Black buzzard nest

Some snapshots of a black buzzard nest found by Bill Lindauer in a huge hollow tree on a ridge above the Little Miami. I set up a couple motion sensitive cameras and should get some better pictures soon.

little miami river map

Feel free to use (for your own personal use only)

The Bike Trail...

The beautiful Little Miami Bike trail is one of the most pleasant places to spend a day anywhere and draws bikers, walkers, fisherman, birdwatchers and more by the thousands every year. Following close alongside the beautiful Little Miami river it offers a chance to see nature at it's finest. Stretching 78 mi from Springfield to Newtown there are countless places to get away from it all while still being in reach of the charming ice cream shops and restaurants that grace the many small towns the trail passes thru. For the first 9 miles to Xenia, the Little Miami Scenic Trail is operated by the Clark County Park District and the National Trail Parks and Recreation District. Due to budget concerns parts of this northernmost section have sometimes been closed. From the trailhead in Springfield, the Little Miami trail runs south to Yellow Springs. Yellow Springs is home to Antioch College and the must see Glen Helen Nature preserve. The "Glen" is home to the large yellow colored spring that gives the town it's name and visitors can view lovely wildflowers, huge old trees, cliffs with waterfalls and rock overhangs as well as an historic covered bridge. Nearby is Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve and John Bryan State Park, two of the most scenic parks in the United States. Located along the Little Miami Scenic River, Clifton Gorge is famous for its waterfalls and rapids that flow through a narrow gorge. Clifton Gorge itself is such an amazing place and seems so unlikely that in many places you can walk right up to the cliffs of the gorge before realizing they are even there. It seems that at the end of the last ice age the headwaters of the Little Miami flowed gently thru glacial drift below the retreating glaciers until they encountered the solid rock of the gorge. The water then cut deeper and deeper into the resistant Silurian dolomite bedrock until at the upper reaches of the gorge the cliff walls are barely 25 to 40 feet apart and it must be 75 to a 100 feet down to the water. Due to the fact its reasonably flat right up until you step off into space it's almost impossible to convey in a photograph the scale of the gorge. All the photos I've seen do no better than my poor attempts, trust me this is one place that is a hundred times more impressive in person. In this stretch the normally knee to waist deep upper Little Miami rages along between the cliff walls at an average depth of 34 feet. The river here drops at a powerful rate of 35 feet per mile. A small sign marks the spot of Darnell's leap. In January 1778, Daniel Boone and his party of 28 were captured by the Shawnees. Cornelius Darnell was able to escape and with Shawnee in hot pursuit Darnell leapt across the twenty five foot gap between the cliffs to freedom. Of course he could not make the entire leap but branches hung out over the 80 foot drop and Darnell went crashing across into them before finally getting a firm grip on one as he fell and climbing up the cliff to safety! It makes me uneasy here to lean out over the safe rail of the overlook, I cannot begin to imagine the courage it took to even attempt the leap.

Just downstream, in John Bryan State Park, the rock is slightly softer and the gorge opens to a quarter mile or so but still retains impressive cliffs. John Bryan purchased, in 1896, 335 acres along the Clifton gorge area and called these acres "Riverside Farm." The Cincinnati-Pittsburgh stagecoach road served the area and settlers began establishing water-powered industries such as a textile mill, grist mills and sawmills in the gorge. After the turn of the century water power was no longer as economical as electricity and the industries in the rugged gorge closed. At the top of the gorge in Clifton the only surviving mill still is in operation and is famous for its Christmas light displays, one of the best in the state.
Close to John Bryan State Park, the North Country Trail and Buckeye Trail enter From the west and Dayton. For the next 15 miles to Spring Valley, the Little Miami trail is managed by Greene County. At Xenia Station, it meets the Creekside Trail, as well as the Prairie Grass Trail, on which the Ohio to Erie Trail continues north to Columbus.

Little Miami State Park (nothing changes but the name) begins at Hedges Road in Spring Valley and follows U.S. 42 into Warren County. It passes through Corwin (near Waynesville), Caesar Creek State Park, and Oregonia, where the Buckeye Trail rejoins. Corwin and Waynesville are home to many fine places to take a break from the trail and enjoy the dozens of antique and specialty shops that dot the towns as well as enjoy a good meal in one of the fine restaurants. South of Waynesville the trail enters another wooded gorge and passes close by the lovely Corwin M. Nixon covered bridge, possibly the prettiest covered bridge you will ever see. At Fort Ancient, the trail runs under the awesome twin Jeremiah Morrow Bridges and Interstate 71. The bridges are 239 feet above the river, and are the tallest bridges in Ohio. The bridges are an amazing 2300 feet long spanning the Little Miami in a huge wooded gorge. The trail then passes through the towns of Morrow and South Lebanon to the Middletown Junction, where the Lebanon Countryside Trail begins and runs 7 miles to Lebanon.
The Little Miami trail continues south, past Kings Mills on the opposite bank. At this location the historic Peters Cartridge Company factory overlooks the bike trail. The site of several tragic accidents, the facility is reputed to be among Ohio's most haunted places! The trail passes under U.S. 22/State Route 3 at Fosters, across the river and under one of the prettiest bridges in the country. It continues entering Clermont County and beautiful Loveland, where it is known as the Loveland Bike Trail.
The trail crosses to the western, Hamilton County side of the Little Miami River, as it meets State Route 126 (Glendale–Milford Road). The trail passes by Camp Dennison and its former southern stopping point in Milford. A 2006 extension carries the Little Miami State Park along Wooster Pike to Terrace Park. From here, the Loveland section of the Buckeye Trail splits off, going to Eden Park in Cincinnati. A short Hamilton County Park District extension brings the Little Miami trail back across the river to the Little Miami Golf Center in Newtown. Hamilton County Park District intends to extend the Little Miami Scenic Trail to Clear Creek. From there, it will follow the Little Miami River to its mouth past Lunken Field in California. At the Ohio River, the trail will meet the Ohio River Trail and continue west to Cincinnati.
The Little Miami bike trail follows the right-of-way of the old Little Miami Railroad, maintained by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources as Little Miami State Park. The long, thin state park passes though four counties, with a right-of-way somewhere 50 miles long and roughly 65 feet wide for a total of about 700 plus acres. Along the rest of it's length the corridor averages around 10 feet in width.

After the fall...

.

.
The Little Miami River valley is home to some of the finest woodlands still left in Ohio. From the lovely woods lining the river banks for much of it's length to the big forests around Fort Ancient to the stunning cliffs and grand woods of John Bryan State Park, great woodlands are just part of the Little Miami River experience. I guess it is a perfect example of the dichotomy that is your average human being or at least me in particular that while fall is my favorite time of the year, it is for me a time of melancholy and deep sadness. I find a walk thru the fallen leaves brings out regrets, memories of things long past, even fears of things to come. For in the autumn I see signs of our mortality everywhere. Portents that those we love and cherish will age and die. I start dwelling on old sayings like "you can never step in the same river twice" and ponder the possibility of how so much of the best of myself has already been wasted.In part to combat this angst and also out of genuine wonder and enterest I have thrown myself into the study of the nuts and bolts of what actually happens in the fall. The miracle that returns both ourselves and the fallen leaves back into the great circle of life. Of how reduced to our most basic componets, bits of nitrogen, carbon, water and mineral, we are never really gone. We are made up of everything that has gone before and everything that comes later will contain us. I can see how some would find religion in that. The Druids worshiping the Earth under their sacred oaks seem to me sometimes to have been ahead of their time. Or possibly we have just lost something in ours. A man I worked with had a wonderful brass loupe, a magnifying glass for looking at the individual pixels that make up each letter of a printed word. After expressing my admiration of it, I was shocked at his generosity in giving it to me. The first thing I looked at with my new toy was a freshly fallen leaf. How amazing is this tiny feat of natural engineering built to do one of natures true miracles, the work of photosynthesis. And yet there on this leaf that had just fallen today were the signs of its future destruction, or possibly rebirth. For in tiny patches along it's main rib were growing two blotches of fungi. Fungi may be the most important thing on earth that your average person knows practically nothing about. I thought I knew somethings, after all I could tell the difference between a puffball and a morel, a chicken of the woods and a boletus mushroom. Well it turns out these are no more fungi than a single dogwood flower is a tree. For the bulk of the fungi, the part that does the real heavy lifting, is the network or matrix of thin strands called hayphae. These hyphae form a network in the topmost layer of soil and leaf litter called a mycelial network. Mycelial networks work their way into dead branches, rotten logs, feces, fallen leaves, animal carcasses, etc. Some networks even seem to link up with the root systems of living trees, sponging off the tree but giving back by passing along some of the nutrients gathered by the network of hyphae. Most of the hyphae strands are too small to see with the naked eye but the larger strands are visable as a white mesh permeating piles of old leaves or seen as you break apart rotting wood on the forest floor. The total amount of fungi in the forest is staggering. There are an estimated one and a half million different kinds and estimates usually come out at somewhere around a thousand pounds of hyphae per acre on the entire land surface of the earth, with higher amounts in areas of heavy vegatation like our woodlands. Or to put it another way over 4000 lbs of fungi per person on the planet!
Although plant eaters from as large as deer to as small as insects eat huge amounts of plant material over 90% goes directly to the decomposers in the form of fallen leaves, branches, logs etc. Add to this things like walnut and acorn shells, flowers in springtime that last just a while, plants such as nettles or trillium that die back completely every fall and the carcass of everything that dies( think of the millions of cicadas in a breakout year), animal poop...well, the list of garbage on the forest floor is endless. All waiting their turn to be broken down into their most basic parts and recycled back into more oak, more maple, more deer, more chipmunk. A single maple leaf may weigh at most four hundreths of an ounce but by november over a ton and a half covers the ground on every acre of woodland. How many fallen leaves lie on the big hillside behind my cabin in the woods? Like counting the number of stars in the universe it is a number too large to comprehend. A number too big for my calculater to handle even if I tried to do the math. Yet all returned, recycled, reborn by the the mycelial networks covering the forest floor. Helping the fungi in this work is an even stranger army of creatures that break down the leaves into smaller and ever smaller bits. Sift thru an old pile of rotting leaves and you will find a myriad of tiny creatures. From tiny arthropods such as pillbugs, to comparatively large earthworms to diminutive monsters like pseudo-scorpions and springtails. A look thru a microscope would reveal untold numbers of protazoans and bacteria hard at work also. Some of the wildest creatures are also among the hardest to see. For this purpose I once built a Berlese funnel out of an old paint can. I cut the bottom out of the can and covered this with a cloth secured by rubber bands. Under the cloth I placed a funnel leading down into a jar of water. Into the paint can I dumped a shovel full of rich humus from nearby Halls Creek Wood. On top of the can I then placed a light borrowed from Gary the pet lizards cage. The light dried out the soil from the top down driving the tiny animals deeper and deeper till they finally worked their way thru the cloth and into the jar. My goodness what monsters were revealed when viewed thru a magnifying glass. Springtails, mites, false scorpions and a plethora of tiny creatures I couldn't name. Remember Creepy Crawlers? The soft plastic creatures you made by pouring that goo from bottles into the square metal molds. Remember how you squeezed in the goo and then baked them and out comes a scarey bug like thing with giant pincers and lots of legs with little claws on the ends? Well, thats exactly what alot of these tiny creatures look like. Existing all around us by the billions and trillions. Even comparatively large creatures like millipedes, centipedes, or earthworms are present in numbers that stagger the imagination. Earthworms alone can reach totals of around 900 pounds per acre in rich leaf compost. Just try to picture in your head 900 pounds of earthworms. Slugs and snails can total as much as 400 pounds per acre. If you suddenly had Godlike powers and could miraculously seperate every pillbug, worm, slime mold, fungi, springtail, bacteria etc., (again the list is nearly endless) in an acre of woodland scientists say you would end up with over five tons. All working somehow seamlessly as part of a perfect system. If God exists he's here, in the details.


"Split a piece of wood... and I am there,
lift a stone... and you will find me."



All working to recycle last year into the new. Breaking everything down into basic pieces of nitrogen, phosporus, calcium, etc. and returning these back into the circle of life. Every bit of you has passed thru this cycle countless times already and will do so again. The atoms that made up our ancestors surround us in the trees, in the rivers, inside ourselves. The huge great circle of life is way too complicated for anyone to ever fully understand, anyone who would claim to do so shows how little they really do know. But to understand a tiny bit, to glimpse how everything fits together perfectly, to me that somehow brings solace to the bittersweet experience of fall.
.

.

.

.

.


.

.

.

.

.

.

.


.

.

.

.

.

.


.

.

Matching the "hatch"

.
In today's fishing world dominated by bass tournaments on huge lakes, there are literally thousands of imitations of everything that bass feed on in lakes. But check the box of the typical stream fisherman and your lucky to find much more than a half dozen different lures and some of these are still more at home in still water. There are some inline spinners like the roostertail and minnow plugs like the rapala that do a good job of imitating the minnows and chubs that live in the streams pools and backwaters but that's about it. But the small fish that inhabit the riffles and runs of our smallmouth streams and rivers have been completely ignored, for often these look nothing like the silvery minnows of the backwaters. For instance in my home water, the Little Miami River there are no less than 13 different species of darters and five species of madtoms that live in it's riffles. All these little fish use strong pectoral fins to hold their place among the rocks in the swift current. When viewed from above (like a foraging smallmouth looking for food) these fins are a very noticeable feature of most darters and madtoms.
.

.
These little fish seemingly come in an endless variety of colors ranging from quite dull to brighter than any aquarium fish. Many darter species change color also during breeding season to attract a mate. I've tried to come up with a few simple ways to imitate these little known but important members of the food chain.
.

.

.

Using acrylic paints, leadheaded jigs can be painted to give you a wide variety of color schemes to try during the days fishing. A coat of clear fingernail polish protects the paint from chipping on the rocky stream bottom. A round ball jig best imitates madtoms and pointier types more closely resemble most darter species. Having a few of both types in a variety of colors gives you more options to experiment with on the water.
.

.

.


Then take a grub or plastic worm and cut a triangle out of the tail with scissors. This triangle is threaded on the jighead ahead of another grub to represent the prominent pectoral fins of your darter or madtom. Often there are a few species on every riffle with pectoral fins that are brightly tinged with color and using a triangle cut out of a grub that contrasts in color with the grub used for the body of the jig can make a big difference.
.

.

.

.
As there are often multiple species of darters and madtoms on the riffle togethor, the smallmouth are used to feeding on a wide variety of colors. I carry several different colors of triangles already cut out in my tackle box as well as a variety of different colored grubs. By mixing and matching different triangles with different grub bodies you can experiment around to find the combination that works best on any given day.
.

.

.
The main constants are size and the prominent pectoral fins. I almost always fish a three inch grub on an eighth ounce jighead and just vary colors.

Darters and madtoms spend almost their entire lives among the rocks of a stream's riffles and runs, the same places smallmouths move into to feed. Fish your imitation along the bottom in short quick motions or let it sweep along the bottom in the current, as these little fish do not swim up high in the water column or in schools, but as the name implies dart from rock to rock. These little guys are almost never caught in traditional minnow traps but are only seen by using a seine right among the rocks of the riffle.

Another resident you will seine out of these riffles, and a main reason smallmouth move in to feed, is the crayfish. While there are some great crayfish imitations out there such as the jig and pig, these are mostly just simply too big to imitate the small crayfish that stream smallmouth love.
.

.
A modified double-tailed grub makes one of the best imitations of these little craws I know of. I first use the jig head like a crochet needle to pull living rubber through the grubs body to make legs. I then trim these to length with scissors.
.

.

.

.

.
Just like darters, crayfish can vary wildly in color and it pays to have different combinations of bodies and legs. Sometime a bit of bright orange or red living rubber can be key in triggering smallmouth when they are in a picky mood. Finding out more about the things that smallmouth feed on in your stream and adding baits that imitate them can add new dimensions to your stream fishing arsenal.
.

.

.

A pocket full of fun...

I often can't sleep at night, a product of years spent working the late shift I guess. I'll turn on the Outdoor Channel and watch those guys dressed like Nascar drivers fishing exotic locations with $30,000 bass boats loaded down with more gear than my father's old bait shop had stocked on the shelves. And that kind of fishing is fun, I admit it. I have hundreds of lures and thousands of flies and dozens of rod and reel combos and have been known to head out looking like I'm heading down the Congo for a month instead of fishing the Little Miami for a couple hours. But do you really need all that junk to have a quality fishing trip? Of course not. You can have a great trip, possibly the best trip of the year and fit everything you need in a shirt pocket. You really only need three or four basic pieces of terminal tackle to catch fish almost every single time you fish a river like the Little Miami. First off get a pack or two of baitholder hooks in size two or four. You can substitute a similar sized hook of another style but baitholders are available almost everywhere and work great. You might want to add a pack of treble hooks in size eight too. Next get a pack of barrel swivels or two and some egg sinkers and your set. Rigging is simplicity itself. The egg sinker is slid onto the line and a barrel swivel is tied into the line about a foot down from the hook. This is idealy fished on a medium spinning outfit and six or eight pound test line. The rig is then tossed out, the rod set in a forked stick and a pebble from the riverbank placed on the line so you can leave the bail open without the line being carried away by the current. More than the tackle the key to catching at least some fish every trip depends on location. Where you want to set up is in a well defined hole just below a nice riffle. Right where the current first begins to slow. If there is an eddy and a deep pocket even better. Too many people fishing bait in the river just set up in the middle of a long slow hole away from the riffle, cover, or the main current. Most of the time this is a recipe for catching little or nothing. Thread on a nightcrawler and fish below a good riffle and you might catch just about anything in the river from all the catfish species, to the occasional bass or carp. In addition nowdays you are just about guaranteed to catch a drum or two (or ten). Any time the water temperature rises above the upper fifties a nightcrawler on light line just about guarantees some drum. Switch to minnows and you might just catch a nice sauger, white bass, or flathead. Baiting up with crayfish in the two or three inch range can also catch just about anything that swims. Change the baitholder out with the treble hook and bait up with a doughball made of wheaties and hamburger and your set for channel cats and carp. Trust me catching a half dozen five or six pound carp on light spinning tackle will change the way you look at these guys forever.
I must admit my favorite way to fish the river is wading the river casting for smallmouth bass with lures but even on these trips I often throw a dozen nightcrawlers in the daypack. About midday I'm ready for a break and stop at a nice riffle and throw this rig out while I eat a sandwich. It's amazing just how often this "break" produces the most memorable fish of the day...

Three knots every fisherman needs...

A bowline knot, also known as a bowline hitch is used to let a bait swing freely in a loop giving it more action.




The Bloodknot is used to tie two pieces of line togethor in a knot that is both super strong and will pass easily thru your guides. Used to tie new line to old when refilling a spool or adding a tippet to a leader when flyfishing.



The Trilene Knot is in my book the most reliable way to tie a hook or lure on. It takes a bit of practice at first but soon becomes second nature.