There's a trick for every treat in the outdoors this time of year.

Byline: INSIDE THE OUTDOORS By Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

Tricks and treats from the outdoors beat:

Trick: Deer decoy, "Bear in the Air." Oregon State Police set up another of their deer decoy traps for would-be poachers on Friday night. Drew Davis, 23, of Springfield, shot the decoy while it was illuminated in his vehicle's headlights, police say. Davis was cited for hunting deer out of season and for hunting with the aid of an artificial light.

Meanwhile, a state police officer patrolling in a light plane directed officers on the ground to two Cottage Grove men who were cited for spotlighting while armed. The plane helped nab a total of eight individuals who were on Weyerhaeuser Co. land Friday night - a time when the property is closed to the public. All were cited for trespassing.

Treat: Summer steelhead fishing in the Willamette Basin. Without much fanfare, the 2006 summer steelhead run has been providing better than expected action for anglers in the Santiam, McKenzie and upper Willamette rivers.

Nearly 19,400 steelhead have been counted moving through the fish passage at Willamette Falls so far this year. That compares with 14,063 in 2006. Adipose fin-clipped steelhead may be harvested year-round, and veteran anglers say late October and November can provide some of the best fishing - especially if water conditions are favorable.

Trick: Deadly fish disease walking. Oregon State University researchers recently established that the parasite responsible for causing deadly `whirling disease' in juvenile trout and other salmonids may be transmitted from one fishing hole to another - and from one stream to another - on fishing boots and waders.

Most of the spread of whirling disease within the United States over the past half- century can be traced to the movement of infected fish through hatcheries, researchers say. But whirling disease has recently begun to show up in streams not stocked with infected fish.

`The bottom line is that we've found that the spores that eventually infect the fish and lead to whirling disease can survive out of water for eight hours,' said Paul Reno, a microbiologist with OSU's Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station in Newport. Laboratory tests showed that the spores can hitch a ride to new waters on boots and waders, among other things, and "become viable when reintroduced into clean water containing trout.'

In Oregon, whirling disease has been identified over the past two decades in tributaries of the Grande Ronde system in the northeastern part of the state, and more recently in Clear Creek on the Clackamas River system.

Treat: Coho salmon fishing in the Willamette basin. Normally the Willamette River system above Willamette Falls is closed to the harvest of non-fin-clipped coho salmon, and fin-clipped silvers can be taken only through Oct. 31. But this year's run was well above average, prompting the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to announce a rule change extending the season and allowing the harvest of any coho, fin-clipped or not.

"Because of the large number of coho and jack coho salmon passing over the Willamette Falls this year - over 6,500 coho and an additional 1,500 jack coho -the decision was made to give anglers an unprecedented opportunity to catch these fish,' said Todd Alsbury, North Willamette Watershed District Fish Biologist. `This unique opportunity is possible because these fish are offspring of hatchery fish and are not subject to the typical restrictions placed on native coho salmon elsewhere in the state.'

Most of these coho move into tributaries at the northern end of the Willamette Valley, but some make it as far as the Santiam River system.

The trick in this is actually catching one of these valley coho, which are notoriously poor biters.

Trick: Anti-hunting postage. Voters in Michigan next week will decide whether to repeal that state's designation of the mourning dove as a gamebird, as opposed to a songbird. (Michigan became the the 41st state to permit dove hunting in 2004.)

What really raised the ire of hunters nationwide was tricky use of U.S. postage in the attempt to stamp out dove hunting.

The Humane Society of the United States - an anti-hunting organization that is not to be confused with local humane societies - arranged for the issuance of a series of stamps featuring photos of doves and the slogan `Protect Michigan Mourning Doves.'

(Congress approved a one-year trial in which private companies could be licensed by the Postal Service to produce customizable stamps sold via the Internet. The idea was that some people would be willing to pay a premium to stamp their mail with baby photos, corporate logos, or the like. Meanwhile, the Postal Service would collect the value of the postage, without incurring the expense of printing stamps.)

Nobody, however, envisioned custom postage stamps would become ammo in political campaigns. Zazzle.com sold sheets of 20 dove stamps for $14.99, or about 75 cents each for stamps with a 39-cent face value - in spite of a policy prohibiting "material that is primarily partisan or political in nature."

Zazzle "did not anticipate" that the dove stamps "could be seen as advocating a specific agenda," said company marketing director Michael Karns. This in spite of Zazzle.com advertisements stating that 20 percent of its profits from the sale of dove stamps would be donated to the Humane Society and to the Michigan-based Committee to Restore the Dove Ban.

Shortly after a Washington state conservation group filed a formal complaint with the Postal Service, Zazzle's Karns announced "we have concluded that the most prudent course of action is to remove the designs from our website, and to discontinue their sale as postage."

Mike Stahlberg can be reached at mstahlberg@ guardnet.com.