You guys are correct. I see a lot of people who mistake colored up fish for wild. This fish came out of a stocked water about 3 months post stocking. It was living in about 12” deep water chasing minnows and chubs and getting fat. I caught it on a streamer. I’d attribute the colors to sun tan and good diet for a few months. I’ve never seen a wild one with colors any better than this, but this is a stocker.
The trout has a lot of color, but that is likely to due to being fed pellets that are supplemented with carotenoid pigments that color up the trout. That has been common with commercially raised salmon for years, and is now becoming more popular in trout hatcheries.
Stocked Rainbows can look really good after just a few months. The fins grow back and they get the nice red colors. The fins even get a nice transparent pink color. I think a lot of fish, both Browns and Rainbow that people think are wild are actually just holdovers.
Bows are definitely the hardest to tell for certain but do not underestimate how many wild trout are out there and how common they really are, particularly browns.
Kinda appears dead to me.
I don't agree with this at all. Wild brown trout are everywhere and are very easy to identify. Wild rainbows are somewhat common, too, and by far more difficult to ID but.....
Totally up to you, nothing wrong with any approach.
I agree. I have been watching a local stream that I have fished since I was a kid. More Browns seem to be turning up there in recent years. They appear wild to me and some are good sized. This is a stream that has limestone headwaters but also has springs throughout. It is a failrly built up area. people would be very surprised to know what creek it is.
I agree there are a lot but I was just thinking how everyone will say a fish is wild just because it has good coloration. My point is more that after a few months in the streams under certain conditions the fish do regrow fins and can look a lot like wild ones. I am really not sure they are that easy to identify.
100%. I was going to make some comment like "Stocked or wild? More like dead". But...it's okay. It's not a brookie, so what's more dead invasive species, amirite!?
My sentiments exactly.
It doesn't always work out that way.
I was arguing with my friend the other day about this. He showed me a picture of a 14 inch brook trout his dad had caught in a stream near his cabin. It had rough hatchery fins and was a plain green/gray color with small whitish speckles (almost no red with blue halos and certainly no orange coloration). He assumed because the stream was not stocked to his knowledge and that he had seen several small natives, that it was a native trout his dad had caught. It obviously wasn't. I always question if my fish are wild or stocked even on streams not listed by either the state or local co-op hatcheries. I can think of many scenarios where stocked fish end up looking wild, but not many where a wild fish looks stocked. The amount of stocked trout in wild trout streams is appalling.
You're right, not always. But, in the last 20 years of wild trout fishing, I've only caught maybe 5 trout that weren't wild. And they did come from private stocking.
It’s not a very common occurrence at least in my experience. I’ve only been seriously fishing for natives/wilds for a couple months (before that I would go out once in a blue moon and catch barely anything, now I’m out blue lining new streams every weekend) but I have seen some stocked fish in creeks I would never expect them in. If your fishing an exclusively wild trout creek odds are your fish are wild but I don’t always take that to be 100%
Many scenarios where stocked fish end up looking wild? Like what?
