The Minnesota State Fair is underway. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has a fairly large display there, including a sizeable fish pond stocked with the state’s popular game species.

Now the kicker: the MDNR has a live webcam in the pond. Go here to check it out.

Beyond being an interesting way to kill a few minutes at the office computer, this webcam can serve a somewhat useful purpose. What are the various fish species up to at different times of day? Are there patterns to their activity that you can see by checking the web cam periodically from day to day? And does that tell you anything about fish behavior that could translate into more effective fish-finding the next time you go fishing?

Check it out, and who knows what you might learn.

From the report for the Little Miami River in SW Ohio:

“Water levels are down now and provide great opportunities for anglers to wade the river and find holes and structured areas that you can come back to later when the river is up.”

It makes total sense; much like the pre-season hunting scouting I’ve been talking about in the last few posts, there are opportunities to scout for future angling success.

The idea of scouting fish hot-spots may not come readily to some; it didn’t to me. After all, why head downt ot he water without a pole in hand? This report from the ODNR just goes to show that even when there’s litle likelihood of a decent fish being anywhere in the vicinity, you can do great things to ensure success down the road.

So while it’s still pleasantly warm, get out and do some wading when the rivers and lakes are low. You might stumble across the hole or snag that’ll produce next season’s trophy catch.

But for the rest of us, I stumbled across a pretty concise, useful web site while researching how to pick likely hunting hot spots via topo map.

Here it is.

You’ll have to excuse its typos; the info’s solid. In a nutshell, you can sum up much of his point with this quote:

“Just look for the easiest route to get from one point to another on the map.”

Visit it, and learn a little bit before you start tromping around the woods.

I received some info recently from PiSAT about their K-Light “Light for Africa” project, and it may be the motivator I needed to buy a solar light.

You can read about the program here; in a nutshell, for every light we buy, PiSAT will donate one to a microbusiness development program in Africa.

Take a look, and if you think it’s a worthwhile cause, pick up a K-light.

Likewise, rules have changed regarding purchase of antlerless deer tags. As someone who’s concerned about the waste of unchecked urban deer populations, I’m happy to see this being implemented.

Go through the regs, and make sure you understand them before this fall. The point of the rules, after all, is to keep game populations healthy and hunters safe.

Yeah, I know it’s early. Yes, I know it’s going to be far hotter, leafier and buggier than it’ll be in the fall. But starting your scouting now will pay dividends when the leaves are turning and the air’s crisp and cool.

I’ll write more on scouting as the month progresses, but the first step is an obvious one: figure out where you’ll be hunting, and get familiar with the land. That does not mean drive around the perimeter of the field and look for deer (although it’s always smart to keep an eye out for heavily-trafficked fields along country roads). I’m talking about getting maps, and identifying the likely spots to find your game of choice this fall. 

If you’re hunting public land, basic maps are as close as the ODNR web site. Even though the information on these maps is limited (especially for power company land), they provide important data as you start your scouting research. Where can you park? What parts of the area are more accessible (possibly more crowded)?

While online, spend some time over your chosen area with Google Maps. While these maps – and their wonderful aerial views – aren’t updated with extreme frequency, they’ll give you a general idea of where farmland borders the area, and where the forest appears to be thicker or more sparse.

After this initial research, you should have a good idea of where in your chosen chunk of land you can go. Now, go find a decent topographic map (I intend to try this resource this year, although I can’t vouch for them yet). Study the contours of the land. Are there funnels? Likely pinch points that will force game past your stand? Although you can only tell so much from the contour lines, this exercise will give you a fairly precise idea of where to look for sign. We’ll talk about that in a future post. Until then, get out, get your eyes open, and have fun in the woods.

Hopefully you’ve got both a freezer full of summer’s catch and a bunch of friends to invite over for a grill-out. If so, here are a few tips that may come in handy for cooking the kinds of fish you may catch around here.

- Don’t over-flip it: Your catch did enough flipping at the end of the line. Now that it’s a filet or steak, aim to flip the thing once. Doing more than that will likely break it apart as it cooks.

- For lighter fish like panfish, get a grill basket. It’ll make life much easier-trust me on that one.

- Marinades are excellent, and can make good sauce if you handle them right. I like to cut the used marinade with a little wine (white for the lighter fish, red for the heavy saltwater critters), then boil it about five minutes to cook down and kill any bacteria. Pour on the meat and go at it.

- If you’ve got the taste for them, crayfish/mudbugs/crawdads are made for the grill. Finish them off with a sharp knife through the head, then skewer them like you would shrimp.

Good luck on the water, and good eatin’ on the grill – sounds like a recipe for a great summer.

I suppose I’m not the only one out here who breathed a big – but tentative -  sigh of relief when BP announced last week it appears to have stemmed the flow of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. No more images of brown crud pumping into what used to be blue, game-rich waters.

Man, what a mess.

There are so many places I could go on this one: the collective addiction to cheap oil that has us going for the stuff in too-sensitive places, the bureaucratic mess that will likely let this company get off the hook with a lot less penalty than it deserves, the livelihoods – and lives – changed forever by something totally out of their control.

Big enough subjects for adults, but what if you’re explaining them to a kid? That can get tricky.

The ODNR recently linked to a helpful site on this very subject. It’s located here, and I suggest you take a look if you’ve got a young one in your life who wants to understand what happened. Handle this situation right, because the stakes are high: the kids watching this unfold today will be the ones who chart our future course: toward or away from another such disaster, the path they take could well hinge on how we present the facts of this case.

Frabill VP of marketing Jeff “Kolo” Kolodzinski will attempt July 30 to beat his own Guinness World Record for the most fish caught in a 24-hour period. According to a press release on the event, that means he’ll have to hook and release more than 1,680 fish.

The attempt is being held in conjunction with a fun-raising event for Fishing for Life, an organization focused on promoting outdoor activities – especially fishing – as lifelong passions among kids.

It’s a good group to back, but part of me cringes at the idea of the massive hooking-fest that I suspect the record attempt will be.

I don’t want to dismiss Kolodzinski’s ability as an angler; that’s a lot of consistency to keep the fish biting for that long. But as someone who approaches hunting and fishing with an eye to their roots – methods for clawless, toothless humans to prey on food species – I don’t feel good about hooking, fighting and landing that many fish. Odds are a few will swim away injured, possibly seriously.

Catch-and-release fishing has its role in the sport, I firmly believe. It would horribly wasteful to kill every too-small or wrong-species catch, and when done right, the practice can produce bigger lunkers in a given body of water.

But where’s the sport in hooking that many fish at once? Where’s the connection to the core – the soul if you will – of what fishing is supposed to be about? 

Catch a big fish. Go to some out-of-the-way place and hook a species you’ve never seen, caught or tasted before. Prepare the catch with respect, and dine with joy. But don’t turn this food-harvesting activity into a numbers game, or a publicity stunt.

That’s a little soulless, it seems to me.

Here’s a FAQ provided by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. Yes, they’re an advocacy group. But they provide some good basic info here.

This is exciting news.

I’m sure many of you have run into the same frustration that I have at various times: you move to a new area, or you’re just getting into hunting, and you suddenly realized how hard it’s going to be to get access to that field just down the road that’s always full of turkeys, or that plot of woods near home that you’re certain contains a bruiser of a buck. Between finding/identifying all the landowners, contacting them and then convincing them that you’re a respectful citizen who will tread lightly on their property, you’ve got a load of work ahead of you.

Open Fields is meant to make that process a little easier. Landowners, many of whom are dealing with over-populations of deer and other game animals, receive incentives for practicing game management best practices and opening their land for hunting, fishing and other wildlife-oriented recreation.

Landowners get compensation for preserving natural areas.

Outdoors enthusiasts gain access to new land.

Another avenue opens to protect this country’s open spaces.

Sounds like a win-win-win to me.