Surprisingly warm month heats up fishing
The calendar pegs February as the bleak heart of winter, a time when lethargy if not outright dormancy dominates much of the natural world in the southeast Texas swamp. February, the calendar and history say, is for hunkering down and waiting for better, warmer days.
A Mississippi green water snake vigorously flicking its tongue as it stretched along a limb hanging over the brown water in the cypress-lined slough argued otherwise.
So did the alligator sprawling on a nearby log, the cold-blooded reptile’s mouth open and eyes closed as it, too, reveled — if, indeed, alligators and snakes can revel — in a drenching of life-charging and wholly un-Februarylike warm sunlight.
Those were strong signs that we’d made the right choice to come to the swamp on this February Sunday. There were plenty of others.
There was the stream of egrets flying overhead, many clasping sticks and twigs in their stiletto bills. They were headed up one of the feeder bayous to the patch of cypress/green ash/tupelo woods chosen for their rookery, where scores of egrets and herons and roseate spoonbills and other colonial water birds cobble together flimsy nests and get on with the annual business of continuing their kind.
Dozens of turtles — mostly red-eared sliders but a few long-necked, pointed-nosed soft-shells, too — sunned in rows on logs, looking like so many mushrooms caps.
These were not the normal signs of February, even in southeast Texas.
February has a rightful reputation as the dead of winter — emphasis on “dead.” The heaviest recorded snowfall in the region — 20 inches in Houston — fell on Valentine’s Day in 1895. Had we been in the swamp on the same day exactly 118 years ago, the place would have been lifeless and locked in ice as one of the most severe freezes recorded in Texas dropped the temperature in Houston on Feb. 12, 1899, to 6 degrees.
Even recent history says February is, surely, a month of bitter, bleak winter and no friend to fish, fowl or those who enjoy outdoor recreation. One of the most recent massive freeze-caused fish kills on the Texas coast came in February, 1989, when an estimated 11 million finfish froze to death in Texas bays.
But this February has seen none of that. Not even close. After one of the warmest Januaries on record, February has been even warmer, with high temperatures breaking long-held records, pushing past 85 degrees some days. It doesn’t feel like February.
To be sure, winter was evident in the swamp. The place had a dark and forlorn look to it. The forest was a seemingly endless sea of bare limbs, all muted gray and brown and black. The forest floor was barren black mud, winter’s cold combined with months of flooding this past year having smothered or frozen all vegetative life from it. It looked as though a fire had burned through the bottom lands, leaving only skeletons in its wake as the flooding river receded.
But if you looked closely, signs of life were visible. A blush of light green on willows here and there along the edge of the slough, oxbows and bayous. On a patch of higher ground, small clusters of white flowers lined dewberry vines — a month ahead of normal timing for such things. And back there on the long-submerged but now uncovered swamp floor where floods have gifted the swamp with a layer of rich, new soil, two clumps of bright green leaves — perhaps palmetto or lizard’s tail or maybe spider lily — poked out of the endless blackness like fingers rising from a grave. Signs were obvious
The signs were plain. Winter wasn’t gone, but it had yielded a lot of ground. The snakes and the birds and the gators and vegetation knew it. So did the fish. We eased close to a tangle of submerged logs and brush sitting in 2-3 feet of water along a bank, pitched hooks baited with frisky shiners suspended about 18 inches beneath orange corks close to the cover and waited.
Would they be there? Were we too early? Were they still in deep water where they should be during February, or had this warm weather altered their schedule?
The answer came quickly. One of the corks trembled, then sank beneath the murky water. Susan lifted the rod, the line came taut, the water boiled in a welter of silver, white, green and black as a thick-backed crappie surged and thrashed until yielding and coming over the side.
It was a white crappie, the dominant crappie in these waters. It was a male, “lit up” with the dark splotches on its side that male white crappie develop during spawning season. This makes them look a bit like their black crappie cousins who also share these waters but typically stay in slightly deeper water.
You can tell the species apart by counting the hard spines on their dorsal fins. White crappie have no more than six; black crappie have seven or eight. It is harder — impossible, really — to tell them apart on the plate; crappie, black or white, are one of the most delicious fish swimming. That’s part of why these panfish are the third most popular target of Texas freshwater anglers (behind largemouth bass and catfish), and why their annual spawning season is so anticipated by anglers.
Crappie move out of their insulated deepwater winter quarters and toward the shallows where they spawn when water temperature climbs above about 60 degrees. Colonial spawners, crappie move into shallows where they build nests and get about their procreative business. The spawning fish often congregate around submerged brush, logs, submerged vegetation or other cover, usually in water no more than 3 or 4 feet deep and often as shallow as a couple of feet.
Some of the best and most enjoyable shallowwater crappie fishing coincides with the spawn. Crappie spawning activity kicks off when water reaches about 65 degrees and peaks when it’s 68-70 degrees. And that usually doesn’t happen until March or even into April. But a prolonged warm-up in February can trigger the fish to move shallow, especially in “small” waters such as backwater sloughs and oxbows, where water tends to warm quicker than in open reservoirs. Temperature rises
That was the case in the old slough this past Sunday. Water temperature had climbed to 65 degrees the previous week and shot about 70 with the recent spring-like weather. Sunday, water temperature in the slough climbed to almost 80 degrees. That’s a rare thing in February; heck, it’s rare in March.
Crappie were not the only fish in the swamp behaving more like they do during March or April than during February. As we eased along the shoreline, plunking minnows and jigs around shallow brush and steadily connecting with crappie, we noticed swirls and showers of tiny shad around the bases of cypress trees or beside submerged logs. Invariably, a cast to the spot brought almost immediate strikes from largemouth bass, some weighing as much as 4 pounds — great fish for a backwater fishery.
As the February day warmed, life in and over and around the slough fairly vibrated under the influence of the spring-like weather. We ran through four dozen minnows, catching dozens of crappie and bass and even a handful of catfish. Jigs and plastic worms also worked.
We were not the only anglers at work. Great egrets, blue herons, snowy egrets, anhinga and an osprey also fished the slough. The bare woods echoed with the calls of pileated woodpeckers, wrens and a halfdozen species of warblers. A dozen or more alligators hauled themselves out on the muddy banks or onto logs or carved wakes in the slough as they swam.
We stayed as long as we could, simply soaking in as much of this rare opportunity as possible — like the gators and the snakes and the fish and the fowl that were behaving like it was spring instead of what should be the dreary heart of winter.
February is the shortest month of the year. Most years, that’s a blessing. Not this year, it seems. At least not if the month holds more days like the one in the swamp this past weekend.