Wood Duck Houses

Those of you that enjoy walking or riding around the trails by the lakes may have noticed that the wood duck houses located at the West end of Copper Dollar Lake are gone. The boxes have been there for several years but unfortunately no birds have ever taken up residence. The boxes have now been relocated to Copper Penny Lake. One is on the Southeast corner and the other is close to the Northeast end where wood ducks have been seen in the past. The latter bird house can be seen best from a boat. Wood ducks can start to nest as early as April. Updates will be provided on this blog.

Copper Penny Cover

With approval from the CDC Board, the Fish & Wildlife Committee added a bit of cover into Copper Penny Lake. Quite a bit of the standing timber has been disappearing over the years in Copper Penny mostly due to high winds. We added four tree limbs each about twenty feet long into the deepest part of the lake. They were anchored with heavy cinder blocks and basically all dropped in the same location. Thanks goes out to Gale Mathison for taking the time out of his day to help me yesterday.

Fishing Bloopers

http://www.wimp.com/classicbloopers/

Article - Benefits of Catch & Release

"Thanks" to one of our residents for sending me this website. I think it should be interesting reading for anyone who likes to fish. It's mostly about a fishing catch and release study right here in Nebraska.

http://barbsandbacklashes.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/catch-and-release-makes-a-difference/

Set Lines Found - Again!

For those of you that are unfamiliar with a set line, it is a long piece of heavy duty fishing line with a series of hooks located at certain intervals. One end is tied up to something on the shoreline like a stake, rock, tree stump, or even the limb of a tree. The other end is sometimes anchored somewhere out in the lake. This way the hooks are in the water at various depths ranging from very shallow to whatever depth is desired. This type of fishing is against the law in all inland lakes of Nebraska.

It seems that at least a couple of times each year these lines are found at Copper Dollar Cove, usually in Copper Penny Lake. Last week a set line was found in Copper Dollar Lake. This particular set line was much more of a professional grade than those that have been found here before. It had a series of large hooks and heavy duty line that would normally be used in places like the Missouri river for very large fish. The part of the line that was recovered was almost one hundred feet long. Copper Dollar Lake is considered the recreational lake and is used primarily for water skiing, tubing and swimming. Once again, this type of fishing is not only against the law but it poses a threat for everyone that enters the lake. If anyone was to get caught up in these lines under water, I guarantee you would never be able to get out alive.

In the past, even though I think we all knew better, we hoped that this type of fishing was done by trespassers who pulled in their lines from the shore. The type of set line found last week in Copper Dollar Lake was the kind that had to be worked from a boat. There is no telling the numbers, locations and the depths of these lines that could still be out in the lakes at the present time. I would like to suggest that when people are out enjoying the lakes to check the shorelines often and if you see anything that looks like a set line to report it to me or someone on the Board or Fish & Wildlife Committee. If you see anyone working these lines from either the shore or a boat, I encourage you to call the sheriff or local game warden immediately.

Tree Swallows

Tree swallows are very common around Copper Dollar Cove and are sometimes mistaken for bluebirds. They are sparrow sized birds with blue upperparts but have clear white underparts. They like to live along lake shores, flooded meadows, marshes and streams. They like to move into the bluebird houses especially around the sewerage ponds by Copper Penny Lake. That is another reason why the bluebird trail needs to be checked at least once a week to remove unwanted nests before eggs are laid. The tree swallows nest is very similar to a bluebirds nest but it also contains feathers. Their eggs are also white instead of blue. We let a swallow family nest in one of our boxes in our backyard and we were able to watch them from the building of the nest to the four fledgelings that took off last week.

Sweet Success

In late March of this year, we put out a trail of bluebird houses starting on Copper Penny Lake and extending onto Copper Dollar Lake. The boxes have been monitored each and every week with detailed records being recorded that will be furnished to "Bluebirds Across Nebraska" at the end of the season. A number of boxes contained bluebird eggs earlier in the year but for some reason, all the eggs disappeared. Finally, there was a box containing five eggs that all hatched and although there were some difficulties, all the birds survived and fledged in a little less than three weeks. There is still time for bluebirds to nest again so hopefully I will have more good news in future posts.