either, when it comes time for him to give back what he was given.

Alex Stevenson packs out the trout Saturday.

Alex shows off two of the rainbows he suckered with some canned corn and patience.

This cool old Colt .45 pocket pistol has been spruced up with some gold inlay by a South Dakota craftsman who prefers to remain anonymous.

By KW

If you’ve been thinking about buying our buddy rdennis a birthday present (and who hasn’t?), how about considering that little Colt up the street at First Stop Guns?

I think it woud fit perfectly in a rancher’s pocket, or maybe in the brim of his hat, and come in mighty handy if a fella had to dispatch a aggravating ground squirrel or a rattlesnake or maybe an overly aggressive June bug.

Shoot, I’m just joshin’. I’m sure that little .25 has more punch than its diminutive size might suggest. And the tiny “pop” alone might spook those pesky herons that come stabbing around in rd’s trout pond.

Just don’t shoot to kill, rd. Herons, they be protected.

A little close-up of that gold inlay shows the guy - whoever he is - has got some touch.

Hatchery technician Patrick Nero unloads some brown trout from McNenny in Rapid Creek in town.

By KW

Call it a booster shot, of brown trout.

Our main McNenny man Keith Wintersteen was in town the other day with hatchery tech Patrick Nero, and a bunch of brown trout. THey joined stream biologist Jerry Wilhite in stocking about 500 McNenny brown trout in Rapid Creek between Canyon Lake and the civic center.

The fish ranged from 11 inches to 13 inches, for now. But they’re fixing to put on the feed bag in the creek, and rock the world of fly fishers, uh, like me.

Rapid Creek in town maintains a decent population of wild browns. But GF&P is looking for ways to improve it. They’ll follow that brown-trout stocking with a few hundred rainbows, and see which ones to best.

“Typically we don’t stock rainbows in town. But this is a wilder strain,” Wilhite says. “We’re trying to see if the rainbows do better than the browns.”

THe rainbows comes from Nebraska, where fish and people easily go wild. I tease. But these Nebraska ‘bow are of a slightly different personality than your average hatchery rainbows.

“There’s a little diffferent genetics there. When you walk up to a tank of these fish in the hatchery, they run,” Wilhite said, meaning they swim away fast, of course. “It’s those kinds of traits that might help them in the wild.”

Some hatchery rainbows grow quickly and resist disease, but exhibit some traits that might not help them in the wild - like gathering to be fed when somone approaches the tank.

In the wild, that tendency can cost a fish, plenty.

“If they start thinking every shadow means food, the next shadow on the creek could be a heron,” Wilhite said.

Then the fish will be food, rather than fed.

GF&P will watch the rainbows and see how well they reproduce and grow, and compare them against the browns.

“We’d like to manage a wild fishery there,” Wilhite says. “We’ll see which ones do better.”

Rapid City angler Paul Stabile shows that his genius goes beyond Italian cooking and storytelling. He can also catch fish, including this 17 1/2-inch Missouri River white. (If you want to learn how to make fish pictures, by the way, take a visual lesson from Caster Don right here. Close, composed, well lit, with the rod and reel and lure all included, yet a nice viewing of the beautiful background. Perfect. You still da man, CD.)

By KW

This just in from Caster Don: 52 degrees.

That’s what the water temperature was in the Missouri River backwater at Griffin Park in Pierre, when he and Paul Stabile were catching the white bass.

When the water temp tops 50, and heads up for 55 and 60, the white bass in the Big Mo turn on. It’s coming into spawning time, after all, and the Great Whites, as my old buddy Steve Nelson calls them, are one species of fish that feeds throughout the spawn.

They feed hard, too. And when they’re not feeding, they’re smacking passing critters, and fake critters, with a vengence. All of which can mean the white-bass catching is easy, if you can find them.

Polovich and Stabile found and caught about 25 the other day on fly rods, fishing streamers. A number of the whites were up in that 17-inch range. I’m guessing that’s about 2 1/2 pounds, maybe a bit more? Which is a nice white.

It’s not as nice as the 4-pound, 10-ounce state-record white that Coy Nelson hauled out of Blue Dog Lake back in May of 2006, or the world-record white, a 6-pound, 13-ounce brute - by white-bass standards - taken in Virginia.

But it’s still pretty nice, so here’s some advice:

If you like catching fish with fight, you’ll find that whites are just right.

They eat pretty good, like a fine fish should.

If you want them to taste like walleyes, remove the lateral line, always.

But if your tastes run on fishy side, leave the line so the flavors collide.

OK, I gotta go. I’m running out of bad, randomly arranged rhymes.

But check out the white below…

And speaking of nice whites, how about this 3-pound, 8-ounce beauty taken recently in Lake Poinsett near Brookings by Dan James, a graduate student in wildlife and fisheries at SDSU. Wow! It looks like an angel fish on steroids. (Nice picture on top of it, by Cari-Ann Hayer, who Dan claims was nearly as excited by the catch as he was.) The fish was 18 3/4 inches long. . Dan caught the little white hawg on a streamer designed by the late Al Campbell of Rapid City. It’s nice to know that Al’s flies are still catching fish.

On a mid-April day when spring is finally believable, Spring Creek is positively full of itself, and some rainbow trout, too.

By KW

Gaylord Nelson would have loved that spot along Spring Creek, the one on the road to Sheridan Lake.

Especially today. His day.

The Clear Lake, Wis., native, who served as state senator, governor and U.S. senator from his home state, is given the most credit for founding Earth Day back on April 22, 1970.

Skeptics believed it would disappear, along with the commitment to environmental protection that inspired it. Far from it. The day has endured with its initial message intact, 39 years beyond its founding and four years past the death of its founder.

In principle, few would disagree with the environmnental theme of Earth Day. Yet the details always seem to get devilish. Environmental protection to one may be costly government intrusion or denial of private-property rights to another.

But surely we all have an outdoor place or two that we cherish and understand - a place, as Langston Hughes would say, where the soul can grow deep like the river.

There may be trout there, or largemouth bass, or the sweet-tasting walleye and its marble eyes.

Or maybe we go there not to cast or catch, but simply to fish for something deep within ourselves.

This is the perfect day for that. And given the forecast, it should be a pleasant one as well.

Use it wisely.

Which means, go out there.

Happy Earth Day.

Airmen Jerrad Gillham and Mickobe Lee took advantage of the new fishing dock on Sheridan Lake along Highway 385 on Monday to make the most of a windy spring day.

By KW

Ellsworth Air Base was represented well Monday at Sheridan Lake.

Airmen Jerrad Gillham and Mickobe Lee were enjoying one of the new fishing docks near the parking lot along Highway 385. It wasn’t a perfect spring day - windy, sometimes pretty chilly - and the fishing wasn’t hot.

But the new dock was comfortable: “It’s nice,” Gillham said. “It gets you off the rocks.”

It got them off the rocks and into some action.

They had a stout-bodied 12-inch rainbow when I stopped to chat. And they were hoping for more.

Don’t we always?

(P.S. Thanks, guys, for your service to our nation. You deserve a limit for that.)

Airman Jerrad Gillham shows of the rainbow caught by fellow Airman Mickobe Lee, who’d rather fish than pose.