WALLAND — A great blue heron on the Little River off Old Walland Highway has spent four seasons picking up the trout Alvin Teague, 74, lets go and setting them down on the gravel beside him.
Teague fishes barbless hooks and puts nearly everything back. The heron, which stands on the same flat rock below the riffle, takes each fish about as fast as he can get the pliers back in his vest. “He doesn’t drop them. He sets them down, sort of, so they’re lying straight,” Teague said. “Then I pick it up and put it back in, and he gives me a minute, and then he goes and gets it again. We did one eleven times on a Thursday. I quit counting after that, but it was the same fish. It had a notch.”
When Teague crosses at the riffle to fish the far bank, the heron flies over ahead of him and the fish end up on that side. “I thought that was pretty nice, honestly. He’d got it worked out which side I was on.”
One rainbow turned up in the cab of his truck in May while he was eating a sandwich with the window down. It was on the passenger-side floor mat and was still alive.