THE MYSTERY OF THE DEPOSIT DEPOSIT!
A few days ago, I met up with my Swedish fly fishing buddy Peter Bjorkman, at Deposit, New York, for a day’s fly fishing on the West Branch of the Delaware River. On this occasion, though, I had left my own rods at home and took my cameras, instead.
After a morning fruitlessly ‘swinging a streamer’, Peter switched to one of my own favourite techniques, that of ‘Czech nymphing’, and started to have success.
The ‘scene of the crime’ – The West Branch of the Delaware River, at Deposit, NY. All of the bodies were in the bottom-right corner of the photo!
In the meanwhile, I was moving along the bank and occasionally in the shallow edges of the river, and while doing so I spotted the waterlogged body of what appeared to be a cormorant, floating among grasses.
The neck and skull ow what I believe to be a cormorant were bare bone but, as shown here, the body and feathers were just below the surface
Having gone closer, to take a look, I then found an equally sodden duck’s wing nearby. And then some relatively dry, breast feathers from a lighter coloured bird — possibly also a duck.
The green ‘speculum’ on the dead duck’s wing
All of this was in an area no more than 12 feet in length, and it seemed too much to be coincidence.
Feathers, apparently from a third ‘victim’
I changed my search and started looking for signs of a perpetrator, and almost immediately I got what I presumed was a result. On a rock a few feet out into the water was some scat (about 1½ inches in length).
“That’s not otter,” I thought (though I’m only aware of what Eurasian otter scat looks like, not their American cousins, and I merely presumed it would be similar).
Scat on a prominent rock – typical behaviour for riverside hunters
“Maybe it’s mink,” seemed like a reasonable conclusion, so I took photographs of all the bits of the various birds and of the scat, so that I could check my animal tracking books when back home.
My sleuthing didn’t pay off though, because according to my books the scat looked absolutely nothing like that of otters or mink, or of any other riverside predator I could think of. If anything, it looked most like that of the humble musk rat — to my knowledge not a creature that’s likely to be inclined or able to kill and eat large birds.
If any reader happens to belong to that elite group of people who can recognise creatures by their after-dinner deposits, could you kindly let me know what the scat might have belonged to and thereby hopefully solve the question as to whether this was likely to have been murder most ‘fowl’ (sorry!) or simply a coincidental gathering of body parts.
Peter with a beautiful, very light coloured Brown Trout (which was immediately returned to the water, unharmed – ‘catch-and-release’ fishing)
And as for my friend Peter, he just kept on fishing, not at all interested in whether or not I had discovered the crime of the century. (And I can’t say that I blame him really!) {;-)