The genetics of the fish in Beaver Creek is an important consideration when talking about whether to supplement a recovery by stocking fish, but the origin of the Beaver Creek browns is pretty easy to trace and the original strain is still available.
The brown trout in Beaver Creek, Big Gunpowder Falls, Big Hunting Creek and dozens – possibly hundreds -- of other Maryland streams that can no longer support brook trout, are from Jones Falls, a stream that flows along one of the most hated sections of highway in Baltimore, the Jones Falls Expressway. Upstream from the expressway and the Baltimore Beltway, however, is a land that time forgot, a territory that has been the refuge of Baltimore’s moneyed classes dating to the late 1800s.
First a mindless digression:
Like Beaver Creek, Jones Falls starts as a tiny bit of a waterway flowing through a golf course (The Greenspring Valley Hunt Club, where I worked briefly in the kitchen in the late 1980s). At the western edge of the golf course is a house with a fairly large spring hole in the front yard. The spring hole (which is protected by a rock wall that keeps the lawn separate from the water) gives the main branch of Jones Falls much of its water, and it’s cold year round. Other springs are scattered about through Greenspring Valley, some right in the creek, others along tributaries, resulting in a creek that is cold throughout the summer.
From there, the creek flows through pastures, old-money estates, and the campuses of a college (Stephenson University, formerly Villa Julie) and a few operations of the kind we used to call boarding schools. Decades ago, and I’m talking 1940s through early ‘60s, if not earlier, Jones Falls was a stocked trout stream, but issues with sewage infiltration resulted in that coming to an end, certainly well before the 1970s. The cold water, however, allowed for trout to flourish, and a few intrepid anglers have been devotees of the creek since I was a kid. It is one of the places where I learned to fish.
The North Branch of Jones Falls flows out of Caves Valley, and on one of its stronger springs, owned by an avid trout angler and fly fisherman named Simeon Joseph Yaruta, was used as a trout-rearing facility by the now defunct Maryland Fly Anglers.
Anyway, digression ends here, sort of:
In the 1980s, the Coldwater Fisheries Division of Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources was run by Robert A. Bachman (the guy who made a name for himself studying trout on central Pennsylvania’s Spruce Creek in the early 1980s), and his chief lieutenants were biologists Howard Stinefelt, Charlie Gougeon. All three were/are avid trout anglers and fly guys. This cast of characters were all friendly with my dad (who ran the Maryland Fly Angler’s operation for a few years), and were all very kind to me when I was a kid. They are the source of information for this tangled, rambling mess.
They made possible the cooperative Maryland Fly Anglers trout project on the Yaruta property, and also recognized the potential of many Maryland streams, long devoid of native brook trout, to support wild brown trout. They set up an operation along the headwaters of Jones Falls and each autumn, harvested the eggs and milt of the stream’s very healthy brood stock. They found that the wild browns, once their egg sacs were depleted, were all but impossible to raise because they are inherently skittish, to the point of mortally injuring themselves anytime someone came around and tried to feed them. Howard and Charlie worked around the problems, and devised ways to get very young trout planted in streams across Maryland that did not already support wild fish. The result is the state is home to a shockingly good wild trout fishery, built on the Jones Falls strain. I say shockingly good, because trout in Maryland are a distant fourth place on the fisheries priority list, after Chesapeake Bay fish, Atlantic Ocean fish, and warmwater lake fish.
Skip to the point
Now that I’ve taken longer than William Faulkner to get to my point, here it is: If Maryland were to stock Jones Falls trout in Beaver Creek, the genetic line would not be affected because that’s where the Beaver Creek brood stock came from.
Two brief footnotes:
1-There’s a second Baltimore strain of wild browns whose story mirrors that of the Jones Falls strain, but populates the western drainage of the Gunpowder watershed in the Butler Valley (Western Run and its tributaries).
2-I’m not spot burning by identifying Jones Falls and the Western Run watershed as being homes to healthy wild trout populations (including some brookies in the Western Run tributaries). I challenge even the most skilled of bait anglers to fish either creek with nightcrawlers and minnows and come away anything but humbled at how difficult the trout are to catch. You may be able to land a few, but you will destroy your boots and leave with a thousand thorn scratches. And a substantial part of the Western Run watershed is on horse farms and fox chase runs where fishing is allowed only with landowner permission. No one is going to shoot you, but you will be escorted off the property, forthwith, by burly farm hands if you don’t have permission.