Brook Trout Today

Brookie Paleoichthyology The brook “trout” (Salvelinus fontinalus) is really a char, related to Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus), Dolly Varden (Salvelinus malma), bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus), and lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush). Over 20 million years ago, none of these species yet existed except as potential within a single, common ancestor (Salvelinus). “The earliest fossil of the precursor of Salvelinus dates to the Eocene epoch, some 50 million years ago,” according to Dr. Robert Behnke of Colorado State University. “Salvelinus, the genus of the chars, branched off from the genus of salmon and trout (Oncorhynchus) some 15 to 20 million years ago, during the Miocene.” If trout and salmon are cold-water fish, then the chars are ice-water fish, particularly well adapted to a frozen world. The many ice ages of earth’s recent past (10 have occurred in the past 1 million years) suited brookies well. Char thrived in the icy rivers and lakes formed by melting glaciers. We could say brook trout survived tougher times than these. We would be wrong. Deforestation, raw sewage, chemical pollution, global warming, acid rain, cattle ranching, overharvest, overdevelopment, and crops extending right to the stream edge are among many other factors contributing to long, steady decline. For brook trout, the rise of humanity makes the Ice Age seem like the good ol’ days. Changes in climate that took thousands of years then are taking decades today.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my forest brookies were pieces of a fragmented population that, historically, joined with a larger population in Michigan’s Muskegon River. The Muskegon River population is long gone, victimized by dams, deforestation, development, overharvest, and neglect.

“Almost no rivers have wild, viable populations of brook trout, only headwaters and small streams. The populations are fragmented and no longer in contact with one another,” according to Nathaniel Gillespie, a fishery scientist for Trout Unlimited and part of the EBTJV. Though he’s referring to conditions faced in New England, the same thing happened in Michigan’s Muskegon River and throughout the native range of brook trout in the U.S. Brookies have been driven upstream, into the headwaters, by the need for cold, clear, highly oxygenated water. To preserve some of those fisheries, all we had to do, as farmers, landowners, taxpayers, and voters, was leave a few trees along the banks of the river, for shade, for food, and to hold the banks together.

“Water quality has been degraded in many watersheds,” Gillespie says. “Poorly managed agriculture, urbanization, invasive species, acid rain, abandoned mine drainage, and a host of other factors have left us with brook-trout populations that are now small and fragmented, which doesn’t bode well over the long term.” Despite all that, Gillespie sees a light at the end of the tunnel. “I’m hopeful for brook trout, because there’s a lot of recognition across the board among state agencies for the need to protect native species. We need to increase funding to provide incentives for local land owners to manage nutrients, improve riparian habitat, and prevent erosion, which is a big problem in the Driftless Region (parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa), where land management has such a poor record, historically. States throughout the East have developed brook-trout management plans for waters with degraded habitat and degraded water quality, and plans include reintroducing brook trout to restored habitat. Fairly large projects are underway in the Southeast to return brook trout to streams they haven’t inhabited for 100 years.”

Somewhere in Maine, fishery research biologist Merry Gallagher is gathering information about salter brookies in her state. “The salter is a fish of great lore and great secrecy,” she says. “People who pursue them don’t release their information to anyone. And, over the years, the salter brookie fell through all the regulatory cracks. No fishery agency has a handle on them. How many runs have we lost? Where? Historically, salter brookies extended all along the coast, but we don’t have records available to tell us if they inhabited every river. Maine was highlighted by the EBTJV as lacking in status information statewide, so we set out to sample streams all along the coast.”

Gallagher, who works for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, notes that salters come and go, entering and leaving the stream quite often before making a spawning run. “Our theory is they stay pretty close to home streams, not going out too far in the sea,” she says. “They come back and forth between the estuary and the sea, making their actual spawning run upriver sometime in September or October.

“I think the overall outlook is bright,” Gallagher says. “We’re finding trout in many coastal streams, which is actually a surprise. Maine is under extreme pressure from development, and we were surprised to find brook trout in so many coastal streams.”

Every fisherman should visit the brook-trout rivers that reach the sea in the Far North at some point, to experience, just once, what was. Perhaps most would be awed just enough to begin thinking trout are more important than numbers, bottom lines, and high rises. A monster was released alive in Manitoba a couple years back, a fish estimated to exceed the world record. Which leads us to believe that, somewhere in the world, moonlight still reflects from the eye of a brookie bigger than any yet caught by man. That’s one definition of hope.