The painted turtles are beginning their annual reproductive activities, which include a slow- motion game of chicken on the roadways. The soft shoulders alongside our roads are easy places for the turtles to bury their eggs. The digging is easy and the ground is flat and boulder free. The downfall, of course, is that the turtles get run over a lot.
The roadways are dangerous places to loiter, especially when you only stand a few inches off the ground and are such slow movers.
The painted turtle is the most common turtle in the United States and can live to be 40 years old in the wild. They bury themselves in the muddy bottoms of swamps and ponds during the winter months and surface during the warmer months of summer.
Turtle eggs are eaten by most of the forest’s predators and their survival seems to rely on numbers. Lay enough eggs and some of them are bound to survive.
We often stop to help the turtles crossing the Moose Pond Road since there are so many of them around. The road separates a moose swamp from Saganaga Lake and is a hot bed for turtle activity. Once they hatch into little turtles they are hunted once again while they migrate back to the swamps. The little silver dollar-sized babies are pretty cute, so it is hard to imagine them being eaten.
I had a friend keep some babies in his aquarium and they were very entertaining. They would swim around between floating lilies with their little paddle-shaped feet. Their life expectancy in captivity is much less than if they are left in the wild. They have a diverse palate that ranges from fish to flowers and everything in-between. If the fishing gets any tougher on Saganaga Lake the Moose Pond turtles will have to become vegetarians.
The bad weather days are still productive for walleyes on Saganaga this year, but otherwise it is difficult to stay consistent. The fish should be leaving the bays and moving out to the rock piles, but it does not seem to be happening yet. When there is little wind and clouds, the bays are lifeless and the rock piles only have a few small bass on them. It is hard to say where these fish are hiding. The water is warming up fast so I would suspect this information will be old news very soon, but so far Sag has been tough.
Northern Light Lake, Ontario is not very consistent this year either but you still catch fish. Saganaga cabin owner Kyle Edlund was fishing for a big northern in front of Deer Creek last week and caught two hawg walleyes while casting muskie lures. They had seen a giant pike the day before and decided to give it a shot. They did not catch the big snake but landed a couple of 30-inch walleyes instead. The muskie lures they were casting ranged from 10 – 18-inches long and the walleyes just hammered them. Pretty cool. I would like to experiment with this type of fishing, but I have a hard time trusting customers that are casting big lures with treble hooks. Sounds like recipe for disaster!
Cory Christianson has worked as a fishing guide on the Gunflint Trail since 2000. If you have any fishing or wildlife reports or stories to share, send an email to: christiansoncory@hotmail.com or call 218-388-0315. You can also visit Cory’s website at Gunflintfishingguide.com.
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