For over one hundred years after the introduction of Brown Trout in Pennsylvania’s waters fishermen have burdened and shackled themselves with the stereotyped concept that kept them from understanding and enjoying the greater potential that lies in the design of the Brown Trout species. We have mistakenly stereotyped the Brown Trout as a Stocked Trout. Of course the Brown Trout is an introduced species. Once the magic of natural reproduction occurs it is no longer a stocked trout, it is a Wild Trout. The will of the natural order of things is carried out upon its development unmercifully as only success is handed down generationally. After more than one hundred years of adaptation to our streams and rivers the Brown Trout is still viewed by many, if not most in Pennsylvania as nothing more than a stocked trout. A stocked trout needs only time and food to grow large. A wild trout to grow large, needs accurate movements to provide both food and time. Movement is key.
It may surprise some anglers to say the trout as well as all things in nature don’t care or have any regard for what we think or feel. The wild trout’s universe does not spin as we would like to think. We need a root change: not a revolution but a return to nature, in the form of a trout. That means throwing out a lot of accumulated human baggage. In the little universe of fly fishing, we have the sun and planets as mixed up as they were before Copernicus. We (Pa trout anglers), still believe the sun and every planet revolves around us. We have made the streams as well as the trout about us and what we want from the environment. We see the brown trout as what we have made it, not what it is or has become, obscuring its true potential. We have altered nature by not valuing more highly what we have over what we want from it. Coal extraction, mining and the lumber industry practices of the industrial revolution are parallel examples to the concept of the propagation of trout and stocking them as adults over wild trout, (native or not), is an irresponsible mismanagement of resources benefitting us as priority at the expense of the natural. For nearly five decades brown trout were planted as fingerlings before they were stocked as adults. Those plantings took root and remain, now refined by many years of natural selection to our waters and are now baring the greatest fruit where we have altered them the least.
As it happens, we trout fisherman have available to us-as one option-an attractive path toward understanding. No other sport offers anything comparable. No other fish seems to have been as forced by its environment into the curiously adaptable. The brown trout as described by the great biologist and former executive director of the PFBC, Bob Bachman, “A riddle wrapped in mystery inside and enigma.” Even the tools of science are relatively blunt in our search for understanding the nuances of this amazing species. We as fisherman have the opportunity to get at the part of a trout’s life which takes most of his time and is most important to him: his search for safe food. But to understand what we observe, we must maintain careful control, and be as honest about our results as any scientist. Science makes skepticism a virtue. The hunting fishermen doesn’t always fish where he knows there are fish. He often fishes where he thinks he may find one. With consideration of all variables effecting movement, the hunter fishes to a specific spot with purpose and he learns always. What a blessing it is to the trout angler to have a wild and free trout to pursue that pushes upon him or her the never-ending thirst for a better, but never complete understanding of its movements in the hunt. To hunt the hunter.
Fly fishing is the sport that asks why, or at least should. We may release the trout, but we cling to his mysteries. The question spawned from the hunt, when the fish are not found behind every rock or deposited by the bucket is, “Why is this trout here and not there?” When the location of the fish is a given, the only question considered by the angler might be, “Why does this fish take this fly and not this one?” The latter being the more commonly pondered and the focus of the Pennsylvania trout angler for good reason. The focus is the fishing, not the fish. Not every trout angler in Pennsylvania is built by the pursuit of a trout that requires a hunt. All men are compulsive hunters, or at least I am. Answering the question of why to trout movement may be the most elusive thing of all. It appears that a fishermen can fish all his life and never truly know a fish the same way a person can go to church all his life and never truly know God. Many a worshipful moment has happened along the stream. I am extremely grateful for what we have.
What we have are Brown Trout in this state that still demonstrate through movement the early planting characteristics of the Loch Leven strain.
Coveted Waters Reel Rap 