Native Brook Trout

When I was a kid back home, Brookies & Beaver ponds were a passion!
 
As a kid, growing up in PA, it was the only fish available in our local creeks within bike distance. It was a special time in the fall when the stocked browns would ascend these little creeks. Can't imagine being tired of catching wild, native, brookies, in favor of pellet fed browns. Live and learn.
 
Brook trout are beautiful. I fish for them on the East fork of the B river and smaller tributaries of it. Also RC drainage. A lake in W MT. has a large population of them. While not native, introduced in late 1800's, they are fun to catch.

I have fished for them in the Appalachians when I lived in the South.

Fun times...
 
Brook trout in their fall spawning splendor have long been a passion for many of us.

Here in Pend Oreille County an attempt is being made to eliminate brookies which have compromised East Slope Cutthroat habitant. To that end they have announced a plan to poison them out of one creek that was historically ESC territory. I know little about this other than the announcement but it strikes me as strange as the creek flows into the Pend Oreille River and the POR has every fish imaginable in it. The POR is the second largest river in Washington and as it flows into Canada it is a series of relatively slow moving impoundments with a number of small streams contributing to it along the way. It is unclear how they can poison one of these tribs and make it stick, trout will always find the cooler water with spawning gravel and take up residence.

I await more information on this, wondering if it is just another "wet dream" on the part of fish managers or if they can possibly eradicate all brookies from the drainage and replace them with ESC. It seems like it could only be a temporary fix at best as the river contains brookies, rainbows, brown trout and others. Freestone and I fish another little creek that flows into the Pend Oreille and up high in that drainage we have caught 4 species of trout on several occasions.
 
If only we didn’t do permanent damage to our ecosystem already, rainbows would still just be west coast and brookies in the east. Massachusetts just keeps stocking and stocking those non natives for the power bait folks, so the future is kind of bleak for the native brookies.
 
If only we didn’t do permanent damage to our ecosystem already, rainbows would still just be west coast and brookies in the east. Massachusetts just keeps stocking and stocking those non natives for the power bait folks, so the future is kind of bleak for the native brookies.
I always wanted to go fishing for the searun brookies ("salters") off the MA coast, but never got to make it happen.
 
I always wanted to go fishing for the searun brookies ("salters") off the MA coast, but never got to make it happen.
There’s a whole group of people out here trying their best to conserve the salters, one day I’m gonna make the couple hour trip to the coast to try my hand.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Zak
Starting when I was about 8 or 9 years old I made my summers fly by much too quickly on a number of tiny brooks, as we called them, in central Vermont, fishing for the only kind of trout that I then knew existed. Now more than 60 years later and having fished for all fish called trout from New Zealand to Russia, Canada to Norway and all over the states when I think of trout fishing the first thing that comes to mind is crawling on my hands and knees through the stream side thickets to flip a worm next to an undercut bank, excited because I knew exactly what was about to happen.
 
Last edited:
There’s a whole group of people out here trying their best to conserve the salters, one day I’m gonna make the couple hour trip to the coast to try my hand.
The Searun Brook Trout Coalition, right?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Dez
A lake in W MT. has a large population of them.
I grew-up on that lake and I dearly miss fishing it in September. I needed dark glasses just to look at those gloriously-colored Brookies. I even developed a pattern that was my go-to September pattern; I christened it "Brookies' Demise."
 
I grew-up on that lake and I dearly miss fishing it in September. I needed dark glasses just to look at those gloriously-colored Brookies. I even developed a pattern that was my go-to September pattern; I christened it "Brookies' Demise."
I was fortunate enough to watch the brookies spawn in the small tributaries. It is amazing, too...
 
Last edited:
I was fortunate enough to watch the brookies spawn in the small tributaries. It is amazing, too...
It is that. The brushy upper reaches of those tribs were challenging fishing in the summer, with mostly small fish but the occasional exciting surprises . . . some in the form of very large Brookies and others in the image of even larger Moose of the mostly cantankerous variety.
 
Back
Top