Native Fish

As thoughts and dreams turn to spring and summer fishing, it’s time to plot out your plan of attack for completing the Western Native Trout Challenge. Details at the link, and there are detailed maps to aid in your planning (that’s native trout territory in Utah above). Git ‘er done.

The good folks at TFO have posted a nice piece about Alaskan Arctic Grayling with AK native Tessa Shetter; details at the link, image via the linked article.

Via the Billings Gazette, it appears the bucket brigade has struck again with an illegal introduction of smallies into the Shields River in Montana, a favored watershed for re-introduced native Yellowstone Cutties. Details here in the article, and image above via the linked post.

Talking with a buddy last week the topic of the Western Native Trout challenge came up; after digging around a bit I found a nifty article that Orvis posted last year about the first guy to complete the advanced level of the challenge – read it here. The challenge sounds bucket list worthy to me, […]

Montana FWP started a rotenone “treatment” of the North Fork of Spanish Fork in the Gallatin drainage this week as part of multi-step restoration of native Westslope cutties. Details here, with some local press coverage here.

The Missoulian recently posted this article detailing a bull trout refuge up in Glacier; a fascinating read of rescuing the final offspring of the last spawning pair of bull trout in Logging Lake, though written in a somewhat unusual form.

Washington state is home to some of the most historically prolific steelhead waters in North America as well as several organizations who are wholly dedicated to the preservation and restoration of wild fish native to the region, namely steelhead and several salmon species. How ironic is it then, that for reasons that appear to continually […]

GOLDENS from Dave Fason on Vimeo.

WNTI just keeps on quietly getting some great projects done; they’ve just opened the window on RFPs for fiscal 2020. Details here.

A closure on several of the Upper Gibbon drainage area waters starts tomorrow the 2nd and runs through the 13th; fisheries folks will be seeding rotenone to remove non-native rainbows and brookies, with Westslope cutties and grayling to be reintroduced down the road. Details here.

Via the Lewisville Tribune, sometimes convincing anglers to harvest trout is a hard sell. Fisheries managers want anglers to harvest rainbows and hybrids from the storied South Fork of the Snake, but not everybody is on board with the plan… What an amazing fishery by the way; I had the memorable pleasure of fishing the […]

The Western Native Trout Initiative has rolled out a nifty project – The Western Native Trout Challenge – to, among other things, teach fishers about native trout around the West, and have some fun along the way. If you have any interest at all in Western native trout, spend some time kicking around this site; […]

Via the Missoulian here, Glacier NP plans a somewhat unusual swap of cutthroat species in several of their remote, upper-backcountry lakes, swapping out introduced Yellowstone cutties for Westslope cutties and bull trout. Read the full article at the link, and here’s the EA for the project.

Kudos to the Missoulian for publishing another well-written piece covering fishy (the good kind of fishy) science in Montana – Brown Trout Reduce Native Cutthroat Numbers, Study Finds. There’s some nifty water tucked in and around the Crazies; thankfully you need to expend a little sweat and boot leather to get to most of it. […]