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Music to my ears
Many years ago, a red-winged blackbird made quite an impression on a young angler.
I don’t know when it happened or where. It’s quite possible it actually happened a dozen times or more before it stuck with me. But wherever and whenever, the song of the red-winged blackbird became inextricably linked in my mind with fishing ponds and lakes.
They are notes like no other bird song. It is the music of the marsh. When my ears hear that trill, I am exactly where I want to be. I am fishing.
In a way, the redwing’s song is like the tune of the ice-cream truck as it trundles up the block. Both are the first notes of real-life “Name That Tune” games.
Ornithologists describe the song as “oh-ka-leee.” Maybe. I can name that tune in two notes. By the time I hear “oh-ka,” I’m smiling.
When we were too young to defy the parental command to never ever venture beyond our yard, my sister and I scrambled to the curb the moment the first notes of the ice-cream truck reached our ears. We knew better than to step out of the yard, but we stretched eagerly to spy the source of the music.
The red-winged blackbird song and the ice-cream truck jingle are sounds of joy.
Somewhere a block or two away on a warm summer evening, the sun low but not gone, the ice-cream truck’s loudspeaker pitched the sweet notes. Who can resist? My sister and I dashed to the curb. We shouted in glee at the first glimpse of the pastel-painted truck idling toward our house.
The blackbird’s oh-ka-leee is rarely a solo song. They talk to each other and the chorus is their conversation.
To me, they are singing “It’s time to fish. Cast your lure. Ready, set go.”
Yes, whimsy, I know. They aren’t literally singing to me. But I can dream, can’t I?
It’s no small coincidence that the red-winged blackbird’s call is so alluring.
They get especially busy every May here in Northeast Ohio. Food is plentiful and it’s nesting time and the redwings have a great deal of work to do.
So they perch on cattails to rest and call out to their own kind to let them know they are in the neighborhood.
Fortunately for us anglers, the very neighborhood where red-winged blackbirds are so prolific is perfectly proximate to the places where we love to fish.
They rarely venture too far from water. They really love cattail marshes. That is very likely where the redwing long ago first sang its song into my fishing memory.
I love cattail marshes. They are bass factories as much as they are bird sanctuaries.
The bass and the blackbird occupy two distinct niches on the animal family tree, but red-winged blackbirds and largemouth bass find all they need in a cattail marsh.
I would say, too, that it turns out I find pretty much what I need when I’m fishing a cattail marsh.
Both bird and bass range across much of North America. But we are fortunate both love living in the cattail marshes around Youngstown. When I’m at Milton or Mosquito, Pymatuning or West Branch, or an estuary of Lake Erie, I look for the cattails and listen for the birds.
I speak redwing. Oh-ka-leee!
“Fish here,” is the translation I hear.