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Mountain streams, ponds offer Red River anglers plenty of action
RED RIVER, N.M. — When trout fishing in the waters in the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range, you have two choices, the pristine, clear streams or any of the various ponds which are stocked throughout the year. Obviously, there is an advantage to each. There seems to be no better place on earth when you are standing in or by a fast-flowing mountain stream, surrounded by an Alpine forest, almost chilled to the bone (in July, at that) and carefully drifting a fly across a small pocket near a rocky bank. You hold your breath as you await the lightning-fast hit of a rainbow, brown, brook or cutthroat trout. The streams are stocked well and often by the Department of New Mexico Game & Fish with most experienced anglers culling to a five-fish limit (in most areas) or catching and releasing in order to perpetuate the existence of many trout.
Dunbar Creek survey brings surprise
Biologists from the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission's regional office in Somerset surveyed the stream July 18-19, looking for wild and stocked trout. They found both in pretty good numbers. They also found something they weren't expecting. Electroshocking one section of stream, below what is known locally as the wire, they found eight hatchery brown trout and three hatchery brookies, but also four rainbow trout "that appeared to be either wild fish or fish that had been stocked as fingerlings, because they were all five to seven inches long," said the commission's area fisheries manager, Rick Lorson. .
Trout blamed for too much
WITH the new trout fishing season upon us, I think that my recent discovery is timely. Among some old papers which were stacked in a box under my house, I found a report concerning the native spotted tree frog, Litorea spenceri, which was threatened with extinction some time before 1990, although the report I have is dated 1997. The main theme of the report was that these threatened frogs were declining in numbers as a result of being eaten by rainbow trout. To help the dwindling frog numbers there was a scheme afoot, involving the Victorian Government and then Department of Environment, to withdraw or eradicate rainbow trout from streams in the Mt Buffalo National Park in particular, in an effort to halt this alarming decline in frog numbers. Both rainbow trout and brown trout are exotic fish species, being introduced into Australia from the US and England respectively in the late 19th century.
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