Cane Rod, Or Bird Perch?

Three or four times when I was guiding in the Florida Keys — always on some 10-mile flat without a tree in site — a migrating warbler would come sit on the end of my pushpole while I was poling. In those cases, I doubt the tired little bird would have cared what my pole was made of, but in Chris Yates’s profile of cane rod builder Edward Barder, I think he gets it right: “Once, I wasn’t even looking when my visitor arrived; it was just the sudden soft thump on the rod that made me glance around to behold a miraculous coloured bird, staring down, ready to pounce on any tiddler. Somehow, I think these encounters might not have occurred had I been using a carbon rod.” In the London Telegraph.