Transcript - The Particular Sadness of Trout Fishing in America

Transcript: The Particular Sadness of Trout Fishing in America

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

[Sound of a river…]

[Music]

Phineas Quimby: Well, when you’re driving there, you’re very exciting because you’re like, oh I really want to put that worm on the hook and start fishing…

Sam Evans-Brown: That’s producer Taylor Quimby’s son, Phin. He and Taylor go fishing a lot.

Sam Evans-Brown: Do you have a favorite fish to catch?

Phineas Quimby: Ummm… pike and pickerel.

Sam Evans-Brown: Because they fight?

Phineas Quimby: yeah they fight hard

Sam: Fishing…

I do not fish. But thanks to a little help from th is particular angler… I think I’ve maybe come to understand those who do.

Phineas Quimby: I like catching big fish because they fight a little powerful… than little ones

Sam Evans-Brown: So it’s more exciting

Phineas Quimby: Yeah. You don’t think that it’s too big at first, you think it would probably be like a pretty big sunfish, but really when you bring it up to the dock… when you pull it out from the net… it’s huge!

Sam Evans-Brown: But… and I’m not sure who needs to hear this… but despite what you see on Fishing Reality TV… it’s not all about landing some monster for the trophy photo for your social media profile photo.

Even for kids… it’s stillness… [sfx] wild places… [sfx] quiet… [sfx] and yes, occasionally a bit of excitement

[SFX reel spinning out]

Phineas Quimby: And sometimes it’s good sometimes it’s bad, sometimes you catch stuff and sometimes you don’t.

[Sound of river fades]

Sam Evans-Brown: This scene — which I created mostly with stock sound effects — is totally artificial. And believe it or not… some of the fish that Phin has caught, they’re artificial too.

[Rising hatchery ambi]

Sam Evans-Brown: ok so how does this next part go?

Will Ritchie: So Tyler will get in, we’ll scoop all the fish into a seine, then we’ll take them a net-full at a time, weigh them, and then they’ll go right back into the truck so that we know the weight that we’re releasing into the water body.

Sam Evans-Brown: Every year my home state, New Hampshire… which only has a little more than a million people in it… raises more than a million trout in concrete tanks...

Zach Curran: In terms of numbers it goes Brook trout, rainbows and then browns.

Sam Evans-Brown: Those trout are then loaded into trucks…

[Sound of fish splashing into stocking truck]

Sam Evans-Brown: And driven all over the state.

Zach Curran: I think I finally got rid of the mouse smell in here… they got into the heating vents over the winter.

Sam Evans-Brown: If the water body is close enough to the road, the driver of the truck unrolls giant fire hoses called slides [unrolling hose sfx] and a whole truck-full of fish… more than a thousand per load... can drain out all at once

Sam Evans-Brown: I’m puttin my hand on it here. Oh! Just felt a fish! A little wriggly body. Hey Buddy

Sam Evans-Brown: If the water body is not close to the road, they walk them out, one net-full at a time. If it’s a little farther…

Zach Curran: We load the fish into a plastic bag with some water, and then we’ll blow it up with pure oxygen, and then we’ll tie the bag off and tape it, and put it a backpack and send ‘em off.

Sam Evans-Brown: They pack them out… and if the waterbody is REALLY far from the road…

Taylor Quimby: OK, so we’ve got a couple of guys, who are ferrying five gallon buckets to the helicopter and they are dumping fish in…

Sam Evans-Brown: Yes indeed… they fly them out in a helicopter.

Taylor Quimby: Sooooo… how many fish in that thing?? [I believe it was about 70 pounds.]

Tyler Devine: A helicopter… off she goes.

Sam Evans-Brown: All of this… just for a bit of stillness… punctuated by a few seconds of excitement…

[sound of reel running out, and Outside/In theme music]

Sam Evans-Brown: This is Outside/In a show about the natural world and how we use it. I’m Sam Evans-Brown. People love fishing for trout. They love it so much that we are willing to go to insane lengths to catch them. But what should we make of the fact that much of that experience of fishing for trout is just a facsimile of what it once was… and may actually be BAD for the very same fish, that we so love to catch?

[outside/In theme fades and truck ambi comes up slowly]

Sam Evans-Brown: There’s a story we tell about why we stock fish. I heard this from a lot of anglers.

We stock fish, because we want people to fall in love with them.

Zach Curran: I’d say it was probably around 8th grade or maybe freshman year in high school, I really got into fishing. Me and my friends would ride our bikes down to the river pretty much every single day.

Sam Evans-Brown: That idyllic youth was enjoyed by Zach Curran. He works at a 100-year-old fish hatchery, run by New Hampshire Fish and Game…

Zach Curran: And we fished for stocked trout… I mean that was mainly what we caught.

Sam Evans-Brown: I interviewed him last spring, while he drove a truck loaded with 700 pounds of brown trout… a species native to Europe, by the way… to be dumped into a pond in Northern New Hampshire.

8th grade Zach did not realize it when he was pedaling to the fishing hole… but this was the first step in a staircase that people who love fish and rivers hope more of us will climb: fish that are easy to catch… easy to get to.

Zach Curran: Yeah there’s a lot of fish around in the spring-time. It was really… it was a lot of fun and that’s definitely what got me into it.

Sam Evans-Brown: The next step is to start to explore.

Zach Curran: I got my license and everything… and I got a small boat .

[Music]

Zach Curran: Down in that area there are a lot of small bass ponds, and they’re like… pretty much unlimited… you could never fish them all.

[Music]r

Sam Evans-Brown: Bass by the way is another introduced species around here… historically they were more of a Mississippi River basin fish, but they’ve been self-sustained in our lakes and rivers since the late 1800s when they were introduced willy-nilly by fishermen.

From here… as anglers get more experienced… they start to look for challenges…

Zach Curran: that’s the most fun time to me is when you’re really starting to learn a new type of fishing.

Sam Evans-Brown: … this for many fishers leads them to harder to fish to catch, new experiences like hiking in for miles…

Zach Curran: … So like hike in to like a remote pond… like may not even care if he catches a fish, he just wants the remote experience.

Sam Evans-Brown: And… in theory… that angler who started as just a kid riding their bike to the fishing hole is going to be a full-throated supporter of fish and rivers.

How could you sit for hours not catching fish, along side a free flowing… mountain stream, and not start to value it

According to this story… that’s why we stock trout. Because abundant, easy to catch fish, get people excited about nature, and protecting it.

Zach Curran: Just get them to appreciate… wild things… and I think that’s absolutely a good thing…

[Sound of truck fades]

Sam Evans-Brown: So that’s ONE story of why we stock fish.

But it’s not the only story.

[music]

Sam Evans-Brown: There are few cautionary tales of environmental impoverishment — in which the world we have today is revealed to be a pale shadow of the sheer teeming abundance that once existed — like the stories of what our oceans used to be like.

Today, we’re talking about stocking trout — but one such cautionary tale that it helps to understand is the story of another fish: The Atlantic Salmon.

By 1800, salmon had been all but wiped out from the rivers of New England. Fisherman were freaked out, and so Congress cr eated the first US Fish Commission.

The new head was a trained naturalist named Spencer Baird. And he came up with what he thought was a win/win solution.

Don't regulate fishing. Don't preserve habitat. Create hatcheries… raise salmon eggs from the west coast, grow them indoors...

Jim Licatowich: Yeah, you're you're increasing the survival of the eggs and the fry, the juveniles because you're protecting them from. Flash floods and predators and all the natural sources of mortality for wild fish out in the stream.

Sam Evans-Brown: That’s Jim Licatowich… he’s a salmon biologist and historian out in Oregon.

The idea was that all those extra fish you get by cheating nature… beating nature… producing more fish than a natural system could on its own… could be released back on the East Coast.

And in so doing… avoid having to make any sort of tradeoff.

Jim Licatowich: What Baird really was telling the people is that hatcheries would be a substitute for conservation... You didn't have to worry about fighting against dams or logging or irrigation withdrawals. You would just build a hatchery.

Sam Evans-Brown: Fish hatcheries and stocking fish were the original techno-fix… take what rivers were doing and improve upon it.

And this enthusiasm included a lot of moving fish around… here’s Helen Neville, the lead scientist for Trout Unlimited, an advocacy group for flyfishers.

Helen Neville: The US Fish Commission set up these hatcheries all around the country, with these modified trains, where the trains had hatchery tanks in them, and those trains would criss-cross the country. They would go from Maine out to California, and just pick up fish along the way! And give them out to angling clubs, and give them out to hatcheries all across the country, and so fish got really mixed broadly, way way earlier than any of have really understood.

Jim Licatowich: There were so many salmon in the northwest that he was using these cars to ship eggs to the East Coast and he was planting salmon eggs and in places where you wouldn't. Ever. Expect a salmon to survive...

Sam Evans-Brown: And… perhaps unsurprisingly… the hatchery fish just… never came back.

Jim Licatowich: Hatchery fish are artifacts of human technology. And they lack the intrinsic value of a wild salmon because the wild salmon is is comes from a natural ecological process that. Has adapted it and that has been part of its long evolutionary history...

Sam Evans-Brown: ...drives it to be a better fish.

Jim Licatowich: Yeah, and in the hatchery, all of that is stripped away.

Sam Evans-Brown: When it came to Atlantic salmon, at least, this indiscriminate stocking never worked. I found report to national research council that contained this paragraph:

“Despite 130 years of stocking, using a variety of life stages ... and releasing about 120 million Atlantic salmon, the systematic decline in run sizes has not been reversed. That raises the question of whether hatchery stocking has ever had a substantial impact on populations of Atlantic salmon…”

That was in 2002. In 2012, after years of putting millions of hatchery raised salmon into the Connecticut River, here in New England, and only seeing as few as 40 of them return as adults the next year, the federal government finally pulled the plug on the hatchery program there.

Two salmon hatcheries are still going in Maine, where some of the last Atlantic Salmon runs in America are now listed as an endangered species.

So in this other version, hatcheries were a story we told ourselves about how we could have it all… and we were wrong...

[music]

Sam Evans-Brown: Hatcheries may have started with salmon, but it spread to other fish pretty quickly.

Rainbow trout, which are native out west, were brought to the East Coast. Brook trout, native to the east, were planted out West. And brown trout, native to Europe, were plunked into streams all across North America.

For better or worse occasionally this practice would work as intended and wild, self-sustaining populations of fish would establish themselves. Today many of our lakes and rivers are chock full of non-native species that have been there so long they’re sometimes considered “naturalized” and we don’t even question their presence.

When it comes to trout, both things have happened: sometimes introduced trout just die. Sometimes they flourish, and are even considered invasive.

[music]

Sam Evans-Brown: So why, sometimes do certain fish they fail so spectacularly, when we grow them in a tank.

Helen Neville: Most people, like you said, think a fish is a fish. Well the agency puts these fish in here and we’ve got these brook trout, they’re brook trout and that’s what our native fish is… but it’s clear from these studies that a trout is not a trout is not a trout.

Sam Evans-Brown: Helen Neville again, of Trout unlimited.

Helen Neville: most of our salmon and trout populations are locally adapted and they have evolved to have very good strategies for dealing with that environment… so they fit where they are.

Sam Evans-Brown: Local trout know how to survive in their home waters… hatchery trout don’t.

There are a bunch of reasons for this but here’s just one example: if for the first year of your little fishy life, every time a shadow gets cast over your pool the next thing that happens is food starts to rain down from above… you will learn to swim up, when a shadow is cast over a pool.

This is not a great survival strategy if you want to avoid being eaten by a heron or raccoon.

But when it comes to the kinds of trout that were in the truck or the helicopter… it kinda doesn’t really matter.

Helen Neville: The sort of typical recreation style hatchery that is really mandated to create a mass of fish to put in waters to serve the angling public… you know where they just go out and stock hundreds of thousands… millions of fish. And so those recreational hatcheries are focused on numbers…

Sam Evans-Brown: Now if there are any hatchery nerds listening out there, they will know that there are hatcheries and there are hatcheries: conservation hatcheries, like the two that are still trying to keep Atlantic Salmon alive, try really hard to combat the problems we’ve talked about and raise fish that will survive.

Recreational hatcheries, the ones that we’ve mostly been talking about, KNOW the fish are unlikely to make it, but don’t really care. Sometimes we’re dumping trout into water that we know gets so hot every year that it will kill trout.

The WHOLE POINT is for people to catch these fish, take them home and eat them.

But, where this gets more complicated, is when we’re dumping them into rivers or lakes, where not only CAN trout survive… but we know they DO.

Helen Neville: You know when you put fish, you know like brown trout in with a native brook trout population, those brown trout can compete for food and for space. They can out-compete fish and push them out of the thermal refuge or the cold water areas that the brook trout might be relying on more and more with climate change. So they can just be more aggressive and push the native fish out.

Sam Evans-Brown: In other words, it's not just that stocked fish don't always survive in the wild. It's that just being there, for a little while might be actively making it harder for wild fish to survive in the wild too.

Big hatchery fish can even eat little, juvenile wild fish. Hatchery fish can introduce disease…

If they do manage to survive and start reproducing, they can set off a familiar chain of cause and effect sadness.

The classic example is yellowstone lake, home to its own population of yellowstone cutthroat trout. In 1994, non-native lake trout somehow made their way into the water, and started eating the juvenile cutthroats.

The cutthroats swam and hunted in shallower water than the lake trout, and spawned in higher up in the yellowstone river. So as they declined, osprey and eagles that used to eat them disappeared, and the bears that snacked on them during their spawning runs no longer frequented the river-side.

Helen Neville: It can have all sorts of cascading effects beyond just what’s going directly with those fish.

Sam Evans-Brown: It’s almost like we’ve taken this whole complex system that allows brook trout to exist… and we’ve turned it into the model T production line, and we’re just like churning out fish to jam into that river.

Helen Neville: it’s interesting that you’re doing this story, because when you step back and look at this scenario it really is like an interesting cultural story. I mean the issue is… people just didn’t understand the impacts that would have a brook trout in a western stream and why wouldn’t you have european brown trout in your eastern stream.

Sam Evans-Brown: you can go catch five fish a day!

Helen Neville: Yeah! You know I can go over to Scotland and catch brown trout there but it would be so great if I could do it in my home water here in Virginia. And that was understandable… and I think there was a big political push back then to do that… it would be a great thing that we could provide for our public.

[music]

Sam Evans-Brown: And here in the East that’s kinda the mindset we’ve still got. States all up and down the East Coast are STILL stocking hatchery fish in places where there are OR COULD BE wild fish… because that’s what anglers want...

But maybe… just maybe… that’s starting to change…

Nate Hill: The thing about stocking is that it creates this facade, where when you hit it right you catch a shit ton of fish — you catch a lot of fish — but then when you hit it wrong you catch very few fish.

Sam Evans-Brown: What does a world without stocked fish look like?

That’s after the break.

BREAK BREAK BREAK BREAK!

Sam Evans-Brown: Welcome back to Outside/In…

This is a story about fish and fishing and fish stocking and YES here is the part where I go fishing…

[woo! Laughter. Creel sounds.]

It may sound like I’m having fun but really I was embarrassing myself because I was really bad at it and the rocks were very slippery and I could have fallen, this is a really hard job okay???

[more sounds of fun]

Sam Evans-Brown: Also, here is just a random thing that I learned doing this story that will maybe anger fly fishers when I say it: you don’t need to go fly-fishing to catch a trout or salmon or any of the fish people fly-fish for. Fly-fishing is just a different, more challenging, MORE EXPENSIVE, way of catching a fish that is not necessarily superior to any other type of fishing…

It was fun though. And my guide was Nate Hill.

Nate Hill: Oh I see one actually sitting, a good sized one… I think that’s a fish...

Sam Evans-Brown: Nate is a young guy… part of the seasonal tourist economy that makes it so hard to live full time in beautiful places like this… he works at the ski areas in the winter. He fishes catch and release only, single hook… no barbs.

He’s part of a very small, brandy new organization, called the Native Fish Coalition. It started two years ago, and has chapters in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. They want more water bodies to be designated Wild Trout waters… so, catch and release only and no stocking.

We’re on a river that they are trying to be set aside in this way, in the White Mountains… one that he prefer we not name for fear of attracting a whole ton of anglers interested in — in his words — killing trout. It’s a river that’s really easy to get to, is stocked in its lower reaches, and yet, still has a lot of wild trout in it…

Sam: Whoo! Nother one.

Sam Evans-Brown: We started fishing where the stocked and wild trout are mixed together, and at first, all he was catching was hatchery fish.

Nate Hill: Looks like somebody took a heat gun to the dorsal fin and fried it. [laughs] You know what I mean.

Sam Evans-Brown: Occasionally Fish and Game will tell you that it’s not possible to tell if you’ve caught a wild trout or not, but many anglers will snort at that idea.

Nate Hill: it’s already losing weight.

Sam Evans-Brown: Oh it’s skinny, is what you mean.

Nate Hill: Yeah, they’re used to getting food fed to them… so they tend to lose weight if they don’t have a lot of food… [pellets being dropped] and they put them in at such high densities… fifty fish in a pool… there’s not gonna be enough food to feed all those fish, it’s not natural, you know?

Sam Evans-Brown: The river in question has a waterfall not far from where we started. It’s a barrier the stocked trout can’t get up past. So after catching a bunch of hungry, skinny, domesticated fish, Nate and I sloshed up some of the higher reaches of the river.

Nate Hill: Woah! That was a good one… there it is… okay, let’s see if we can determine the difference. So that’s about the same size right, as the other fish, but if you look at this fish, his body in proportion to himself is a lot more of what you’d think… he doesn’t look like an arrow, it’s more an oval.

Sam Evans-Brown: And I see what you’re talking about about that dorsal fin.

Nate Hill: Yeah the dorsal fin’s very square. And all the other… see how pointed the fins are? And actually the skin color… there’s no abrasions on the fish, it doesn’t look rough, it’s very smooth.

Sam Evans-Brown: it’s just a healthier looking fish.

Nate Hill: And when you let them go they swim away much faster!

Sam Evans-Brown: yeah! It’s like a dart!

Sam Evans-Brown: Oh, now I can see him there. Now I’ve got my eyes on him.

[sound of flowing river]

Sam Evans-Brown: So for like 3 weeks it’s great…

Nate Hill: Yeah, until they stock it again, and then it’s great again… so you end up up with less fish in the long run, than if you would if you managed it for a wild population

[Music]

Sam Evans-Brown: Here’s what the Native Fish Coalition is pushing for: they want Fish and Game to stop dumping stocked fish into SO MANY rivers… starting with the headwaters, the little mountain streams that are the nurseries that would feed wild trout into the bigger rivers.

And then eventually, if they can show that cutting out all the dang stocking actually makes for better fishing then, in certain places you could move down the watershed. Stop stocking bigger and bigger streams until you get all the way to the main stem.

Nate Hill: And you can see when you look at these nursery habitat, how many wild brook trout there are in these rivers… it kinda makes sense… and I think the best way to get people on board is to focus on small native trout water… and not the bigger rivers, because yeah, a lot of people can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel...

[music ends and fades]

Dianne Timmins: Stocking has changed quite a bit over time… historically fisheries was a relatively wealthy division, and basically if it was wet it was stocked… overfishing was a huge issue… non-native species got brought in… and literally there were a variety of locations that biologically should have never been stocked, but … historically… we had money we had time and we had anglers that were interested and so fish went in.

Sam Evans-Brown: This is Dianne Timmins, the freshwater fisheries biologist for the state of New Hampshire. She’s been doing her job for more than twenty years and one half of a husband and wife Fish and Game Power couple: her husband is the state’s bear biologist.

In this interview, she spoke with the refreshing candor of someone who knows their stuff, is comfortable with their facts, and secure in their job. And can we just dwell on something Dianne just said, but said it a little too quickly… she said historically… if it was wet, it was stocked.

Talking to her, my takeaway was stocking has kind of trained anglers to expect the artificial… and they would be disappointed if we stopped.

Dianne Timmins: We are the granite state so our productivity, unfortunately, our productivity is less than our neighboring states… all of them… less than our neighboring states… in that we have granite and so we don’t have a lot of calcium in our waters… so generally overall our brook trout and our trout species tend to be much smaller because the food sources are smaller… And so So I'll tell you, our statewide average, based on a few decades of data at this point… and our average size is three point six two inches. So New Hampshire is not not really known for its larger size brook trout and so the larger the fish, the happier the angler.

Sam Evans-Brown: Dianne and the Native Fish Coalition are engaged in this whole back and forth over which waters should or shouldn’t be catch and release only with no stocking… it’s a whole thing… very New Hampshire… which I’m not going to drill down on.

What I think is interesting, here is they actually agree that stocking hatchery trout on top of wild trout… is bad for wild trout.

Where they disagree, is the question of what’s best for anglers.

Dianne Timmins: I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but basically to tell you the story. You know, some of it. I mean, a huge component of our well, I can say that's a huge component of our management is social and it always has been. So like one of the things that we're that I just identified as we have a lot of areas where we stock brook trout. We have a lot of areas where we stock period. But one of the things is that a lot of these areas have wild buckshot in them, which leads us to the next latest challenge in life trade is that there's this whole big push right now to not stock on top of wild fish, which, you know, makes sense. Right. Except that in New Hampshire, my fish at three point six two inches is not exactly satisfying. So I have the unfun challenge of how do you satisfy your angler? But biologically, you know, do something for the system. So that's kinda… It's tough!

Sam Evans-Brown: So we know… and accept that stocking hatchery trout on top of existing wild populations is bad for the wild populations… and in fact that hatchery fish compete with our wild fish and probably make them smaller… but we keep doing it because we like catching the big fish…

Which to me… feels kinda like we’re running on a treadmill, but we’re afraid to step off because it’s going too fast...

[music post and fade]

Sam Evans-Brown: I asked Nate about this… the idea that there aren’t enough people showing up to fish and game meetings clutching their rods and demanding LESS stocking… SMALLER fish?

Sam Evans-Brown: To what extent is this about the culture of angling changing… so that anglers are demanding a different kind of experience?

Nate Hill: I think that’s really 90 percent of it right now… because the state’s management is based on what the public wants… they will say that 60% of their constituents want more stocking… so there has to be enough blowback to prove otherwise.

Sam Evans-Brown: Nate told me a story… it’s a story about how out West in Montana, they decided to not stock a bunch of rivers… and the wild fish recovered… and now the state has the biggest fishing guide industry in the country…

Nate Hill: Now could New hampshire be Montana… I dunno… but could it be more like that? Probably. Than it is now? Could we have more wild trout? Yeah. How many more? We’ll never know if we don’t start experimenting. You can’t tell me that we’ll never have something that we’ve never studied.

[River sound]

Helen Neville: I mean the issue is… people just didn’t have the context to know what they had lost, and at the time when a lot of this was started… I mean… many of these plants were initiated in the late 1800s, people just didn’t understand the impacts that that would have.

Sam Evans-Brown: This is Helen Neville again… the Trout Unlimited scientist… she’s from Idaho.

New England is not like the West Coast. Our fish were on the receiving end of uncontrolled colonial european fishing practices for a really long time and there have been a couple generations now how have had no memory of what the rivers and lakes used to be like…

Which means some of these ideas about stocking are still kinda, fringey out here.

But Helen says there’s a lot less fish stocking out West, and some of the places that are still stocking have very different practices than here in the East. For instance, they only stock ponds and lakes, not rivers… and only stock fish that are sterile, and can’t reproduce.

So… why the East/West divide? In the West, before stocking practices became entrenched, there were people who could remember the old rivers… the way it used to be who spoke up.

Helen Neville: People just didn’t grow up with understanding what they may have lost… that they see a fish there and it might even be a brook trout and that’s good enough… you know all of this needs to be put in a cultural context and it’s not just about the science… but I think it’s really important to put it in perspective of trying to come up with some smart strategies for where we can use hatcheries productively to serve those different socio-political needs, versus where we can really try to prioritize these native populations for conservation.

Sam Evans-Brown: The US stocks hundreds of millions of trout each year, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars… here in New Hampshire alone it’s a bit more than a million fish for a bit more than three million dollars a year… That’s three bucks a fish, in order to create an entire parallel life history for a creature that — for most of them — almost entirely eliminates natural waters from their lives, except for the few weeks or months before they’re caught by a fisherman or eaten by a predator...

Now it’s true that in some places, water that wouldn’t have fish otherwise… this is mostly benign… but still… it’s artificial…

But in other spots… it’s actively bad for wild fish.

So what do you do when you learn the thing you love fishing… is hurting the thing you love… fish?

[hammering sound]

Sam Evans-Brown: I believe it’s the case that both stories we tell ourselves about fish stocking are true: Yes, it started a techno-fix that allowed us to ignore the way we were treating rivers… But also YES… getting people into fishing, some of them starting on stocked fish… means that eventually SOME OF THEM will start to deeply care about the grueling job of saving habitat.

Sam Evans-Brown: So um, before we get down there can you Introduce yourself?

Ron Rhodes: Ron Rhodes, river steward for the Connecticut River Conservancy.

Sam Evans-Brown: Ron’s also a big fisherman… used to help out as a volunteer for Trout Unlimited, Helen Neville’s organization. I met him in Norwich, Vermont, just over the border with New Hampshire.

Sam Evans-Brown: How long have you been doing this job?

Ron Rhodes: Seven years since Tropical Storm Irene. And this is our eighth dam removal.

Sam Evans-Brown: Eight dams and seven years seems…

Ron Rhodes: Eight dams and actually about four or five years. The first couple of years I hadn't gotten addicted to these things yet.

Sam Evans-Brown: It's an addiction?

Ron Rhodes: It is an addiction. It's really satisfying work, partially because it's permanent. And it's, you know, we're not building anything or putting a culvert back in the stream or taking it back to its natural state. And so it really is like you get them done and it's just like, when's the next one?

Sam Evans-Brown: So let's walk down. We can talk maybe more after we've seen the work.

Ron Rhodes: And not only is it an addiction, but there are thousands of these old dams, not only in Vermont and New Hampshire, but all over New England, so we have our work cut out for us or a lifetime of work. If you want to think of it that way.

Sam Evans-Brown: Everywhere I look, there is more and more river restoration happening. Here in the East… out West… in Alaska… everywhere. This is a category of work that pretty much everybody can get on board with.

[moar hammering]

Sam Evans-Brown: The six little states that constitute New England have over 14,000 dams… Most of them are tiny, and abandoned, like this one. . They used to power and grist mills in the colonial years, or were built as little drinking water supplies — like this one — in the early 1900s, and then abandoned in the 70s and 80s when towns started drilling wells to supply drinking water…

This dam is in the middle of the woods, no houses around… on your average day probably no-one sees this stretch of river, except for the fish.

Ron Rhodes: Right now, the biggest issue here is that all this sediment has filled in and there's just not that much depth. So the only fish that would be living in a place like this right now are as tiny little minnows or maybe tiny little brook trout. But as soon as they get big, they would be moving. Hopefully they would try to move into better territory, deeper water with more structure and more food.

Sam Evans-Brown: To remove this dam, one excavator has to jack hammer out the concrete a few inches at a time while another digs up the sediment that is gradually exposed on the river bank, so that it doesn’t flush downstream and screw up some habitat farther down. A dump truck continually runs back and forth, carting away the extra sand… It’s a big project.

Ron Rhodes: Yeah it’ll be somewhere in the neighborhood of $320 plus, all in.

Sam Evans-Brown: That’s three hundred and twenty thousand plus dollars, to remove this one… little dam, on one little tributary to one river…

Sam Evans-Brown: and then there are thousands of dams in New England.

Ron Rhodes: yeah, there are.

[Music]

Sam Evans-Brown: I don’t know if Ron started by catching hatchery trout… but I do know that Nate Hill… the Native Fish Coalition fly fisherman from earlier… he did.

So, maybe this is a stretch, but in a funny way… if we do ever change the way we stock here in the East, restore the habitat and let wild trout populations recover… it may be that stocking ACTUALLY was something that helped to get us there… eventually.

And even so… this assuming that kids will only start to love the outdoors if they catch an 8 inch trout once an hour… but maybe we’re not giving kids enough credit...

Phin Quimby: There are bad days of fishing but they're not totally bad. It's not necessarily 'catching' the fish. You don't say I"m going to go "catch a fish" you say "fishing". Because you never know.

Sam Evans-Brown: So it's still okay if you don't catch a fish?

Phin Quimby: Yes. That's part of fishing.