Mother Nature can be friend or foe

Biologists can have great intentions and use the best management tools available, but in the end, Mother Nature often trumps everything.

I was thinking about that the other day after about a half-dozen jakes ran across a logging road in front of the truck while we were on the way to repair a deer stand.

This was in another state, where the wild-turkey hatch was apparently pretty good last year. Not so in South Carolina. The Palmetto State experienced another fairly uneven hatch in 2008: not as bad as in some past years, but certainly nothing to yelp about.

Why? Nothing that any wildlife manager could have done could have made up for Mother Nature dropping cold, wet weather on us at the end of May, about the time poults were hatching out and at their most precarious state in life.

So a lot of them died of hypothermia or exposure or whatever it is about cold and wet weather that isn’t good for week-old turkeys. And that has probably impacted the success many of us did or didn’t have this spring more than any single factor.

If a lot of poults die, there aren’t as many jakes in the woods the next spring, and that cuts down considerably on the number of longbeards strutting around in seasons to come. It’s a simple equation. If reproduction doesn’t keep up with mortality, the flock gets smaller.

So perhaps later this month, when you’re thinking about the cold front the weather man is promising, say a little prayer that it’s not all that cold, and that there’s not a lot of drenching rain involved.

On the other hand, Mother Nature has been pretty kind to us over the past several winters. For that reason, saltwater fishermen can expect to have another banner year catching spotted seatrout.

Besides predation from bigger fish and man, the single factor that kills speckled trout more than anything else is cold, cold, cold weather. Think Alberta Clipper. A cold front roars down from Canada and leaves people as far south as Miami shivering. That’s the kind of weather that will send speckled trout to the great marsh in the sky.

Specks are one of the most temperature-sensitive of all inshore fish. For the most part, they spend the winter in ditches and sloughs and saltwater creeks, maybe in the ICW and around inlets. And that’s what can get them in trouble when a cold front hits quickly.

If the temperature drops gradually, over a period of several days, trout have time to move into deeper water where the temperature is less affected by what’s going on topside. If the water temperature drops from 49 to 47 to 45 degrees over a period of several days, specks slide down in the water column to water that is warmer.

But a cold snap can drop in on us without a lot of warning. You know the kind; you wear a sweater in the morning and need a full set of insulated coveralls that evening. It’s 20 degrees colder, and you’re not prepared.

Out in the water, specks are even less prepared. If the water temperature crashes, they die. It’s simple. If a severe cold front drops the water temperature a half-dozen degrees in a day’s time — down into the mid- or low-40s — specks don’t have time to head for safety.

So when you see that popping cork go under this month and there’s a tug on the other end of the line, say another little prayer, this one of thanksgiving, that for the fourth or fifth year in a row, South Carolina’s speckled trout didn’t float up dead in huge numbers.

Mother Nature can be kind, too.