1. Troutnut Forum
›
2. Photography
›
3. Trout I.D.

Hey, guys. A buddy of mine caught this fish in a stream that to my knowledge is not stocked, but holds wild browns downstream of his cabin and wild brookies in his stretch. I think it's just a rainbow, but he thought it looked odd to be a rainbow and wanted a second opinion. Sorry about the poor lighting.

-Shawn

Yes, it is a rainbow.

Looks like a rainbow to me - reddish flanks with lots of little black spots, and small black spots all over the tail. Consider it a bonus species! And hope they haven't started dumping stockers in there...

Jonathon

Ditto on the rainbow. I played around with Photoshop quick to brighten it up and verify that it's got the reddish color in all the right places.

The "bent" dorsal and caudal fin wear look like that of a stocker to me. Stocked rainbows stray all over the place, and some people can't resist dumping them into wild trout tribs.

Bruce and I fish a small wild brown trout spring creek that unfortunately has some club water on it. The club stocks only fat pellet feeders.
We each have caught some 3-7" rainbows while trico fishing recently. We managed some beautiful browns up to 14" and I lucked into a 15" rainbow that had perfect fins.
Bruce got the largest of the weekend. He managed to set the hook on a 1000+ pound Black Angus that made a short run before breaking off. We are strict catch and release anglers, but I would have had a good arguement on keeping that one.
The good news is that we were able to safely negotiate the two layers of electric fence to get into the stream...

Tony, What did he take him on? ;) One of your 32's?

#24 snowshoe male trico spinner on 7x

Wow! You two are scary! "We aren't worthy!" :)

Someone else might say, "Where are the photos?" But I know you two are above long tall fish tales, right?! ;)

Spence

Actually, there is no club water on it but fish do manage to swim onto the property.
I'll fess up about the black angus. I wasn't really fishin' to him, but I did hook him good. I got him on my backcast. I couldn't decide whether to try and land him or just break him off. I was ready to yell up to Gutcutter to bring his net, his is larger than mine, but I didn't think he'd quit casting.
The beast got into my backing once before I managed to regain control of him. All I could think of were the steaks if I got him a stringer.
Sportsmanship took over and I broke him off.
The cows had me surrounded, literally, and the fish were risin'. I had to cast my tricos between and around them beasts.
You know how it is when the fish are rising.
The last time we fished there the cows refused to get into the water where I was standing. This time they wondered in and tried to take over my spot, but I showed them.
You don't even want to know about the horse at our other spot. I think the damn thing wants to French me.
These are all true stories, but believe what you want. My life does not require me to manufacture stories.
Goose, Lastchance, Bruce

Goose, sounds like you need a new fly reel with a stronger drag. Hey, they land marlin on fly tackle, right? Gotta scale your gear to the size of your quarry...might wanna go up to a 14-weight, too. And if you're going to target them, you should probably tie up some really large streamers in green-dyed schlappen to match the grass they're munching on. Tight lines and steaks on the barbecue!!

Jonathon

P.S. Oh, and you might want to use some kind of shock tippet to make sure they don't just bite you off...

there is stocked club water just downstream from where we were fishing


There is also stocked club water below the pasture where your Gene Simmons wannabe mare lives. Maybe she loves you because you sneak into her electrified fortress?


he isn't lying about that. I love fishing with Bruce, 'cause it's never boring and always an adventure...

Back to the topic at hand - these rainbows are spawning in this small spring creek. Is this bad? I tend to think not. I mean they coexist in many quality fisheries, why not this one. They spawn at different times of the year, so there should be no competition for gravel. The rainbows eat a lot of eggs, but the browns eat a lot of small fish.

Thoughts?

Gutcutter,
In my humble opinion rainbows and browns coexisting isn't a bad thing at all. It's when you start throwing brookies in bull trout water or rainbows in cutthroat water where you start having problems. I used to fish a small creek when I was a kid that had healthy populations of rainbows, brookies, and brown trout. I miss fishing places like that.

John

Well Bruce...At lest you hooked something with a pulse! I had a meltdown moment Sunday on the South Branch of the Au Sable. I was casting to some fish eating the little anoka's and was being lazy and instead of re-working my tippet and fly I just cast what I had on to them. I was just about to head for Detroit and was done for the day. I just caught a low hanging tag alder leaf and gave it a healthy tug before I was really screwed and the fly popped back over my head and hooked a dead limb on a cedar sweeper high above my head. I was at 4x and what an unfortunate time to find out that I had tied some quality knots...I couldn't reach it and it didn't want to come free...

Next time out I think you need to let Tony drag along a camera and film your fun...YouTube or America's Most Funniest Videos are just waiting to see what we can produce...;) Maybe we could win the top prize and use the dough to head out west and take this dog-and-pony show on the road!

Thanks for the merriment!

Spence

This is a tough question Tony...I think what John is saying above is that it's not a good idea if you are trying to protect wild natives in that stream. The bottom line is only the brooks have real native species status in our neck-of-the-woods. What is going on there should determine the answer I think.

In a real healthy productive stream I think a little competition, if the above has been answered, is not a bad thing. Wild means wild in every aspect, no? Even when they become harder for the novice to catch.

We have Rainbows in the Mainstream (Holy Water) of the Au Sable and there may be a few in the other branches but I've never caught them there. They don't stock the upper reaches of the Au Sable and there is natural reproduction of the Rainbows. There is a dam in Mio that keeps the upper sections protected from other competition like from Steelhead & Salmon runs.

There is a pond behind the dam and there are some large Bows there that migrate upstream for spawning...These guys are probably responsible for the continued re-population.

They all seem to get along and spawn at different times with the Bows doing their thing at the end of winter/early spring. I think, for the most part, they inhabit different parts of the stream during the rest of the year. Though this isn't always true, the Browns hug structure and deeper holes, Brooks fill in the empty spaces, and the Bows like the cooler, riffled, aerated parts of the stream...I did pull a wonderful Brookie from a log Sunday and have caught Browns in the "Brookie Hole", but you know what I'm saying.

I doubt we will ever go back in the midwest etc and only put natives in the streams, but it would be nice, if the stream can support it, to let them go wild and invest in stream improvement to help sustain that "wilder" population...I think right species for the right habitat...

We have had some issues here over the years with some old put-and-take programs that only still exist due to the history of the programs going way back. The DNR would kill them if they could. We have had groups try to place trout in marginal waters and I think they are wasting their time.

I won't name names, but one of my favorites is a feeder stream that before it was damned in the 30's had a monster pike spawning run. They have removed the dam and have placed trout way upstream...I think that once the pike feel that cool water flowing in to a warm water environment they will be coasting upstream again and once they discover there are dumb hatchery trout swiming around up there they will stay...:) They will think that their prayers have been answered!

Back in the early 90's this same group asked me and a couple of their members to research the possibility of placing trout in other parts of the river as a put-and-take situation. I owned up to a predisposition against it but they kept me on anyway. We gathered together with the watershed folks, the MI DNR, and the fisheries boys from U of M...They gave me all I needed to shut it down.

For some reason they are revisiting this I think because of an obsession with trout and maybe other vested local interests...Struggling fly shops have dreams of riches floating around in their heads and being flooded with guys needing flies and gear and directions to the promised land...

I think we need to stop with the funny business sometimes and get some real science to answer our questions. Sometimes the DNR just wants us anglers to be happy and they think that means to us catching alot of fish no matter how stupid they are or how lacking the habitat is.

This time I'm really sorry for the ramble boys...Really!

Spence

Guys, in my neck of the woods it seems that the three species get along just fine. The Pine River has yielded all three to me this year, with brookies up to 11" so I think they're doing just fine in there what with competition from the browns and rainbows (which don't get any bigger themselves). This afternoon/evening I went up a favorite tributary on the Rifle River and popped a couple of small rainbows on hoppers - unfortunately the fabulous beaver ponds I remember from ten years ago are gone, but then again there's a lot of nice gravel beds in there now open to the mainstem for spawning runs so maybe it's not such a bad thing. The Rifle holds loads of browns and they can get pretty big, plus a few rainbows in the mainstem (and tribs as mentioned above) and brookies in several of the tribs. I enjoy catching all three species so I'm glad that they can all "get along". The Pine River does not get stocked (according to the MDNR website, anyway) and so all of the fish in there are wild. The Rifle does get stocked pretty heavily (not legal size, however, so they can grow and eat bugs for a while) with browns and also steelhead, and there are (or at least used to be) steelhead and some lake-run browns coming in from the big waters.

BTW Spence, Foote Dam keeps the salmon (or what's left of them in our part of the world) and steelhead from even getting any where near the trout waters further up on the Au Sable. It also keeps sturgeon from ever getting re-established in there...During our research on that problem 10-12 years ago we kicked around the idea of fish ladders to let them get further upstream but the trout fisherman would have none of it, lest those damned salmon & steelhead reach & defile their precious trout waters (filled with introduced species anyway since the demise of the grayling & sturgeon...). So much for native fish management...at least the smallmouth belong there!

Jonathon

P.S. Spence, didn't they want to start dumping trout into the Huron on a put-and-take basis too? Like those smallmouth weren't good enough for them??? As in the one I'm holding up in my picture??? Damned thing even took a dry fly...

Thanks for the I.D., guys. And, um, everything else.

-Shawn

Shawn, you can always count on us to take your (and everyone else's) posts in some whacked out tangential direction. You are most welcome.

Jonathon

Spence and Tony -

Huh? Didn't you guys tell me in another thread that brookies aren't native there? It seems to me that if the rainbows are spawning wild fish, there is no difference between the two. Unless, you prefer one over the other...

Kurt

What I mean is that Brooks are native to the region. Tony is not speaking of the Au Sable in MI but a stream he and Bruce haunt when they are in one of their "Marx Brother's" moods and are hell bent on entertaining us.

Brook trout are native to Michigan. They just didn't make it to the Au Sable for some reason. The reports I've seen say that they may have eventually found the river given enough time except we showed up before this happened. Rube Babbitt rectified nature's oversight for her...;)

I think somehow that the argument has evolved, here east of the Mississippi, to more "wild" populations vs stockies. We have screwed so much with these rivers for so long "native" has little meaning. Out west though there are some genetic strains of natives that losing them would be a shame. Look to the work being done to isolate cut-throat in Yellowstone.

Back east the train has long since left the station.

I worry, in the example that Tony brings up, about letting anyone, willy-nilly, dump trout in to a stream...That should be left to the areas DNR and maybe the fishing groups who are attempting to develop a plan of some sort there. What happens if these "Hog" stockies placed in the stream are disease ridden and they blow out the resident population? Who do we place against the wall then? These assholes believe that they can pretty much do as they please with no regard to others' work or mother nature or good science...If such exists.

I think this is were Tony was going with his inquiry, not some particular speciesism.

Jonathon is correct with his hint that there are some of us that hang around the "storied" waters of the Au Sable near Grayling that have created something of an angler's fantasy land. There are at least 5 dams between the mouth at Lake Huron and the Holy Waters. Mio being the closest upstream.

Just this last weekend, at the annual river clean up sponsored by the Angler's of the Au Sable, the Sierra Club presented us with the environmental club of Michigan award for 2011. I have been a member since 1991.

One of the somewhat contradictory things we do has been to fight hard against hydo dam relicensing, but deep in our hearts we may admit to not wanting all the dams removed along the Au Sable. We cheered when the empoundment dam in town was removed upstream, but I tremble when they mention that there is a chance that those downstream may be eliminated.

We humans are married to our own self-interest no matter how "un-enlightened" it might be. This is probably what has made rational change nigh on impossible for the human race and will no-doubt do them in down the road somewhere.

We seem incapable of getting out of our own way most of the time...

Spence