Streams being considered for wild trout designations

[troutbert]

Swattie87 wrote:
I bet in 3 of those 4 there's Browns reproducing somewhere. Maybe all 4.

It's hard to imagine where there might be wild trout in Philadelphia.

In an area as large and as rural as Beaver, Greene, Washington Counties it does seem surprising that no wild trout have been found.

But the streams and landscape don't look very trouty around there. That's close to Ohio, which has a lot of rural areas too, but very little in the way of wild trout.

 

[k-bob]

"That's close to Ohio, which has a lot of rural areas too, but very little in the way of wild trout."

I grew up NE ohio and there are near zero wild trout. I'd guess the water is too warm for ST and too acidic for BT. there are long delays in stream pH improvements after rain pH improvements, but the rain pH change in wayne county oh, south of Cleveland, is striking. maybe much later.

http://nadp.sws.uiuc.edu/sites/ntn/ntntrends.html?siteID=OH71

 

[Swattie87]

In the three western counties, there's so many Browns stocked into those streams that you have to figure somewhere there's a reproducing population of Browns. Maybe not all that great from a fishable standpoint, but I'd certainly bet on it being more likely that there is some limited reproduction somewhere in those counties than not. Browns show up in all kinds of places. The first places I'd look would be the smaller tribs to the stocked streams.

Disclaimer - I have never caught, nor attempted to catch a wild Trout in those three counties.

Philadelphia County is less likely than the other three western counties, but possible still I think.

 

[k-bob]

can't imagine trout in the cuyahoga given thermal issues:

http://blog.owu.edu/sustainability/files/2015/02/Cuyahoga-Fire1.jpg

 

[dryflyguy]

Back in my hunting days, I used to spend a lot of time tromping through the hills of greene and washington counties. Lots of steep, densely forested hill sides there. With some nice looking streams that sure looked like places for WT. And I always wondered why there weren't any there.
However, after looking at the recent issue of TU magazine - in which they have maps showing the historical ranges of wild trout in all sections of the country - apparently those counties never had any WT for some reason.

 

[pcray1231]

Yeah, I've spent some time in that area. Even the far western counties north of there are pretty lean. I realize Crawford, Venango, etc. have a lot of streams but they are on the eastern edge of those counties, the western edges are pretty poor. But Lawrence, Butler, Armstrong, Mercer, etc. have a couple streams but are VERY poor as well. Pretty much S of I-80 and west of 119 is poor. North of 80, then you still gotta get east of I-79.

It's geological, but I don't think acid rain is the primary culprit. It's primarily a shale bedrock, and groundwater flows are atrocious, even by freestoner standards. A stream large enough to hold water year round gets too warm in the summer. A stream small enough to stay cold goes dry. Plus, there's a whole lot of bituminous coal seams, so sulfuric acid forms naturally. The poor area coincides largely with traditional coal mining zones, but it is not confined to areas that were mined. Hence, the poor trout habitat and coal mining are correlated, but not cause-effect. The cause of both is the geology and presence of coal to begin with.

And, of course there could be a few that would be borderline streams in other areas. Meaning they'd hold fish if they were in, say, Potter County, but wouldn't be "good". But in Potter there are "safe" streams. Meaning when you get that one bad summer, the poor streams may be wiped out, but they just reseed themselves from the better ones and recover. Down there, that bad summer literally wipes out everything. And then there's nothing to reseed them.

Swattie's probably right that a pair of brown trout have reproduced at some point. That doesn't make them a wild trout stream. They have to be self-sustaining. Multiple year classes and all that. Modern stockies rarely if ever seed a self sustaining population.

 

[troutbert]

dryflyguy wrote:

However, after looking at the recent issue of TU magazine - in which they have maps showing the historical ranges of wild trout in all sections of the country - apparently those counties never had any WT for some reason.

I wonder how they determined that there were never trout there.

And if they were never there, why not?

When the whole landscape was forested, why would brook trout not have existed there?

 

[pcray1231]

The same way they determine the ranges of dinosaurs. Fossils and so forth.

You could use the same argument to ask why any animal was not found anywhere. Brook trout habitat requires a lot more than simply the presence of forest.

Nobody said there were no fish. Just other fish that were perhaps more suited to the habitat than brookies.

There are water chem issues with the coal seams. But that's not the main problem, as many streams are fine for stockies and even some on the basic side.

The real problem is that kind of bedrock (almost solely slates and shales) allows almost zero water penetration. As such, runoff is swift (which adds siltation issues), and any springs are small and intermittent. Hence, streams run dry easily and it takes a sizable stream to not run dry. In those sizable streams, the % of flow from springs is virtually nil, so they don't stay cold. So it's rare that a stream is large enough to flow year round and small enough to stay cold. That doesn't make for very good wild trout habitat.

Seasonal trout habitat? Sure. Summer is the bugaboo.

In the counties that do have a couple wild trout streams, almost all of them will be on the river hills. Bigger rivers cut a chasm, and the river hills offer a higher gradient and crumbling layers of bedrock, allowing for some thicker scree type slopes and hence deeper overburden and more spring action. You'll see a couple river hill wild trout throughout Armstrong, southern Clarion, Butler, etc. counties. But SW of Pittsburgh, for one, your getting off the plateau so any bigger rivers and streams don't cut so deeply.

 

[jifigz]

It is nice to see some of the small streams that I've explored recently on that list and I've caught wild fish in each and everyone of them. It is also very encouraging to see streams on that list that I've been meaning to get to in my area that I was highly expecting to find trout in, now I know for sure that they are there. The best part about these streams is that no one fishes them. "They aren't stocked, so there ain't no trout in there." That's a common mentality in my area and quite frankly a wonderful mentality to have. It leaves more streams wide open for me.

 

[pcray1231]

troutbert,

A little to expand on what I'm saying. Attached is a pic of a PA stream with this general geology. Notice the horizontal shale layers. Almost totally water inpenetrable. The entire watersheds are stratified like this. There's a thin layer of soil with basically pavement underneath.

Streams slowly cut through layers, so you get slow pool, fall, slow pool, fall. The pools lack structure, but oxygenation is decent, and right at the plunge of falls you sometimes get plunge pools.

If you have enough gradient, though, you cut through more layers more quickly, and the edges of those layers crumble and form deeper overburden, like you see beginning to happen here. The overburden acts as a sponge and results in more groundwater.

In this case, this is the headwaters of Hells Run, one of the few class A's in the region. It's starting to go down into the canyon that Slippery Rock Creek forms in the McConnell's Mill area. Effectively a largish river hill for the region and hence enough gradient to do the trick. There aren't many of these in this area, and none as you go farther SW where the plateau is simply not high enough to allow any stream or river to cut deeply enough.