We’ve all heard stories about the healing power of water and fly fishing. At Trout Unlimited, our chapters and volunteers devote significant resources to helping physically and emotionally wounded veterans heal from the horrors of war. But it’s more than that. Ask any die-hard fly fisher why they fish, and, after getting through all the…
Above: Native brook trout from the northwest Ontario interior. Photo courtesty of Paul Smith. Below: The author holds a brook trout from Argentina’s Corcovado River. When those of us here in the lower 48 think of brook trout, we might think of boulder-hopping in a secret Appalachian canyon that has managed for more than two…
Gill lice in a Wisconsin brook trout. Photo courtesy of Wisconsin Trout Unlimited. By Jack Williams In Wisconsin, Department of Natural Resources staff are finding increasing rates of gill lice parasitism in brook trout as waters warm. In North Carolina, the same gill lice have been found for the first time on brook trout from…
Thousands of miles of trout streams in New Mexico are susceptible to the historic drought plaguing the Southwest. TU just helped protect 305 of them.
In my cusped hands dripped a lustrous jewel. Its belly was streaked pink, and the rest of its body speckled in luminescent hues of amber and bronze. The overall effect was that of a fine watercolor, hand-painted by a master. It was a gem of a fish.
Here’s a case study for why we need a new approach to abandoned mine cleanups
By Zack Hoisington On July 14, 2019, I found myself in uncharted territory, driving north through upstate New York on highway 87 into Adirondack State Park. As the sun started to lower, I noticed a sign for Montreal. Although I have spent very little time in this part of the country, something told me I was going the wrong direction. I had…
Trout Unlimited developed three conservation planning products to help identify strategic conservation opportunities and evaluate potential projects within the range of Eastern Brook Trout in the eastern United States. The Conservation Portfolio uses the 3-R framework (Representation, Resiliency, and Redundancy) to evaluate each population patch for resiliency to disturbances, likelihood of demographic persistence, and representation…
New water is always exciting, and, while I’ve fished Idaho’s Salmon River a lot for steelhead over the years, I’d never poked into the river’s extreme upper reaches at the base of Galena Summit, where the Sawtooths spread out to the northwest. My thought—and, frankly, my hope—was to get into some native west slope cutthroats…
Special thanks to Carolyn Thomas, a middle school science teacher at Wildwood Middle School in Shenandoah Junction, WV for today’s video. Her students worked with staff and volunteers at the National Conservation Training Center outside of Shepherdstown, WV, on this project, and they have a long list of conservation partners who work with students throughout…
Our video post yesterday on an upcoming brook trout film got a lot of traction—it’s clear that I’m not the only guy out there who loves brookies, even if catching them here in the West means I’m catching a non-native fish that’s likely contributed to the decline of native cutthroat trout. Let’s be completely clear…
Here’s one for the romantics in fly fishing—a teaser video to larger project to come about chasing native brook trout. I grew up in Colorado, fishing for introduced brookies in small headwater streams in the Rocky Mountain high country. As a kid, I had no idea that the fish I caught didn’t belong in the…
https://login.tu.org/sites/default/files/blog/20160519_145145_resized_7%5B7%5D.jpg Salter brook trout tend to be heavy for their length. (Jeff Reardon photo.) By Jeff Reardon I recently returned from five days in eastern Maine with a group of volunteers from TU, Maine Audubon and the Sea Run Brook Trout Coalition (SRBTC), along with staff from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife…
Goals No matter how clean and cold the water is for brook trout, a bountiful population cannot occur without a significant amount of uninterrupted stream mileage to allow the fish to move throughout the length of stream. Streams like Clark Brook, Oliverian Brook and Eastman Brook in western central New Hampshire have habitat characteristics of…
