AdventuresInNature

Maybe the critics are right.

Maybe fishing has gone south on the North Fork of the Holston River in Virginia and Tennessee.

Let me put it this way. I’ve caught more fish in a bathtub while playing with my Rubber Duckie than I’ve been able to catch recently on the North Fork.

And this from what was one of the finest smallmouth rivers in two states just a few short years ago.

Locals blame river otters and cormorants.

From Hiltons through Wadlow Gap and Weber City, downriver past the Tennessee state line at Cloud’s Ford, residents have developed a hatred for otters and cormorants similar to that of the Devil for holy water.

Otters, once native to the area but trapped out a century ago, have been restocked in the river system by TVA and Virginia game department biologists. The 30-pound animals are cute as buttons and cavort as if trying out for a Disney movie. But they live on fish.

Cormorants are black, slender, goose-size birds that can dive and swim underwater like … well, like an otter. They aren’t native to Southwest Virginia and East Tennessee, but know a good thing when they find it. So they settle in and invite all their relatives.

These fish-gulpers are called “black geese” along the Chesapeake Bay, and are so good at chasing down and catching fish that the Japanese have been using the birds for centuries to fill fish baskets.

The method is simplicity itself: Tie a string to the cormorant’s leg. Send him diving after a fish. When he nails one, hand-line him in and take it away before he can eat it.

Personally, I prefer a fly rod or Shimano spinning reel in my hand over a large bird with a string on its leg. Yet such bold innovation may be the wave of the future. It’s suddenly difficult – at least in the past couple of years -- to catch smallmouth bass, channel catfish and sunfish using traditional methods in the North Fork.

Otters and cormorants. Cormorants and otters.

My brother Tosh (Glen, to his Eastman buddies) lives on the North Fork and has watched the annual decline in good fishing.

“If I have to make a choice between watching otters play and going fishing,” he grumbles, “I’ll take fishing every time.” Such, he believes, is closer to the natural order of things.

As we all know, younger brothers are seldom right about anything.

But this time, Tosh nailed it.

END