No mistaking odor of bat guano

MALTA -- Ahhh, the smell of spring.
I was in the garage last week gathering my fishing gear for a trip to the reservoir east of town, visions of a walleye dinner coursing through my mind, when I got the first whiff.
Whew.
There’s no mistaking the unique odor of bat guano.
I put the spinning rod back on the rack and picked up a hammer. The walleye would have to wait. In a few weeks the bats will be back and I still had holes to plug.
After awakening from a long slumber inside caves in the Little Rocky Mountains south of here, the northernmost colony of migrating little brown bats will return to town.
And more than a few of them will be headed directly to my place where odor of their past inhabitance is unmistakable.
I suspect my wife, Barb, and I got such a good deal on the house we bought here a couple of years ago because of the number of dead bats that littered the inside.
Vacant for a number of years before we moved in, our two-story stone house built in 1915 had enough holes in it to make it a very popular summer destination for members of the colony.
Following months of renovation, the house is now relatively bat-proof, but the garage is not. Sitting on the deck at night last summer, I watched as bats, squeaking eerily, came and went through a hole under the eaves.
Not wanting to trap them to die inside the attic, I decided to wait until they left town before covering all the cracks and holes in the garage with trim.
Then came hunting season when all work is put on hold.
Then came winter when it was too cold to work outside.
And then I forgot about them until spring when I was greeted by the odor of guano and forced to cancel my fishing trip.
Fortunately this isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve lived with wild animal issues before. In Kentucky a family of skunks took residence in the crawl space under my house. In Cooke City black bears raided the beer fridge on the porch of my cabin.
I’m hoping a lack of access to the dark recesses of my garage will persuade the bats to roost elsewhere.
If not, well, I may just have to adjust.
An elderly couple, who used to live down the street, wielded tennis racquets at night while watching television to fend off any bats that dared disrupt their favorite shows.
Come to think of it, my backhand could use some work.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

FOR PUBLICATION ON OR AFTER MAY 13

By Parker Heinlein
Outdoors columnist
MALTA -- Ahhh, the smell of spring.
I was in the garage last week gathering my fishing gear for a trip to the reservoir east of town, visions of a walleye dinner coursing through my mind, when I got the first whiff.
Whew.
There’s no mistaking the unique odor of bat guano.
I put the spinning rod back on the rack and picked up a hammer. The walleye would have to wait. In a few weeks the bats will be back and I still had holes to plug.
After awakening from a long slumber inside caves in the Little Rocky Mountains south of here, the northernmost colony of migrating little brown bats will return to town.
And more than a few of them will be headed directly to my place where odor of their past inhabitance is unmistakable.
I suspect my wife, Barb, and I got such a good deal on the house we bought here a couple of years ago because of the number of dead bats that littered the inside.
Vacant for a number of years before we moved in, our two-story stone house built in 1915 had enough holes in it to make it a very popular summer destination for members of the colony.
Following months of renovation, the house is now relatively bat-proof, but the garage is not. Sitting on the deck at night last summer, I watched as bats, squeaking eerily, came and went through a hole under the eaves.
Not wanting to trap them to die inside the attic, I decided to wait until they left town before covering all the cracks and holes in the garage with trim.
Then came hunting season when all work is put on hold.
Then came winter when it was too cold to work outside.
And then I forgot about them until spring when I was greeted by the odor of guano and forced to cancel my fishing trip.
Fortunately this isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve lived with wild animal issues before. In Kentucky a family of skunks took residence in the crawl space under my house. In Cooke City black bears raided the beer fridge on the porch of my cabin.
I’m hoping a lack of access to the dark recesses of my garage will persuade the bats to roost elsewhere.
If not, well, I may just have to adjust.
An elderly couple, who used to live down the street, wielded tennis racquets at night while watching television to fend off any bats that dared disrupt their favorite shows.
Come to think of it, my backhand could use some work.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

Socorro, por favor

My cousin, who lives on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, fears one day he’ll answer a knock on the door and find Jim Cantore standing there.

Although he’s already weathered more than a couple of hurricanes in his beach house, my cousin knows the presence of Cantore, the Weather Channel’s harbinger of really bad weather, would mean he’s in for the big one.

I, on the other hand, fear the day Cesar Millan, knocks on my door. The “Dog Whisperer” from the National Geographic Channel is apparently summoned only in times of dire canine distress. And having lived with dogs my whole life, I’m a bit too proud to make the call myself. So the summons for help would have come from elsewhere.

Perhaps, I fear, from my dogs.

Because, after all, according to Millan, a native of Culiacan, Mexico, the majority of dog problems are actually people problems.

“That’s what I’ve always said,” my springer bitch Spot recently told me.
“It’s you, not us.”

“Exactly,” her studly little brother Jem agreed. “It’s your boyfriend, girlfriend.”

“Get a clue,” Spot growled at me. “You praise us when we’re bad and discipline us when we’re good.”

“And when are you good?” I snapped.

“I’m calling the Dog Whisperer,” Jem told her as he lifted his leg on the couch.

“Oh, yeah?” I said as I reached for the phone. “I’m going to call that woman in Bozeman who makes jewelry out of baculums.”

“Huh,” he asked as he sniffed himself. “What’s that?”

“It’s a bone found in the sex organ of most male animals,” I told him. “You’ve got one. For now anyway.”

Babs Noelle makes necklaces and earrings out of gold, silver and platinum casts of the bones. She won’t say where she gets them, but she keeps the bones in tiny white boxes in the back of her shop.

Noelle’s creations sell for up to $3,000.

“I think it’s about time I started wearing some bling,” I told the dogs.

Jem stared at the floor. Spot closed her eyes and went to sleep.

Then the telephone rang.

“Maybe it’s Jim Cantore,” I told the dogs as they followed me into the other room. “I read where the Weather Channel is offering a service where Cantore will call you when a storm is coming.”

“There’s not a cloud in the sky,” Spot said. “Maybe it’s Cesar Millan. He must have heard about your necklace.”

Jem raced to the phone.

“Socorro! (HELP!),” he whispered as he picked it up. “Socorro, por favor. (PLEEEZE)”

Caddis, a window of angling opportunity

There’s a window of angling opportunity on the Yellowstone River I hope to slip through this spring, a time of exceptional fishing that’s here and gone so quickly it often goes unnoticed.
Catch it right and you’ll mark it on your calendar as the very best time to fish the river. Miss it by a day and you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about. The window can slam shut overnight.
The Mother’s Day caddisfly hatch on the Yellowstone doesn’t always occur on Mother’s Day. Some years it’s already over by then. Not that the bugs are gone, but the opportunity to take advantage of the trout feeding on them has disappeared in the rising brown torrent of spring runoff.
The river won’t be fishable again until summer.
But catch it right …
After launching your boat in the morning somewhere above Livingston, you begin to notice a few bugs in the willows along the bank. Then the day warms and clouds of caddis begin to fill the air. Rafts of dead bugs swirl in the eddies and pepper the scum lines. Trout feast eagerly on the first big bug hatch of the year.
You can actually hear them feeding.
Drift an elk-hair imitation along a current seam and watch it vanish in a splash, rod bowing to a fighting fish, line cutting through the glassy surface of the river.
Rainbows, browns and cutthroats, along with mountain whitefish, all feed with equal abandon.
Sink a caddis emerger next to a cut bank, see the line go taught, raise the tip of the rod and a rainbow comes flying out of the river. Or maybe it’s a brown or a cutt that goes racing downstream. Again and again.
Caddis flies get down the collar of your shirt, on your glasses, in your mouth. But you don’t care. You’re too busy catching fish.
The hardest part of it all is keeping track of your fly among the swarms of real bugs on the water.
You go to sleep that night with visions of rising fish in your head and dream of doing it all over again tomorrow.
But when you get back to the river the next morning the window has shut. The off-color water of yesterday has turned an opaque brown and while caddisflies still fill the air, there are no fish rising to feed on them.
At least you had yesterday.
That’s why I keep my options open the last week of April and the first week of May, hoping for a chance to slip through that window of angling opportunity.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

Report card blues

Among the indignities I no longer suffer now that I’ve left the city for the hinterland are performance evaluations.

Unfortunately, however, after years of being summoned to the boss’s office for an annual sit-down Without a one-to-10 scoring system how am I to know how I’m doing. Have I met my goals for the year? Have I shown initiative?

Do I get along with my co-workers?

Oh, yeah. I no longer have any co-workers.

Unless you count my wife, and let’s not go there.

I’d rather be judged by my dogs, who, if given the chance, would jump at an opportunity to evaluate me.

Or so I thought.

But after broaching the subject with Spot, my 3-year-old springer bitch, I was told the process was flawed.

I should evaluate her, not the other way around, she said. Even under the cover of anonymity, an underling’s written opinion of her boss is seldom honest, Spot told me. The paper trail, you know?

I agreed, but after tossing her a biscuit and hinting that there might be more where that one came from, she said she’d give it a shot anyway.

Her brother Jem quit licking himself and agreed to participate too, if biscuits were involved.

Did I meet or exceed my goals for the year, I asked them.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Spot said. “You didn’t even come close. You shot more birds when you had a fulltime job.”

“That’s certainly an area in which we’d like to see some improvement,” Jem told me as I squirmed uncomfortably in my chair.

How about my willingness to take on new tasks, I asked?

“Like what?” Spot queried.

“Like retrieving that goose you and Jem wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole,” I shot back.

“That’s another thing we’d like to talk to you about,” Jem said. “Your quick temper. Maybe you should consider counseling.”

Maybe you should consider neutering, I thought, but only smiled wanly at the pup and nodded my head in agreement.

Let’s move on to initiative in learning to operate new equipment, I said.

“You sure you want to go there? Spot asked.

“Why? Is there a problem? I said, making a point of controlling my voice.

Both dogs looked away in disgust and I could feel my face turning red.

“One word,” Spot said. “GPS.”

“That’s three words,” I told her.

She ignored the sarcasm.

“It’s still in the box,” Jem chirped. “You don’t have a clue how to use it.”

“Just like the iPod,” Spot said. “And you just recently learned how to use your cell phone.”

A bead of sweat trickled down my ribs as I offered the dogs my thanks for their honest evaluation and promised to try harder next year.

Spot closed her eyes and went back to sleep on the couch and I could tell without looking that Jem was licking himself again.

I rose and left the room. Suddenly I wasn’t missing those performance evaluations so much after all.

A new year and our first grandson

You don’t always get what you want, but like the old Rolling Stones song, sometimes you get what you need.
The phone rang shortly after I got back to the house on the final day of pheasant season.
Audrey’s water had broken and she was on the way to the hospital.
Barb and I gave it little thought before loading the dogs back in the truck and starting the 300-mile trip to Bozeman.
The birth of our third grandchild, following so closely on the death of my father, wasn’t an event we were going to miss.
I had expected to spend the rest of the afternoon watching bowl games on TV. It was New Year’s Day, and I’d spent the morning on the refuge with the dogs. The birds were few and scattered, but after a couple of hours Spot finally flushed a rooster and I dropped it in the cattails.
One was enough on this last day of what had been a very long -- and at times trying -- season.
My dog Scout was killed by a rattlesnake in September. A few weeks later Spot ripped her belly open on a barbed-wire gate. Our house in Bozeman hadn’t sold nearly as quickly as we had expected, putting a crimp in our move to Malta and then a week before Christmas, Dad died.
But Jem, the puppy we bought in Belgrade last fall, was fast turning into a real bird dog. Spot, no longer in Scout’s shadow, had matured and become a pleasure to hunt with.
And best of all, my daughter Audrey was expecting again.
We finally sold the house in early December, trucked the last of our belongings north, and settled in to begin a new chapter of our lives.
Then the phone rang and we were on the road again.
We watched the sun set behind the Little Rockies to end the first day of 2007 as we headed to the hospital in Bozeman, the rest of our trip across the middle of Montana lit by brilliant moon.
While I was glad to see the passing of 2006, it was a year I’ll always remember. After all, it was the year I quit my job, moved north, lost a very good dog and became an orphan.
This year, however, is already one to remember. Our first grandson, Isaac William Winfrey, arrived in the wee hours of January 2, bringing with him – just like a new year or a new season -- hope and promise.
I thank him for that.
It was just what I needed.
Happy New Year.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

Why protect rivers when we have bottled water?

Conspiracy theorists take note.
I recently heard a radio talk show host advising holiday shoppers to stay hydrated.
More needless advice dispensed by another celebrity know-it-all, was my first thought.
Then I recalled the television commercials for a pill that promises men the ability to take longer drives with fewer pit stops all the while throwing back bottled water like guys used to drink beer.
As if the growing oil crisis isn’t scary enough, now I hear a shortage of clean water looms on the horizon.
Well, no kidding.
We’re told to drink more water all the time and warned to take it with us everywhere we go. Sales of hydration systems – Camel-Baks and the like – are booming.
Admittedly, I’ve joined the trend. I carry water with me while hunting and always keep a bottle or two in the truck and boat.
I never used to. There was a time when I took great pride in my ability to go without.
And I never carried water in the backcountry. Giardia be damned. I’ve quenched my thirst from tea-colored pools while horn hunting in the spring, drank from the Yellowstone River in the summer and sucked water from holes through the ice on late fall hunts.
Not anymore. Now I drink spring water from somewhere else out of a petroleum-based plastic bottle. I’m beginning to suspect the same folks who brought us $3-a-gallon gasoline are behind this water shortage.
Until recently we would have balked at buying water by the bottle. It flowed from the tap relatively cheaply.
Now we hear tap water’s not good to drink.
Bottled water is a hot commodity in the little northern Montana prairie town where I live now, but I suspect it’s even more popular in trendy Bozeman where gin-clear mountain streams feed into the city’s water supply.
Apparently though, no one there really cares if that water remains clean enough to drink since nearly everybody in Bozeman is quenching their thirst out of a bottle. An effort under way to make the Gallatin River the best-protected waterway in Montana outside a national park or wilderness area keeps meeting with more opposition than support. Wealthy landowners, developers and realtors are fighting the effort to protect the Gallatin.
From my point of view, seated comfortably on the grassy knoll, I suspect more than a few of those folks just might own stock in Exxon-Mobile.
In the meantime I’m making a switch to water flavored with hops and barley. I hear it even comes in a can.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net