Our Mission: To Preserve, Protect, and Restore Pennsylvania's Cold Water Streams and their habitats.
Our Wild Trout Resource
Welcome to Pennsylvania Trout's Wild Trout Page. Here we intend to present articles and information about wild trout, their nature and management in Pennsylvania. As this page grows, we hope to provide an area for discussion and education on wild trout issues as well as opinion pieces and more, so stay tuned!! We welcome your opinions and thoughts on wild trout and their management and preservation. Click here and let us know what you think. To get things started, read these features on wild trout, their nature and value.
The Decline & Fall of Big Spring
Why Wild Trout?
The Trout Unlimited organizational focus is first and foremost on the preservation and enhancement of native and wild trout fisheries and on protecting and improving habitat so wild trout can flourish. TU is about more than fishing and more than trout. Trout Unlimited is about clean water for today and all our tomorrows; not just for trout, but for our children as well.
Almost everyone has heard the story of coal miners of days gone by who would carry a canary in a cage to warn them of rising levels of toxic gases in their underground workplace and allow them time to escape before these gases overcame them. In the same way, wild trout are an indicator of the quality of our cold water streams. Wild trout demand the very best from their surroundings and will not settle for less. When water quality is degraded by the hand of man or the whim of nature, they disappear. Wild trout are the clean water equivalent of the canary in the cage. When we lose them, we lose more than fish. Their disappearance is a warning that all is not well in the natural world that supports all life, including us. When we work to preserve clean streams and wild trout, we also improve the quality of our own lives. Trout Unlimited is about wild trout and the clean water that supports them. And clean water is at the very heart of life itself.
What is a Wild Trout?
Any stream-bred trout is a wild trout. Some anglers call any trout born in the stream a native. But that really isn't so. The term native is reserved for those species that have inhabited an area for thousands of years until they have become completely adapted to the surrounding environment and an integral part of the ecosystem. The brook trout has lived in Pennsylvania's cold water streams for many thousands of years. They swam here before the ice ages and for another 12 thousand years after the last great ice sheet melted away, adapting to every imaginable cold water stream in the state, from tiny trickle tributaries to our big freestones like Kettle Creek, Pine Creek, Sinnemahoning and the Loyalsock and even big limestone streams like Spring Creek and Penns Creek. They are our only native, stream-dwelling salmonid, and are considered by many to be one of the most beautiful freshwater fish in the world.
Like most of us, the brown trout is an immigrant. They evolved in the cold-water streams of Europe and were introduced into our waters in the 1880's. After their introduction, brown trout quickly took hold in Pennsylvania's cold-water streams and by the early part of this century had almost completely displaced brook trout from our limestone streams. These waters were much like the fertile chalk streams of the British Isles and Germany where they had evolved and the ecological fit was almost perfect. Browns were also quite successful in establishing naturally reproducing populations in our big freestone streams, but were never able to completely replace the brookie in these waters. In most of our big freestones, brook and brown trout live in what the biologists call sympatry ... a word which essentially means cohabitation. However, there is nothing sympathetic about the relationship, as the biological term would seem to imply. As a matter of fact, they are locked in a life-or-death struggle for dominance in such waters.
Rainbow trout are native to the Pacific coast streams of the U.S. and were introduced into Pennsylvania about the same time as the browns. Rainbows were never really able to establish themselves to any extent in our streams, probably because they spawn in the spring and during this time of year most of our streams are just too cold for the successful reproduction of spring-spawners. Steelheads, a strain of rainbows that move downstream into the ocean or large lakes to mature, were able to establish naturally reproducing populations in several of the Great Lakes. A few stream-resident populations do occur in Pennsylvania streams, but rainbows have never really offered any significant competition to the native brookie in our state. This, of course, is not the case in the southern Appalachians, where rainbows have nearly replaced brookies in all but the most remote and isolated headwaters. Maybe it's a good thing they were never really that successful here.
So any trout born and raised in the stream where they are caught is a wild trout and wild trout is what this page is about. Trout Unlimited was founded in order to protect native and wild trout and that remains its mission to this day. There will be no stocking lists or schedules on this page. What we are concerned with here are trout that wriggled up from the gravel of a redd and took their chances in Mother Nature's lottery where only a tiny few of the keenest survive.
