GRAY DAYS BRIGHTENED BY MIGRATING SIGNALS OF SPRING

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, February 25, 1992                   TAG: 9202250097
SECTION: SPORTS                    PAGE: B5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
GRAY DAYS BRIGHTENED BY MIGRATING SIGNALS OF SPRING
Sometimes the journey between winter and spring can seem terribly long, but the other day, for us, it was a brief hike.
We had been along Sawtooth Ridge, where there was winter in the wind, but when we dropped down into Catawba Valley we spotted spring.
It was just beyond where the slanting February sun was sending narrow columns of shadows past the foothill trees onto the edge of the meadows.
At first, we thought we were seeing flocks of common blackbirds, but even in the waning afternoon light we could view individual shapes that were much more dignified.
Robins! They came toward us in huge flocks.
When you have seen robins, you have seen spring, or at least the spirit of spring. Never mind that tomorrow's rain may change to snow. There now is no turning back.
Like passengers on a northbound Greyhound Bus, the flocks were stopping to drop off groups of robins here and there, and these were fanning out and becoming increasingly smaller in number, until one warm spring day they will appear on your lawn in pairs.
The coming of spring is announced most elegantly in the movements and songs of birds, but the great migration of seasons is just as spectacular, although mostly unseen, in the watery depths.
In a more innocent era, spring meant catching the white suckers that would migrate in streams of all gradients and sizes. Like round-nosed, silver-colored torpedoes, these fish would push upstream to deposit their slightly adhesive eggs in the shallows.
We waited for them along the creek channels they used as highways, with our bait in the water and our rod on a forked stick.
Now we are more sophisticated, and go after early spawners like walleye, or we use outboards to follow striped bass that are pressing into the upper ends of lakes where we hope they will "bust" shad all around us.
Sometimes a mild winter can disrupt migrations, although the seasonal movements of even cold-blooded creatures are spurred by the length of the days and the position of the sun as well as temperatures.
Speckled trout already are being caught in the surf at Nags Head, N.C., and researchers recently tagged 1,000 bluefish after locating schools of impressive size in the Atlantic near the Virginia-North Carolina border. These fish apparently did not bother to winter as far south as normal.
Does that mean the big blues this spring will bypass the sudsy surf of the Outer Banks and even the Chesapeake Bay? If you are a Banks or Bay fishermen, the prospects for jumbo fish aren't promising, but it is way too early to tell for certain.
Migrations still are shrouded in mystery, which makes them all the more fascinating, be they flocks of robins in Catawba Valley or schools of fish traveling the continental shelf.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB