re: Craziest Thing You've ever Seen on the water while fishing or in the outdoors

I've seen some crazy, hilarious and downright frightening things in the woods.

The creepiest though was when I was about 15.

My best friend at the time and I used to fish what we called "3 track bridges" in central Oklahoma. There were three consecutive bridges down the train tracks about two miles east of town and the fishing was pretty good at two of them.

The first bridge is over an overflow area from a very shallow 25 acre flood plane that was designated as a wildlife preserve by Oklahoma Game and Fish. The second bridge is over a creek slough, and the third is over the creek itself.

Every two or three years, it would rain enough that the game preserve watershed, which was around 20 surface acres of water, would rise and actually flow out over the earthen embankments under the first bridge. When this happened, it would wash fish out of the wildlife preserve... big fish. Big fish that had never once seen a fishing lure and you could catch them nearly every cast.

Might sound like complete bullshite but I swear this is true. My buddy and I would have tu take turns carrying our stringers of fish back to town when the first bridge would flood under it. 2 to 3 pound crappie were average. 4 to 8 pound bass were average. It was absolutely insane.

So one morning just after a monster rain, my buddy and I were walking the tracks to that spot with our rods and tackle boxes to see if it had flooded. As we got there it was that twilight time in the AM where everything is still dark, but you can start seeing trees pretty decently against the sky. It was early spring so the trees weren't completely leafy yet and still appeared pretty barren of leaves.

We began to notice that were things perched in the trees. It was too dark to tell but as the morning light increased it became obvious that it was owls. A lot of owls. Barred owls, barn owls and horned owls. Sometimes 20-30 owls in a single tree, and we could see literally hundreds of owls just from our vantage point. Not one of them ever made a sound. Just sat there in complete silence, staring at us. Every one of them that we could see, looking right at us.

We're both Native American and we got the hell out of there with a quickness. We came back later in the day and they were all gone. The following morning and every morning thereafter, they were gone. Never heard of such a thing. Only saw it once.

Have talked to game wardens and they've never heard of such a thing. Talked to the county Fish and Game Biologists and they both said that owls do not congregate like that or behave socially like that at all, period. Also spoke to several Tribal elders from different local tribes who all said we were right to leave, but had no explanation.

None of the people we told had ever even heard of this happening before, nor had any clue why it would have happened. That was 25 years ago and it still gives me the chills and makes me wonder.