As trout go, the rainbow cavorting at the end of Michael Martinez’s line wasn’t much to shout about.
Granted, it flashed splendid coloration, along with a little extra spunk born of the heavy lifting required by a fast-flowing river. But it measured only 13 inches, provided it stuck out its tongue.
Still, this lovely little fish that Martinez coaxed into his net last week represented something very special for this wild trout section of the Poudre River just downstream from the hamlet of Rustic.
It was, after all, a rainbow trout, something you don’t find every day on a river increasingly dominated by browns. Catch a hundred fish in the Poudre, and 95 will be decked out in brown and gold, not pink and green.
Nothing much wrong with that, except that it might take awhile, considering the relative difficulty of getting a brown trout to overlook the fraud inherent in a hank of feathers with a barb attached or a hunk of metal sporting treble hooks.
“A lot of people want rainbows back,” said Ken Kehmeier, the Division of Wildlife biologist who wrestles with the problem.
The answer isn’t as easy as it seems. The DOW can plant lots of rainbow trout of sufficient size to avoid the whirling disease that destroyed natural reproduction and depleted the species. The agency also is experimenting with hybrid rainbows extremely resistant to WD, a strain that soon might breed successfully in this and other rivers across the state.
These are solutions for science, something at which the DOW excels. For the Poudre, and every river overrun with brown trout, the problem is politics, another matter altogether.
Through a natural resistance to WD, browns quickly claimed the environmental niches vacated by rainbows. Tougher, more resilient, they’re like the neighborhood bullies that took over the corner concession. Placing a few wimpy rainbows on the block won’t make them go away.
“The best chance to give the rainbows a place in the river is to remove the browns,” said Kehmeier, his voice rising at all the implications inherent in that suggestion.
You read right. Snatch a perfectly fine and healthy population of brown trout from portions of the river and replace them with a physically inferior breed that might even require a certain amount of wet-
nursing along the way.
Kehmeier generally is pleased with the overall number and quality of Poudre trout.
“We’re near the historic highs of biomass and the trout are in good condition,” he said of a rebound from the drought woes of three years ago. Last week the river was ripping along just less than 200 cubic feet per second, exceptionally high for late summer and a strong indicator for high winter trout survival.
“These are brown trout and the question is whether people can catch them consistently,” he said.
That was the precise problem facing Martinez, a Greeley resident, and his writer companion last Friday. Fishing the lower of the Poudre’s two catch-and-release segments, the two found bites hard to come by. In the absence of an insect hatch to stir the trout, the same complaint echoed from other anglers in a section that contains up to twice the trout biomass as unregulated waters.
Martinez’s rainbow may have been a tad on the dumb side, but we would have loved more just like him.
What management strategy the DOW ultimately embraces will be determined in part by the availability of WD-resistant rainbows that can make their own way in the stream. But it’ll also be driven by public opinion. Get ready to cast your vote.
Listen to Charlie Meyers at 9 a.m. each Saturday on “The Fan Outdoors,” KKFN 950 FM. He can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
