Maryland fall 2021 - part 1

It may be warm and sunny in Florida, but the rest of the country has been cooling off. Ally and I recently traveled up to Maryland for a three day weekend, and before we left we had to dig in our closets to find our winter coats to survive the frigid temps. Seeing the fall colors more than made up for the chilly weather.

We knew fishing would be tough, and most of the species wouldn't be colorful, but we picked out a few targets and made a plan to target them. First up was the Blue Ridge sculpin for both of us and a decent list of minnows for Ally. We fished a medium sized stream in the mountains and quickly caught a few different minnow species.

Bluntnose Minnow (Pimephales notatus)


Common Shiner (Luxilus cornutus)

I switched gears to focus on sculpin, but I wasn't seeing any among the rocks. However, I did find a well camouflaged northern hogsucker tucked under a rock and pointed it out to Ally. She put a piece of worm in front of its mouth, and a few minutes later I saw her dashing up the bank with the fish in hand.

I moved upstream to the next riffle and continued poking around for sculpin. This time I had no trouble finding them. After two failed hooksets I finally got a big sculpin to take my bait and get him to hand. The unnotched caudal peduncle bar confirmed that it was a Blue Ridge!

Blue Ridge Sculpin (Cottus caeruleomentum) - new hook & line species #798

The chin pigmentation and median chin pores also support the ID, but because there is significant variation within the species, I think as a hobbyist you ultimately have to use location as the most important evidence for separating Blue ridge from mottled sculpin.

Ally captured my fish-in-hand-in-water photography technique, which is also the reason why my lower back is sore whenever we go microfishing.

Photo credit Ally Toth.

We promised ourselves we wouldn't spend all our free time in Maryland fishing, so after we caught all the easy species in the creek we went for a trail run in the mountains. The views from the overlooks were pretty good.

The next morning we fished an urban stream that had fallfish for me and tessellated darter and another handful of minnows for Ally. It was an easy stream to access, and right away we saw fish.

We started off catching small minnows. Ally caught a satinfin shiner, and I caught a few creek chubs. We didn't see any fallfish or tessellated darters though.

Creek Chub (Semotilus atromaculatus)

We worked our way upstream until we found a run with good flow and more rocks. We spotted a few darters and got to work fishing for them.

It didn't take long for each of us to catch a tessellated darter, and we also picked up swallowtail shiner. Neither was a new species for me, but both were much needed photo upgrades for my lifelist album.

Tesselated Darter (Etheostoma olmstedi)


Swallowtail Shiner (Notropis procne)

I scouted further upstream and found a deep pool with a fallen tree providing cover at one end. It had a few big chubs in it, so I tied on a larger #14 hook and put on half a worm. I dropped it in the shadow of the fallen tree, and a bigger chub dashed out and grabbed it. My first fallfish!

Fallfish (Semotilus corporalis) - new hook & line species #799


With one more species to go to reach 800, we headed towards the coast to fish saltwater...