Bigfoot

I try to make it to one of the PA Game Commission "bear check" stations each year. The public is allowed to watch the biologists weigh, determine if it's male or female , pull a tooth for aging as well as any other data they might be collecting on the harvested bears. Check in is mandatory for all successful hunters and most of the resulting data is recorded on a whiteboard for public viewing. I've seen bears as small as 26lbs. and as large as 642lbs. (dressed) weighed in. Average adult female would be 100-150lbs and average adult male 200-300lbs. However, they have recorded bears with live weights exceeding 800lbs. The assembled crowd tries to guess the weigh of each bear (myself included). Most people aren't even close when guessing the bears weight. I've been visiting the stations for years and not any good at guessing either!

Cayuga debris Pic taken this afternoon near SW corner of Cayuga.

Time for a reality check. Walleyes are expensive to raise for stocking. Like double the cost of trout. NYS struggles to produce enough walleye for the waters it wants to stock, so some waters are only stocked every other year instead of annually. I don't see walleye stocking expanding to the central Finger Lakes at the expense of fisheries more suited to walleye. We think of sawbellies as baitfish, and they are. We don't tend to think of them as predators, but we should. They vacuum up newly hatched fry of both lake trout and walleye in huge numbers. I have one source (Saunders) that blames the destruction of the native walleye population in Owasco on the introduction the sawbelly (Alewife). Some think that the current problem on Seneca s related to the abundant sawbelly population. DEC had cut laker stocking due to the number of wild lakers present, however that natural recruitment doesn't appear to be happening. Sawbellies will eat lake trout fry during the first two months of life. Given Seneca's huge Alewife population, it's a wonder any wild lakers survive. Less stocking and less reproduction, (plus a large, hungry lamprey population) equals lousy fishing. I have read that walleyes can live for 20 years. No wonder that they are still present in Owasco. Give the sawbellies time, history will repeat itself, and the walleye will be nothing but a memory.

Standings are at http://laketroutderby.org/current-standings Some pictures can be found on the national lake trout derbies' Facebook page.

Apparently the Keuka alewife population crashed around 1967. DEC seined about 70,000 alewives out of Seneca and Waneta Lakes to reestablish the population. My source is DEC management of Keuka Lake through 2004. Several people have mentioned the flood as a partial cause of the lakes decline. I would think that the opposite would be true. Keuka is an infertile lake. Floods wash nutrients into the lake, making the lake more productive. Last Summers drought should have exacerbated the mussels effect on the already stressed food chain. Just my opinion.

I can't add much to your well written reply. You mentioned getting lures away from the boat. Keuka is one of the clearest lakes and I have spooked fish that were 70 foot down by merely trolling over them. Small lures on light line fished way back sometimes works when little else will. Besides catching browns in the South end, I have seen times when they were present in large numbers in the extreme North end of the Branchport arm.

Diary reports don't mirror the actual state of the landlocks in Keuka lake. Finger lakes trollers fished there in May and 6 legal landlocks were brought to the scale. They fished there again in September and 2 more were weighed in. Most of those guys only fish that lake a couple of times a year and don't keep diaries on Keuka. The fishing might be lousy, but not as bad as the diaries indicate.

I would never have guessed that numbers of bucks are shedding this early. I saw a buck today with his antlers intact and I found an active scrape that had been worked overnight!