Not sure if this was the last hurrah or not, but with dove and goose season coming in just a week and a half and archery season soon thereafter - I may have picked up my bowfishing tackle for the last time of the summer.

Andrew and I headed up to the Eno River yesterday to chase around some carp, but didn’t have to much luck.  Water was down a couple feet past normal and the fish were in such shallow water that we either couldn’t get to them or they had the water churned up into a chocolate milk concoction.

We did manage to connect on 4 common carp and miss twice that many, but there just wasn’t much action going on.  Andrew kept the trip exciting though with a 9.2 swan dive into the drink.  When he reached out to push off of a log that wasn’t there anymore, gravity took over, and well…you can see the result.

We did see a couple of neat things going up and down the river though… 1) Snakes were swimming all over the place, mostly northern watersnakes from what we could tell, 2) saw a prothonotary warbler - which is just a brilliant little songbird that looks like it belongs in a tropical jungle, 3) and we stumbled onto a Wildlife Resources Commission rocket net set-up.

The light strip on the sand is to the left of the box is corn and lures in whatever they are trying to catch…ducks, doves, wild turkeys?  When they are in range, a switch is triggered by the waiting processing team and the net is propelled by 3 rockets up and over the bait pile capturing the critters underneath.

A zoomed in view of the rockets sitting on top of the net box.  After the animals are captured, they can be banded, measured, sexed, aged, even relocated to areas being re-stocked.  Wild turkeys have historically been captured and relocated using this technique and are distributed as widely as they are today because of this great wildlife management technique.