FYI - wild trout ID

I fished Kettle Creek on Friday and had a lot of luck. I actually decided to fish Leidy Bridge and was pleased to find a ton of fish that made it through the warm dry summer. The tiny BWO hatch was really good in the afternoon and I was able to catch several browns and rainbows. A few of the fish had some decent color to them but several still had messed up fins. I believe a lot of this has to do with the stress on the fish with the raising water temps and the quality of the stream is just not that great. Fishing Creek on the other hand as everyone knows is a class A wild trout stream that does get stocked at the lower end. I believe with very little stress they have no problems growing back fins as long as they were not damaged too much and a lot of the fish with damaged fins happens because of being placed in the holding tanks on the trucks and rubbing the sides of the tanks...not from actually being clipped at the hatchery. Hatchery fish do learn how to feed on wild food or else there wouldn't be hardly any trout left in Kettle Creek especially after dealing with the warm summer months. There is still at least one monster over 20 inches there swimming. So again I'm not saying its on all streams they regrow fins and can become almost identical to a wild brown but in a good quality stream that gets stocked I feel it is too hard to tell a wild from a stockie as the stockie lives in the stream longer and longer.

I more or less just posted this because of my trip to Kettle and how happy I was with the results but you couldn't find a nicer day in the fall then last Friday.
 
BigJohn,

Amen to the fishing last Friday! I was about 12 miles down the road from you on Young Womans Creek. I can't imagine a better day in November for flyfishing.
 
M,
Thats a sweetie in your pic and with the red spots and colorful fins i would almost have to say a wild now i rarely fish the golden mile to avoid crowds and the fish i caught saturday was above brandtsville in a section that has not been fished heavily for real since the last club stock the large Brownie was very slender and long with perfect teeth and fins i have stocked alot of fish for the club and know this was not a stockie from expirience thats why my original question alluded to streambreds in poor conditions i belive its possible and trout are more hardy than people give them credit for know i am no expert just voicing my opinion .

S1,
 
Salvi, that was a stocked fish, it had a crippled pectoral fin. in fact all the under fins were green to gray but the spots were almost red....almost. just a very very bright orange. Red tipped adipose fin and round spacial spotting. My point for posting it was sometimes it can be difficult to tell the difference if the fish has the diet to get that colorful. But typically you can make a definite ID by locating one of the indicators of stocked trout. (ie; inability for the spots to be red, opaque under fins or deformed ones)

I handle alot of stocked trout too each year and seeing a wild trout sticks out like a sore thumb most of the time...sometimes it is more difficult where you have to look for some of the indicators.

I caught 19" brownie this fall on my home stream that I would love to say was wild. Everything was perfect including the lower fins. It had a hook jaw and was nearly orange on the lower flanks with reddish under fins. Just gorgeous...but the spotting was orange and the black spots were just too numerous and irregular for me to buy it. Nevertheless, for that fish to make it from stocking truck and harvest through the summer and into fall, is incredible. Those are the fish that demonstrate the rewards of helping stock all those normal sized fish each year. I'd say it is likely that I either netted that fish out of a barrel in spring or carried it to the stream in a bucket. An old friend comes to visit.

Maurice
 
Sorry for the confusion . I don't quite understand how these posts work. I reply to a particular post and it gets filed(?) at the end of the posts not with the thread(?) I replied to. This is unlike the old site. :-?
 
Re: "the black spots were just too numerous and irregular for me to buy it"

The PFBC stocked strain of brown has numerous irregular spots. But there are also reproducing populations of these brown trout. So the numerous, irregular black spots are not a reliable indicator that a brown trout was raised in the hatchery.
 
flyman wrote:
Sorry for the confusion . I don't quite understand how these posts work. I reply to a particular post and it gets filed(?) at the end of the posts not with the thread(?) I replied to. This is unlike the old site. :-?
Click to expand...

flyman, you're right that the new site doesn't have threads that branch off of the main one which you can attach responses to. You can make sure your response gets associated with a particular post by using the quote feature, like I did with your post. Click on the "Reply" button under the post you want to reply to, and then hit the "Quote" button at the bottom of the page, and a box like the one above will appear in your response.
 
BLF,
From what I can tell the fish pictured appears to be a stockie, the vetral fin is very rough as is the tail. A caveat is that it could be wear of an older fish after spawning, but I don't know when you caught it.
 
M,
now that was the answer i was looking for into Wild ID i by no means consider myself an expert but a very interested party in this matter I appreciate your input ,the fish in my statement was not a YBAC stockie but very well could have been a state stock that had been in for a while. In your reply you stated that diet helps bring back color if i understood right and if that is correct that is very interesting indeed!

S,
 
Salvi,
The Breeches does have a few wild fish in it and especially in the area of Boiling Springs there could be some. A friend of mine also said he saw a caught some wild brookies there. That being said, diet plays a role in how all trout look, and proof is that even in the fall on certain streams I fish the brookies don't color up as much as on some others. On still other streams they only color up for the spawn when during early spring, especially on freestone streams they appear very brightly colored even then. So you can't always tell by color alone that a fish is stocked or wild. I'll put some pics up on the web to illustrate this. But give me a couple of days.
Chaz
 
WildBrown-SauconCreek.jpg



Chaz - got him on 10/19/06. The blue behind the eye and the fact that there are not any stocked browns (or so I thought) in the saucon park area? Anyone wanna chime in ----is this fish wild or stocked?
 
blf wrote:
Anyone wanna chime in ----is this fish wild or stocked?
Click to expand...

I'd say it is wild...even if ya didn't tell me where it was caught.

Maurice
 
Thanks for the input Maurice. I thought I should add that the fish (as with everyoone I catch), was gently played, qucik picture and safely released.

I was hoping it was wild
 
BLF,
Wild or stocked it is a beauty. I was merely pointing out the rough edges to the fins.
Fish move around and there are stocked fish in the regs area of the Saucon.
 
Wulff-Man wrote:
flyman wrote:
Sorry for the confusion . I don't quite understand how these posts work. I reply to a particular post and it gets filed(?) at the end of the posts not with the thread(?) I replied to. This is unlike the old site. :-?
Click to expand...

flyman, you're right that the new site doesn't have threads that branch off of the main one which you can attach responses to. You can make sure your response gets associated with a particular post by using the quote feature, like I did with your post. Click on the "Reply" button under the post you want to reply to, and then hit the "Quote" button at the bottom of the page, and a box like the one above will appear in your response.
Click to expand...

Hey this works!! :lol:
Thanx Wulff-Man
 
Lloyd:

Pretty good discussion re: wild trout identifiction.

You might like to read a recent (Nov, 2006) post of mine to my website, Fly Fishing Potter County

http://www.pennswoods.net/~tomdewey/fishing/MillCreek.html

I tnink this stream fits your criteria to a "T".

Tom Dewey
 
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