Visit a nearby river and observe the ecosystem.

“One of the things I like about fly fishing is that you hang out in the river and that if you do that enough, some pretty cool things happen. It’s this aspect of fly fishing that is the hardest for me to convey to non-anglers. [...] I remember standing quietly in a stream as a beaver floated right over my feet, he never knew I was there. Or the time we saw an osprey take a trout that I would have been thrilled to catch. [...] I start to notice the fish, then the bugs, then the birds and I start to blend in to it all. For a moment there, I’m just another part of the river. It never lasts long, but it’s there for a flash.”

“I am constantly astonished at the diversity of form and fluctuation of fluvial processes within each waterway I visit. Even the same stream, like the one in this story, which I visit nearly daily, reveals new faces, flow patterns, substrate changes, sounds, and reflections. I am either greeted with times of abundant lifeforms and times of lifelessness, but always a reason for pause.”