Peter DuBrul: Trouting in little rivers of Vermont — or are we still stocking non-native fish?

This commentary is by Peter DuBrul of Charlotte, who is a history teacher and paddle guide.

I’ll never forget catching my first brown trout. It was in one of those cold, clear rivers that flow out of the gorges of the western Green Mountains, and the sky was as blue as a Burmese sapphire — far too bright to catch a trout, I knew, especially a brown trout. 

But I stood on a ledge in a narrow ravine, on the inside of a tight turn, and I saw a fish chase my fly out of deep water. I cast again; a fish struck in the shadows, and I knew by feel it was a trout. And when I saw the black and red spots, I trembled, and when at last I scooped it into the net I was elated — finally I had caught a brown trout, the fisherman’s fish, that spotted fellow that for generations has been the game fish for tweed-wearing, creel-carrying sportsmen from Scotland to Montana.

And I’ll never forget measuring it at 10 and a quarter inches, and seeing on the Vermont Fish & Wildlife website that days before they had released exactly 1,089 of such-sized brown trout in that exact river, in that exact section of river. 

This trout had not spent a lifetime craftily evading predation, or enduring long months of ice and darkness, or swimming rapids up out of deep lakes. This trout had been fattened in a crowded tank and dumped into a river for human entertainment: like The Hunger Games, but for fish. 

More than a century after we began stocking trout for those creel-carrying sportsmen, we are still at it — and simultaneously worrying about scores of other non-natives carried in bait buckets, ship ballasts, or swimming up canals.

The brown trout is an Old World species. The only reason that might be surprising is that it’s been stocked in the United States since the 1880s. 

The rainbow trout, another non-native species, occurs naturally on this continent, but only in the Pacific Basin, where its range extends into Asia. Vermont has only three native species of trout or salmon — the Atlantic salmon, the brook trout, and the lake trout. 

There was a fourth, a holdover from the last ice age, sometimes called the silver trout, that lived in deep, cold waters of the Northeast Kingdom. It disappeared a century ago, victim of stocking of larger, non-native salmonids. 

It is easy to confuse the salmonids, the most famous of which are divided into three groups: the Atlantic salmon and its sister species the brown trout; the Pacific salmon and its sister species the Pacific basin trout; and the charr. 

Charr — whose name comes from an Irish word for red — include brook trout, lake trout, and that lost Vermont silver trout. Charr are especially partial to cold water and swim where glaciers once stood.

Our vernacular words salmon and trout are notoriously inexact. Put simply, so-called salmon spend a lot of time in salt water, and so-called trout spend a lot of time in fresh water. But to make it more confusing, almost all salmonids are capable of sea runs. That includes brook trout. Years ago, brook trout “salters” swam out of New York and New England to the sea. 

Whether individual fish take to larger water is determined by resources available in home streams. If they do go downstream, salmonids lose the beautiful colors and patterns that help defend territory in tight spaces for duller silver suited to open water, where members of the same species no longer compete but swim together.

Before dams, New England was famous for spectacular Atlantic salmon runs, and that included countless Vermont salmon swimming north or south to the sea. But to add yet more confusion, some landlocked salmon likely spent their entire lives here in lakes and tributaries. Decades-long efforts to reintroduce Atlantic salmon into Lake Champlain have had minimal success, as farms send sediment down waterways, which are now too warm for salmon and most other salmonids.

Considering what was frankly a salmon collapse, perhaps stocking brown trout is not such a bad idea after all. Brown trout are the closest relative to Atlantic salmon, but can survive in warmer and dirtier water. 

Just as coyotes are arguably a decent proxy for extirpated wolves — and carry extirpated wolves’ DNA — brown trout in waterways that no longer support salmon could count as environmental justice. Maybe we should be thanking those creel-carrying fisherman who dumped brown trout willy-nilly throughout the Northeast, in waters that had once supported salmon. 

And who knows? There are interesting cases where a non-native population becomes a last hope for its species. Invasive Barbary sheep, starlings, and Burmese pythons are now declining in their native ranges. Monarch butterflies, diminished in North America, thrive in Hawaii and Australia.  

Remember that silver trout that once swam in the Northeast Kingdom? In 1977, a biologist fishing high in the Rocky Mountains caught a curious salmonid — which turned out to be none other than that lost silver trout. Decades before, some creel-carrying sportsman had dumped non-native charr into those cold, clear waters. The silver trout lives on.