Prompt Blog #7: Brook Trout

I have hiked four miles on Black Forest Trail, off of Rt. 44, to get back into County Line Creek. It’s a narrow, shallow creek cutting down through the Alleghany plateau. Nothing seemingly special; not what one many would call a “destination” fishery. Its banks are choked with rhododendron and laurel, making it hard to cast a fly. The few fish I do catch are only promising to be a half-foot long; a ten-inch trout here is a real trophy.

Why go through so much effort? Because County Line, like hundreds of other nondescript runs, streams, and brooks in the Pennsylvania Appalachian Mountains, is one of the last strongholds of the Brook Trout.

Often criticized for its small size and lackluster “fight” in angling circles, the brook trout gets a bum rap. These relatives of the mighty Arctic char and the long, sleek lake trout have the ability to get massive in size, as large as the largest brown trout or rainbow trout or salmon. However, these hillbilly trout have been pushed out of their native habitat into the last remaining pristine waters of the East, waters like County Line which don’t have the room or the food chain to support larger fish.

All up and down the spine of the Appalachians, brook trout survive: barely. They have been relegated to the fringe of humanity because we humans have made “humanity” incompatible with “nature.” Pristine might as well mean “without human” even though all of our pristine and damaged lands alike have always been affected by humans. However, our accentuated industrialism in the past 150 years has deforested our lands, heated and polluted our waters with factories and dams, and introduced foreign fish such as brown and rainbow trout, as well as small mouth bass, whose aggressive nature will outcompete trout parr in any watershed where they meet.

But it hasn’t always been this way; the upper reaches of the Susquehanna all contained brook trout, which thrived so well that early settlers recorded catching basket after basket of 16 + inch fish until they couldn’t carry the baskets home. Moreover, the supply seemed limitless, so they set no limit on the harvest. As our modern world replaced “nature,” though, it became very clear that the brook trout’s day was numbered, so brownies and rainbows were imported from all over the world to replace them.

“Unfortunately”, rainbows could never reproduce in the East very successfully and brown trout, while they could reproduce, did not do so with the same prolific abundance as the brook trout used to. Yet, even though they couldn’t reproduce, Americans kept (and still keep) on stocking these “more successful,” “more sporting” trout in the brook trout’s native habitat. Much more aggressive and territorial, browns and rainbow out competed brook trout and pushed them further and further up watersheds until they were only left the County Line Creeks of the East Coast.

So, all of this being said, why do I make this trek to places like County Line Creek? I don’t know. I guess I’m a romantic. I guess that a small native fish is more of a treasure than a large exotic to me. I guess that the brook trout seems to be the only connection someone like me has to a time they were born too late to witness first hand. I guess I’m trying to bear witness before the last native brook trout are gone or replaced with genetically similar hatchery trout.