Better Trout Habitat: A Guide to Stream Restoration and Management

By Christopher J. Montana Land Reliance and Christopher J. Hunter

Better Trout Habitat explains the physical, chemical, and biological needs of trout, and shows how climate, geology, vegetation, and flowing water all help to create trout habitat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781610912518

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

This book was written in response to an explosion of interest in habitat restoration in general, and trout-stream habitat restoration in particular. The intent was to synthesize state-of-the-art technical information and present it in such a way that it would be readable and informative for both the lay and professional reader. Thus, the writing style, which is fairly informal and very accessible compared to most scientific publications, belies the technical nature of the book.

Throughout the book the pronoun you is used to draw the reader into the subject matter. It does not imply that single individuals, whether they be baker, biologist, or engineer, should undertake a stream restoration project alone. Each stream is a whole greater than the sum of its geologic, climatic, hydrologic, and biologic parts. The design of a successful restoration project requires the efforts of a team of specialists who can analyze the parts and synthesize them into an understanding of how the stream and its valley function to create trout habitat.

Despite the groundswell of interest in the subject, there is not a detailed, readable, up-to-date book that describes the science and art of trout-stream restoration. This book attempts to fill that void and give the reader an understanding of the physical, chemical, and biological needs of trout. This includes understanding the importance of the interactions among climate, geology, vegetation, flowing water, and land use that create trout habitat. With this base of information, it is hoped the reader will learn how to evaluate existing habitat conditions and trout populations to help determine specific habitat restoration objectives.

Chapters 1 through 6 provide the historical context and technical background necessary to understanding the theory behind trout-stream restoration and management. Chapters 7 through 9 examine 14 case histories showing how theory has, and has not, been put into practice. Chapter 10 provides some concluding thoughts on stream restoration management and protection.

We will consider this book a success if the next time you are thinking about your favorite trout stream, your thoughts drift away from the emerging insects to how land use in the drainage has affected riparian vegetation. Or if, as you stalk a lunker in your favorite pool, you begin to think about the processes that created the pool. Maybe the next time you go fishing you will become so absorbed in observing and trying to understand the interactions between land use, streamside vegetation, and trout habitat your rod never makes it out of the case.

Chapter 1

STREAM RESTORATION: CURRENT INTEREST AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

THE sport of trout fishing is growing and it is growing fast. By the year 2000, there will be 10 million trout anglers in North America. Many of them will simply take up rod and reel to escape the pressures of their daily lives and seek the solitude they expect trout fishing to offer.

Thoreau said that many a man went fishing all of his life without ever realizing that it was not fish he was after. Modern surveys of trout anglers are showing that Thoreau was at least half right. Trout anglers are on an outdoor quest to lose themselves in the scenery and catch a wild trout in the process. Unfortunately, the number of streams capable of supporting wild trout—trout that are actually products of a natural stream system—is dwindling.

Sadly, we are all to blame. In too many places the cost of economic prosperity has been the destruction of trout habitat. With that destruction go the natural environments trout anglers find such fine complements to their fishing trips.

Our domestic and industrial wastes have polluted streams and eliminated wild-trout populations. The evidence can be found in West Virginia’s Cranberry River, Oregon’s Camp Creek, Pennsylvania’s West Valley Creek, and other streams described in this book. Even the seemingly innocent removal of streamside vegetation by livestock, farming, logging, mining, and urban development has led to wide, shallow, and warm troutless streams.

Straightening stream channels, a surprisingly common flood-control practice, has caused water to gouge wide, shallow channels, resulting in related changes in the streamside vegetation. Perhaps such streams in now-barren landscapes could still be stocked with hatchery trout, but, in the end, it would not take a lifetime to discover that wasn’t what one was after.

The growing population and increased interest in trout fishing, coupled with decreasing trout habitat, have heaped new pressures on fish and game agencies to provide quality trout-fishing opportunities. All of the fish and game agencies of trout-producing states have, at some time, developed programs of planting hatchery-reared trout to meet the increasing demand for trout fishing.

In 1983 approximately 54 million catchable-sized trout were stocked in 43 states at a cost of $36 million. At the same time, our stream resources were dwindling, and by 1988 the U.S. General Accounting Office’s study of streamside management on public rangelands showed that in some states as much as 90 percent of federally managed streams were in a degraded condition.

The easily managed stocked fishery allows many anglers to catch and keep trout that are genetically programmed to die quickly in the wild from waters that need not be capable of supporting naturally reproducing wild-trout populations. But for many anglers, hatchery-reared trout are a poor substitute for wild trout. A hatchery trout doesn’t look or fight as well as a wild trout, and, for growing numbers of anglers, much of the mystery and beauty of trout fishing is lost when the quarry is just another mass-produced