We may not be birdwatchers in the Audubon Society sense, but we do watch the birds, we fisherfolk, because we know that where the birds are there’s a good chance we’ll find fish there as well. Fishing for blues and stripers, we look for a crazed cloud of seabirds, knowing that they’re feasting on baitfish and that there’s a similar, darker cloud of predatory fish beneath the surface. One day I was out for a walk on the Cape Cod National Seashore when I spotted a bird cloud virtually on the beach and I trotted down the sand to join them. I waded into the thick of a primeval drama, a survival passion play. Feeding blues and stripers had driven a shoal of baitfish onto the beach. Every few seconds a bright silver cloud of bait erupted from the surf, the little fish leaping into the air, many of them falling onto the sand, desperate to escape the jaws below. The jaws above were no less forgiving. The feeding gulls and terns, completely absorbed in their feeding frenzy, ignored my intrusion and hacked away at the little fish flopping on the beach and those massed at the waterline. I waded in up to my knees. Huge stripers swam all around me, lunging for mouthfuls of the bait, coming within a foot of my bare legs before veering off.

Earlier I had spotted a boat trolling offshore, and the two anglers aboard had finally spotted the action, gunned the boat and pulled up fifty yards off the beach where I was and began casting toward shore. Immediately their rods bent and they were both onto fish. But what they hauled over the side were big blues, not the stripers that were assaulting the beach. Each school seemed to have its piece of underwater turf, but there was plenty of food to go around so they respected the separation of powers. All I could do was watch the amazing scene that I was literally immersed in and marvel at it all.

[Note to self: Never walk on the beach without a fishing rod.]

But that’s a sea story. What about birds and freshwater fishing? Again, where the birds are is often where the fish are. At Lower Dam on the Rapid one day, I noticed a lot of bird activity right around the dam and went up for a closer look. A number of birds (don't ask me what kind) were perching on the remnants of the dam, looking alertly this way and that, as if they were waiting for something to happen. Then it happened: a big fat stonefly, fresh out of its shuck, took to the air. The bug’s first and last flight was very short and ended happily – for a bird, which swooped in and nailed the stone in midair. I watched this scene repeated a dozen times in a couple of minutes before my synapses sparked and my little angler’s brain said, “Tie on a stonefly, you idiot!”

On a trout pond one day, getting blown around by a wet, raw spring wind which was whipping up whitecaps on the slate-gray water, I was catching nothing but, possibly, pneumonia. Then I spotted a flock of swallows, swooping and darting. Their swoops and darts were well-focused over a particular area of the pond, so I paddled over to see what was up. A mayfly hatch was up, but I would never have seen it, or the swirls of feeding fish, because of the chop on the water and the stinging wind in my eyes. I started casting a small pheasant-tail nymph and started catching fish. One swallow doth not a summer make, but a bunch of them can lead you to a pretty good day.