OK, so you’re technically not giving a frog a hand, per se. It’s more about letting those folks who keep tabs on our wilder places what’s happening with the amphibians. They can’t be everywhere, so they need the help.

I’m talking about the Michigan Frog and Toad Survey. It’s a Department of Natural Resources and Environment program in which regular people help biologists figure out how the frogs and toads are doing. That’s important because those critters tell us how clean the air and water are by their very existence.

It’s pretty easy. You establish a route of 10 ponds or wetlands, and then three times during the spring you visit each of your spots and listen.

In early April you hear wood frogs and spring peepers. In May it’s tree-frog city. By June the green frogs rule. There are others of course, leopard frogs, chorus frogs, bull frogs and American toads. You keep track of how many your hear and return the survey to the DNRE. Participants receive a CD with the calls of all Michigan’s frog and toads so they know what they’re hearing.

Depending on your distances, each run takes around an hour, give or take. It’s an excellent reason to get outside, and it’s often remarkable just how loud those ponds get after dark. Kids love it, and it’s a great way to connect them to their world, the lack of which is a persistent problem in my opinion.

At the moment there are about 200 routes statewide, and they’re always looking for more. If you’re interested, call or e-mail Lori Sargent at (517) 373-9418 or SargentL@Michigan.gov.

Greatnorthernoutdoors.net is updated with new articles every Thursday.
Previous content on hunting, fishing and other outdoor subjects can be found
under the “Outdoor Adventure” button above. Here’s what’s new for the week
of September 3, 2009:

– Securing the future: For more than a decade, Minnesota’s hunters and anglers agitated for a state fund dedicated to clean water and wildlife habitat. Earlier this decade, environmental groups began to see the wisdom of taking care of the state’s natural resources, and last fall a surprising coalition’s conservation vision became reality. When Minnesota voters passed the Legacy Amendment, they guaranteed that billions of dollars would be used over the next 25 years to preserve their outdoor heritage.

– Take a look: Tony Hansen is a deer guy, and he’ll tell you he’d rather have a good binocular with him in the tree stand than pretty much anything else — even clothing, but let’s not go there.

– On the fly: Long-time Michigan fly shop owner Steve Southard tells why fly fishing is so special to him — and why the sport is no longer just for the big-money crowd.

– New video: Late summer is the time to scout your deer ground, but be careful. It
doesn’t take much for that big buck to figure out he’s being hunted, and
when that happens it could be game over before the season even begins. Face
it: He’s going nocturnal at some point, and if he figures out what you’re up
to, you might never see him again. Tony Hansen explains how to be smart
about scouting that deer to improve your chances of seeing him during the
hunting season.

I’ve never really understood the gap that sometimes exists between the hooks-and-bullets rednecks and the greenie tree-huggers.

I’m positive there are people who would consider me one or the other. I tend to think of myself as both. I love to hunt and fish, and I make no apologies about killing animals so I can eat them. We as a species are hard-wired to do that. Meat nourishes us. It’s why our ancestors invented weapons. It’s why they had opposable thumbs with which to grasp them.

But it’s important for us to take care of our planet. Acid rain is bad. Mercury emissions that land in lakes and contaminate fish are bad. Human decisions that compromise habitat are bad. Take your trash out of the woods. Reduce your carbon footprint. Recycle.

So let’s hear it for Minnesotans, who realized en masse that those two worldviews do not exclude each other. Thanks to a coalition of old-school outdoors folks and new-school environmentalists, Minnesotans last year voted to tax themselves — it’s a 0.375-percent sales tax — so they could protect wildlife habitat and keep their state clean.

They’ll keep huge forests undeveloped, restore critical wetlands and clean up lakes and rivers. Some people will enter the food web to hunt and fish there. Others will just observe.

And they can all take credit for doing the right thing.

Bravo.

I was reading one of the bigger outdoor magazines last night when I came across a passage that stopped me cold. It said “13 anti-hunting groups” had sued to put the gray wolf back on the federal endangered species list.

That statement is true for the most part. It’s the other part I’m worried about. This whole wolf debate is very heated, and it has become de rigeuer to use half-truths and inflammatory language to forward the cause, particularly by those who want the gray wolf to remain under federal protection.

I believe the science is there to show that the wolves have recovered enough to let the states manage them. It’s unrealistic to think the Western Great Lakes population of gray wolves should colonize outside the big woods up north, and they’re clearly doing just fine there. Thanks to the Endangered Species Act and the end of bounties, the gray wolf population of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan has grown from a couple hundred animals in the mid-1970s to around 4,000 today.

The fact is they’re filling up the available habitat and reaching a balance with their food supply. Conflicts with humans — read that as attacks on pets and livestock — can’t help but increase with the wolf numbers. By giving those controls back to the states, problem wolves can be eliminated and the people who have to live with wolves can be placated. It’s a kind of empowerment that can help build tolerance of wolves in places where that is scarce, and that can only help the wolves in the long run. It’s a practical way to let wolves and humans share the landscape.

Those who oppose letting states manage wolves disagree, and they’re not shy about bending the truth. When a court ruled that wolves should go back on the list because the U.S. Fish and Wlidlife Service didn’t hold a proper public comment period — clearly a technicality – the Humane Society of the United States web site crowed “Feds cry uncle in wolf lawsuit,” as though the USFWS had just given up because it was so incredibly wrong.

Later they describe state management plans as “killing plans” because they include allowing landowners to kill wolves caught in the act of attacking livestock, and they include the possibility of sport-hunting wolves. One HSUS lawyer calls state management “reckless plans to start sport hunting and trapping imperiled wolves.” That’s just silly. The scientists who put together the wolf management plans have spent years listening and learning how to make wolf management work for everybody, most notably the wolves themselves. They’re anything but reckless.

And keep in mind that the Michigan and Wisconsin legislatures would have to pass laws making wolves a game species before any sport hunting can happen. And keep in mind that Michigan couldn’t even get that designation for mourning doves, which already are hunted in dozens of states. Wolves? Yeah, right.

Another group, the Center for Biological Diversity, isn’t against hunting at all, according to Michael Robinson, its wolf expert. It just believes that wolves haven’t recovered enough to be de-listed, and that the USFWS is applying the Endangered Species Act illegally. It claims that the Western Great Lakes wolves are too genetically isolated to be viable and could be susceptible to disease or hybridization. Those sound like compelling arguments, but they ignore the fact that wolves don’t recognize international borders. That western Great Lakes population of wolves is really just the southern arm of a huge Canadian population that includes some 50,000 animals. They come and go between the U.S. and Canada at will, mixing their genes and everything. Isolated? Hardly.

Which brings us back to our outdoor magazine’s claim that “13 anti-hunting groups” filed the suit to keep wolves on the Endangered Species List. Remember the Center for Biological Diversity? They may be anti-wolf-hunting, and they may be in bed with a bunch of anti-hunting lunatics, but they’re not anti-hunting.

A minor distinction? Probably. But in the circles I travel, there isn’t much that can rile folks up like the term “anti-hunting.” Hardly anything is as inflammatory as that. It’s a blanket statement that describes an unbending, systematic attempt to strip us of our rights, extinguish our passion and shut down our lifestyle.

When it’s true, use it. When it’s sort of true, don’t. In the hunter/anti-hunter argument, we have to be right. And saying things that are wrong, even a little bit wrong, makes that a lot harder.

Right?

I’ve been a sucker for a good field guide as long as I can remember, so I was absolutely delighted when The ROM Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of Ontario showed up on my desk.

It makes little difference that I’m in Michigan; with very few exceptions the fishes that live in Ontario can also be found across the northern United States, especially in the Great Lakes region.

This guide is complete and easy to understand. It breaks the fish into families, and each species account describes in detail physical characteristics, habitat and behaviors, and includes several pictures, a map showing the species range in Ontario, and a small chart listing average and record sizes (in metric and standard measures). It includes every species from the teensiest minnow to the mighty muskellunge.

The images used in the species accounts are a useful combination of photographs and illustrations that show the fish from different angles. The guide also includes 43 pages of images showing the fish side-by-side with similar species and pointing out the distinguishing characteristics of each, an extremely handy feature for identifying species that are easily confused.

One extremely minor complaint — and I understand this is an American talking about Canadian fish and that we Yanks are as guilty of this as anyone — is that the maps showing the range of each species stops right at the border, even out in the middle of the Great Lakes. I’ve never liked it when American publishers do that, either. But in the ROM’s defense, the title makes it clear these are the fishes of Ontario. For the most part I know which ones cross that line.  

Compiled by Erling Holm and Marry Burridge, both assistant curators of ichthyology at the Royal Ontario Museum, and Nicholas E. Mandrak, a research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the ROM Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of Ontario (ROM 2009, softcover, $29.95) is an excellent resource.

Everyone knows about the rut, right? Starts ramping up around the time we gather our bows and hit the woods. Reaches full swing around the first of November in the northernly parts. Deer go nuts, bucks trail does, show up at odd hours in places you don’t otherwise see them, all that.

It’s a fall thing.

Or at least we thought so. Maybe the deer in Ohio haven’t heard. Seems a state deer biologist was out turkey hunting last week — this is May, remember — when he saw a doe mosey past. Nothing unusual there.

Moments later, here comes a buck. A spring buck. A 3-inches-of-stubby-velvet buck.

And he’s bird-dogging that doe like nobody’s business.

“He had his nose to the ground, tail straight back, just like you’d see in the peak of the rut,” said Mike Tonkovich, Ohio’s head deer honcho.

Now it’s important to note that the witness to this was Jim Hill, also an Ohio deer biologist. A DEER biologist. In other words, this guy knows when he’s looking at a rutty buck. He’s just not used to seeing them when he’s calling turkeys.

The behavior was so unseasonal that Tonkovich put a call in to John Ozoga, the retired Michigan DNR deer specialist who’s a leading authority on the animals’ behavior.

His reply: Are you sure? And the answer is yes. Tonkovich said obviously that doe’s estrous is seriously out of whack, and the buck was just doing what bucks do when they catch that scent.

“When you’ve got a million deer, you’re gonna find one that doesn’t follow the rules,” he added.

OK, so if you go out fishing or hunting and come back empty-handed, writing about the outing is pretty dicey business. After all, who wants to read that you didn’t catch anything? I get that. You can sit on the couch with your hand in your waistband and not catch anything. Big deal. So rather than talk about what I didn’t do in a day and a half on Michigan’s Pere Marquette River, here’s what I did do:

– I listened to the all-day drumming of a lovesick ruffed grouse. Spring rules!

– I hooked four steelhead, two of which went airborne multiple times before throwing my hook. By far my best-ever day of steelhead fishing, even without bringing one to the net.

– I watched a small flock of turkeys roost right above my head, in a tree across the river, then returned in the morning to watch them fly down and resume their turkey business. Did I mention that spring rules?

– I decided that Berkley PowerBait steelhead egg clusters are every bit as enticing to steelhead as real spawn, without the oil slick or stinky fingers. Furthermore, they hang inches off the bottom, which a spawn sack won’t do if it has too many floats in it, and they stay on your hook without tying an egg loop. The only reason I would switch from the PowerBait would be a total switch away from bait and into fly fishing.

– I got up early so I could beat the four old guys staying across the river to the water. I had the prime gravel to myself and had two fish hooked before they even showed.

– I heard the cannon-shots of a pileated woodpecker pounding away at a dead tree. Man, those birds are impressive.

– When two driftboats arrived and anglers spread out across the gravel, I quietly took my leave - and fished a sweet spot upstream where the fish reconvened after all that commotion scattered them. Two more hook-ups.

– Discovered some submerged gravel that gets passed over and passed over by the driftboat crowd but consistently produces fish. I learned the details of that hole later from my buddy Jeff, who knows that stream as well as anybody.