Eastern Conservation

The West Branch of the Susquehanna River is far healthier than it had been 25 years ago, showing vast improvements in the fish and insect life, thanks to TU and its partners' efforts, according to its West Branch Susquehanna Recovery Benchmark Project findings.

Trout Unlimited is hosting the West Branch Susquehanna Recovery Benchmark Celebration at 11a.m. at the state park off Route 120 in western Clinton County, featuring among its guests John Arway, executive director of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, and John Stefanko, action deputy secretary for the Department of Environmental Protection's Office of Mineral Resources Management.

They electrofish Middle Branch's entire stream length (about one mile) once a year. Last year, they only found four trout; the year before, they'd found none. By the end of the mile this year, Dunlap stood sweating, but beaming. They'd caught 26 trout, measuring in size from 80 mL to 164 mL. That's a sixfold increase in just one year.

Trout Unlimited has released its West Branch Susquehanna Recovery Benchmark Project findings and the results show a tremendous improvement in the water quality, fleshing out in more brook trout and insect life in the West Branch in many places that were considered "dead" due to acid mine drainage, the number one source of pollution in Pennsylvania's waterways.

For Trout Unlimited, most of its passion is about water quality. We love its missions statement: To conserve, protect and restore North America's coldwater fisheries and their watersheds. No doubt Trout Unlimited is doing a lot of work to restore the health of area waterways, most noticeably the West Branch of the Susquehanna River and its nemesis: Acid mine drainage from abandoned mines.

Pennsylvania fishery biologists are wrapping up the second year of a major effort to explore wild trout streams they have never before assessed, in areas increasingly vulnerable to impacts from development.

“The thinking of most farmers is that they want to leave the land better than they found it,” says Mike Rudolph, a rancher from West Virginia.  “They are conservation-minded to begin with, and that is kind of a commonsense practice that you were taught growing up.” 

With the stream gurgling in the background, a group of conservationists, fishermen and supporters got together Thursday afternoon to celebrate the removal of an aging dam in Moshannon State Forest. 

“A dam is like a cork in a bottle — nothing comes in and nothing goes out,” said Ken Undercoffer, president of the Pennsylvania Council of Trout Unlimited. 

He said Pennsylvania had been “an angler’s paradise at one time.” Often brook water trout are now confined to headwater streams and can no longer move through a watershed, in part because of dams. 

Volunteers are being sought to head into the wilds of Maine to find and fish for previously-undocumented populations of wild brook trout in remote ponds.

Maine Audubon is partnering on the project with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and Trout Unlimited.

Anglers can choose one or more of 187 ponds in western Maine to find and fish, Christian Neal MilNeil, Maine Audubon communications manager, said Wednesday afternoon in a news release.