Barbs and Backlashes

“Take Me Fishing” is running a promotional sweepstakes right now on the best family fishing spots in the country. Nebraska has four waters entered in the sweepstakes and I believe a person can vote on multiple days.  Sign up, vote for your favorite Nebraska waters, have a chance to win a fishing trip! Oh, and do not forget to gather the family and GO FISH!

I was a little late getting home for supper the other night.  Many times I can get a lot done in the office after 5:00 p.m.. after the phone stops ringing.  As I parked my pickup on the street and walked to the front door, I heard a great horned owl hooting.  Now I live in Lincoln, within the city limits, but there are a lot of trees and apparently a great horned owl was in listening distance.  I woke …

Unless you literally live under a rock, you have noticed that we have had a lot of wind lately.  That is an understatement.  I am not going to say “it has never been this windy before” or “I never remember it being this windy” because I believe such statements are usually wrong.  It seems like anything that happened more than 5 years ago is considered ancient history anymore and does not count.  We all know that the Great Plains in …

Our Fisheries Division here at the Nebraska Game & Parks Commission received some national recognition recently and I want to tell you about it.  Here is our news release: Game and Parks’ Fisheries staff was recognized by the Fisheries Administration Section (FAS) of the American Fisheries Society for incorporating fish and angler-friendly features into new reservoirs being constructed by Natural Resources Districts. The FAS annually selects the nation’s outstanding Sport Fish Restoration Program-funded projects in three categories: Management, Research, and …

One of my favorite sounds is the “booming” that ice sometimes makes.  I tried recording those sounds last winter: DSCN0001 I did not do a very good job, you can hear more of the sounds of my depth-finder and the crunching of my ice-creepers, two other favorite sounds by the way, but if you listen close, you can hear what sounds like doors being slammed and that was the sound of the ice that day. Recently I got a better …

Got a hardcore fishing, ice-fishing blog post for today.  Let me share some thoughts that have been rattling around inside my head while on the ice the past couple of seasons. If you want, there is some theme music to go with this post, click on it, start the music, read my post.  Multi-media! All baits and lures ever invented will catch fish when used in the right place at the right time.  The trick is working through all the …

I suspect that some of you have already heard about this fish, but just in case you have not. . . . First of all, you should know that the Omaha World Herald has a new outdoor webpage, gooutdoorsne.com .  We, the Nebraska Game & Parks Commission, have partnered with the World Herald on that page.  You will find a ton of outdoors, hunting and fishing, “stuff” there and if you have not checked it out yet, you need to.  Look …

It has come to my attention that various sites in the cybersphere are reporting that Nebraska has a law on the books prohibiting the capture of whales by fishing, Stupid Laws, Nebraska. Oh really? Try as I might, I cannot cite you “chapter and verse” where that law is in writing.  You know, “Chapter 66.4, page 32, column A, section C14, paragraph 12, line 7 of the Nebraska Legislative Code, 1867, states that no members of the Order Cetacea may …

I was going to blog about something else today.  But, once again life’s events intervened and I now have something else I need to put in writing.  I have mentioned some of the things I am about to say already in a couple of places in the cybersphere, but I want to put them here again, and add a little more. . . . The fisheries science world and a lot of others have suffered a great loss.  Dr. David …

Some of you hard-core anglers have probably already found it, but in case you have not, here is the 2014 Fishing Forecast! If you want to see it in a .pdf version, here that is, 2014 Fishing Forecast .pdf, 2014 Fishing Forecast. You may be familiar with the annual fishing forecast that we produce, but in case you are not, let me explain it a little bit, let me go behind the cover.  Every year we have fisheries biologists sample fish …