Ep 116: The Importance of Native Fish, with Bob Mallard
Bob Mallard is the Executive Director of the Native Fish Coalition (NFC), a nonprofit dedicated to restoring and protecting native fish. In this episode, we talk about the origin of NFC, the work they do, what does and doesn’t work for fish conservation, the value of native species, and much more.
Email: Info@NativeFishCoalition.org
Website: link
-
Katie
You're listening to the Fish Untamed podcast, your home for fly fish in the backcountry. This is episode 116 with Bob Mallard on the importance of native fish. Well, I know we're going to get into the Native Fish Coalition, but I like to start every episode by getting a background on how my guests got into the outdoors and specifically into fishing. Walk me through how you got your start in the outdoors.
Bob
I was a little boy. I had this odd fascination with fish. And from the time I can remember, I would venture down to the lake when it was safe for little kids to do so with a fishing rod in my hand. And Grampy, he was an outdoorsman. And I would go until they came and retrieved me, cold and dark out. So it was like always there for me. Never left, even through high school. You know, while I had my distractions like every other high school kid, I had pictures of myself with a canoe on a hot rod. So it really was just, it's been me since as long as I can remember. And I fish 100 days a year. I spend 50 nights a year in a tent. I hunted for 20 years. I'm a flunked out software guy who opened a fly shop, and I guide, and I of course helped found NFC. So it's like part of my DNA, I would say.
Katie
And what species did you grow up fishing for?
Bob
You know, when I was a kid, and I think it's important for people to understand, You know, children, they just want to fish for anything. We're not - you know, little kids aren't fish snobs. I would catch sunfish, perch, pickerel. I'd bring them home in a bucket and show my poor Grammie, who now I know really didn't necessarily care, but she pretended she cared. And I'd bring them back to the pond at her request and let them go. And so, it never really was a species thing as a kid. As I got older, I got fascinated with trout, brook trout, and cold water systems. And so, you know, brook trout have always kind of, you know, they kind of popped in and stayed in. But I think, you know, we kind of do a disservice with children when we try to make them species snobs. And I think that's one of the most interesting changes we're seeing right now, is this everything from blue lining to I saw one recently brown lining where they're fishing these drainage ditches to see what's in them and and these young kids that are snorkeling around look at darter and and you know fall fish tournaments and white fish tournaments I just think that is such a wonderfully positive change in what had become quite a unnecessarily snobby undertaking.
Katie
Do you notice that more in the fly-fishing world or is it pervasive across kind of all styles of fishing?
Bob
You know I used to say that that we fly fishers, which I am exclusively and have been for 30, 40 years, I used to think we were the biggest species snobs out there but you know you can't pin it all on us because the bass guys, serious bass anglers, that's what they do and you know we have serious salt anglers. So, you know, I think people, I get this weird opinion and belief that we are not as attracted to a species as we are a habitat, a type of habitat. I love the woods. I love the deep woods and the mountains and the clear water. And therefore, I'm a trout guy because that's not where bass live. And, you know, maybe, you know, when was working in Louisiana I loved the whole bayou thing and if I lived there and I'd be you know chasing largemouth and if I lived in you know Alabama I'd be on the small streams chasing red-eyed bass so that's my my story and I'm sticking to it I think we like a certain type of environment more than necessarily a certain type of fish.
Katie
Where do you think the line is drawn between snobbery and just having a preference for something because I feel like what you described is you know it's natural people have preferences but at some point it gets into the you know I'm I'm better than so-and-so because I you know I'm enlightened and I chase trout or whatever it is but is there a line there between…
Bob
That is the line when we think we are better than someone else because you know we see our you know chosen species as more worthy then yes, we are snobs. And one of the things, I live in Maine, in central Maine, certainly not a snobby place. And my trout, brook trout peers, you know, they're regular people. There's nothing snobby about the average Maine brook trout fisherman. And they're more likely to have a Red Sox hat than a Sims hat. And they're, you know, very likely to not own a pair of waders. They're sitting in a canoe with a pack basket. And so, you know, that defies the whole trout, brook, you know, trout fishermen, fly fishermen as a snob. However, most stereotypes are earned. And we did this to ourselves. This idea of, of the snobby, you know, trout fly fishermen is well deserved. It was a bunch of old curmudgeons who looked down at people were, you know, I think about a time I was on Silver Creek in Picklebo, Idaho, where a young man was dropped off by his mom to fish on Nature Conservancy land. He didn't know what he was doing, and he stepped in the water, muddied it all up, sent a cloud of mud downstream. And I saw three older gentlemen basically spew off at this poor kid, who had no idea what he was doing wrong. And then they wonder why, you know, people think we're idiots. So, I went up and I said, you know, "Come on out of the water for a minute." I said, "Let me tell you why these grumpy old guys are grousing at you." And I said, "You know, I just coached them. I said, 'Stay in the sand and you won't kick up as much mud and, you know, ignore these old guys.'" So, you know, the trout angler deserves, in some ways, and still today. I mean, you go into some of these um, trout clubs, orgs, whatever you want to call them. I'm 65 years old, I go in to speak, I'm the youngest man in the room. It's like, really? So you know, you're not doing well when, when your mean average age is 70 years old, there's a problem. When I go to a NFC event, I am grandpa, you know, I am the oldest man in the room and oldest person in the room. And so we must be doing something right when my mean average is in their 30s not in their 70s 60s.
Katie
Speaking of NFC, tell me tell me the origin of the Native Fish Coalition. What inspired you guys to start this and just tell me about how it evolved over time.
Bob
I was at a hearing. I had been actively involved in several orgs in Maine, a TU chapter that I helped found, a hook and bullet lobbying fish-specific group called Sportsman's Alliance of Maine Fishing Initiative. They were hugely influential at the legislature. And I helped found a group called Dud Dean Angling Society that was going to be a little more edgy, a little more focused on conservation. And that, you know, long story short I kind of burnt out. I don't know how to tone things down. I'm always like 90 miles an hour. Then I dropped out and I just took a break and I was at a hearing supporting someone else's bill and we lost that bill. And it was a common sense bill we never should have lost. And on my way home, my phone rings and it's a young man from Washington, DC. He was a consultant for RNC, a Republican National Convention, and I'm displaced Mainer. And he said, I listened to the simulcast and, you know, I'm embarrassed for my own state. That bill should have passed. And he said, and you need to get organized. He said, the lone wolf thing isn't going to get you to the Holy Land. So that's the short story. So it kind of put me back in the game after I had left. And he offered money to get our legal papers, our logo, our website. And I'm maybe in his 30s. And I recruited a young woman, Emily Bastion, who I had been helping on some projects with Audubon, and she's a biologist, had been a game warden, worked for Audubon, Nature Conservancy, or sorry, Audubon, AMC, Appalachian Mountain Club, National Park Service, on and on. And then once we started getting this thing going, I recruited, you know, a couple of friends to come in, older people who've been in the game. But our intention and our name was Native Fish Coalition of Maine. And our intention was to fill the void left by the group that had been leading the charge, Sportsman's Alliance of Maine, who under a change in executive director got out of the game. So we felt like we really needed to get a group in there to make sure that this focus on Maine's wild native brook trout, which is a stronghold in the country and Arctic char and things like that, didn't fall through the cracks. So that's how we started. Native Fish Coalition of Maine with no intentions of ever getting beyond Maine. And now we're 18 states deep. I was supposed to be retiring, not ramping it up, but I'm here for the ride. It's a good thing. I'll do whatever I can to leave it in good hands and leave it in a condition that younger people can run with for hopefully years to come.
Katie
And I want to hear more about the organization itself and the work, but just as kind of a to lay the background for people, I want to define some things, you know, wild versus native versus stocked versus non-native and invasive, all these different terms that get thrown around. And I think it'd be good to kind of lay out what we're talking about just so the rest of the conversation has some context. So maybe let's define some of the common terms used, particularly native versus wild. But I know there's a whole bunch of other words that get used kind of as antonyms to things. So I'll let you run with this.
Bob
It's super important and it it has a lot to do with why we exist, which is that somewhere along the line, somewhere along the way, we lost our understanding, our ecological understanding of what belonged, what didn't, why it mattered, why it, you know, and I attribute a lot of that to the Trout Guys more than anybody else. No group of sportsmen are more reliant on stocking and other forms of husbandry, whether it's hybrids, pigment depraved, I mean on and on. Triploids and no group of sportsmen is more accepting of non-natives than today's trout fishermen. And yet, today's trout fishermen, myself included, we hold our noses up as if somehow, you know, we are the stewards of the resource. You know, nobody does it better. And yet, you could argue nobody does it worse. So I, we got to a point where when we first started with NFC, it was, I said, we need to go back to square one. We need to go back and educate the masses as to these horrible misuses of terms. When somebody refers to, and in Maine it happened, you know, a senior business owner who was on the Fish and Game Commission stood up in defense of his "native" smallmouth bass. Well, smallmouth bass are not native to Maine. And yet, here's a whole room full of Fish and Game people, legislators, you know, movers and shakers, and this guy's bloviating about, you know, how it actually had to do with he didn't want native alewives restored to his water because they were going to impact, or he said, non-native alewives, you know, restored his water that was going to disrupt his native smallmouth. Well, in fact, he had it asked backwards. The alewives were native in the smallmouth. So he's not alone. People were using the term native to mean self-sustaining. And some of the biggest conservation groups in the country focused on trout, their mission was wild, not native. Stocking was bad. Wild was good, irrespective of whether that wild, you know, fish belong there or not. I use the analogy, would we be that accepting of zebras in Nevada or, you know, fallow deer in Maine? Of course we wouldn't. And yet somehow, we've got an entire generation now believing that wild brown trout in what should be cutthroat and grayling water is a good thing. And that somehow they're a placeholder for, you know, this day when the skies are going to open and all of our native fish are going to come back. And it's the opposite. They're why we don't have them. So, you know, simply, and we document the heck out of it. Native means indigenous, historically present. It means indigenous to that particular body of water, not a region, not a state. You know, fish are different than terrestrial and birds because, you know, they are constricted by waterways. They can't like decide, you know, I think I'll go walk, you know, a couple of miles and try the pond down the road. So unlike mammals that can go wherever the heck they want and do when climate issues affect them, and birds and, you know, so it's really hard to pin down exact native ranges for mammals and birds, but it's not hard to pick it, you know, to find it for fish. We know what belongs where. So that's our term. We use the dictionary meaning for native, indigenous. Wild means self-sustaining, born in nature. Again, dictionary. And you know, we don't go as far as to say that parents had to be born in nature, because in many cases that would be impractical or impossible to prove. But you know, we also, you know, draw some lines in regard to planted eggs and stuff. We basically say, you know, in nature of naturally deposited eggs. We're not going to question who grandpa was or mama or daddy. And so that's wild. And NFC rarely uses the term native without saying wild. And we're careful, you know, our push and our focus is wild native fish. Because technically a stock brook trout in Maine in a historically, you know, brook trout water is a native fish. It's just not a wild native fish. So that was that complex re-education of the masses as to, you know, what's native and what's not. Because if you can't get past that, then everything else is moot. And stock means we put it there, you know, we did it. It wouldn't be there if we didn't do it. Natural expansion of non-native fish, you know, that's a different thing. But, you know, it's-- but that falls under the, you know, typically the wild non-native fish. And so that's, you know, we started there and said that if we can get that far, now we can talk about why it matters. And, you know, somewhere along the way, we actually- After we beat the terms to death on our website and everything, we actually put a pop-up that says, "Why do wild fish matter?" And then we explain the role that they play in their ecosystem. We talk about how, you know, any changes that we make to our environment in regard to what lives there, plant, animal, whatever, it, we never really know where it's going to go. And more often than not, well more often than not, we get these unexpected results. And, you know, when I say unexpected, I don't mean that they're unexpected, but we say they're unexpected. We know better. We know when you move stuff around, bad things happen. It doesn't always happen right away. It might happen 50 years from now, but it's eventually going to happen because everything is so intricately tied that, you know, it's the house of cards. I mean, you can pull two cards and not cave in the house and then the third card brings everything down. And so that's - and then, you know, we talk about, okay, now you've collapsed everything. Why does that matter? And, you know, I could dig in as deep as people want to go. Minnow infestations, I'll take golden shiners, they can disrupt in a small pond the entire insect populations because their numbers, their abundance is off the charts compared to say brook trout. And so they start feeding on the emerging insects before they have a chance to get out of the water and do their thing. And the next thing you know, you know, we see declining insect populations. And then, of course, we got a bunch of bats that are hungry and birds and, and then like in Yellowstone Lake, where we were placing native cutthroat with non-native lake trout. Well, lake trout are deep water fish, cutthroat are shallow water fish. So everybody that used to eat cutthroat, grizzlies included and diving birds and stuff. We're going hungry because nobody could eat the lake truck. So it's just got these tentacles that are so unpredictable and they go off in so many directions that we're better off just leaving stuff alone. It hasn't served us well. I mean, every day you read about some damage caused by some non-native species, You know, we've got worms, which nobody talks about. Non-native worms are a huge problem to soil and stuff. So it's endless, and yet we keep doing it.
Katie
When you talk about, you know, why wild fish or why native fish, do you find yourself having to defend in ways that can be measured? Like do you find yourself having to justify it with, you know, an economic, you know, fish bring in this much money or something like that. Do people want these more concrete valuations of things or are people generally satisfied when you say like, "Well, this thing was here and it has a value just in its existence." There's people who value knowing that there are native species out there. How accepting are people of an answer of intrinsic value like that versus needing to put like a dollar amount to it?
Bob
Young people are way more likely to accept the intrinsic value of things that belong there. And they're way more likely to not want to follow stocking trucks, you know, not have the interest in, you know, these non-native species. And part of it is that young people, and I know at 65 years old, they've seen more in their short time on Earth than we've seen in our whole lives or at any comparable period of time. So they're living climate change, they're living the extinction, you know, crisis, whatever you want to call it. They're living in an era of, you know, enlightenment in regard to pollution and overpopulation, all this other stuff. So they're way more open. The problem is with the entrenched older generation who confuses recreation with conservation and is somewhat selfish in that what they care most about is preserving that that they like to do. Brown trout. Brown trout's an example. So there are times, I mean, geez, if you dig into these podcasts and stuff enough, you'll see references where people liken, you know, the removal of non-native fish to genocide, to Holocaust. I mean, that is offensive, never mind, you know, historically inaccurate. It is downright offensive and ignorant, and yet people do. And it's not young people. So, you know, you do have, you know, times when, you know, the discussions have to get deep, And you can't not recognize the social impacts. You can't not recognize the economic impacts. And however, and there's also the ecological reality that, you know, I hate to say most, but it's a fact. Most of this damage is irreversible. So groups like NFC, our focus is more on stopping the bleeding than fixing what we broke. I mean, fixing what we broke is great, but it is not as critical as stop breaking. Because you know, when you introduce a non-native fish to a large system, you ain't never getting it out of there. So what successes you can have in regard to restorations are small waters. They're small ponds. There are streams way up in the headwaters, you know, upstream of a natural barrier, things like that. So this paranoia that this native fish movement is going to end all brown trout fishing in America, which has actually come up, is insanity. Because you would have to be a complete fool to go to war to try to remove, you know, brown trout from, you know, the Delaware River, whatever. There's also the issue of habitats that have been so altered, tailwaters in particular. Most of the big economic trout fisheries in America are artificial tailwaters. It's why we have, you know, world-class brown trout fishery in Arkansas, multiple. So again, you'd have to be foolish to believe for a minute that you could restore, had any chance of restoring, you know, the White River in Arkansas to what it once was. It's 50 degrees now. You know, you take places like the San Juan in New Mexico, it ran, you know, coffee brown and, you know, 80 degrees. And now it runs, you know, 50 degrees in the dead of summer while it's 110 out. That is such a complete alteration of the ecosystem that Any attempts to try to, you know, fix it is futile. NFC is not getting into futile battles. We're not wasting your money, our time to try to fix things that are broke. Our focus is on, unfortunately, it's very much on small streams where you can actually make a difference. So all this noise that, you know, this is an attack on the bighorn and stuff, I go, let me tell you, if I had to list, you know, a thousand places I'd be interested in going, The big horn would be a thousand and one. You know, it's just not gonna happen. But again, this is coming from the older generation. It's coming from the entrenched fly fishing trout angler who has bought in and been sold. I mean, trout advocacy, trout conservation was flawed the day we started it 50 years ago on the banks of the Au Sable River in Michigan. The battle cry was stop stalking because it's harming our, you know, naturally reproducing non-native brown trout that existed at the expense of a, at the time, extirpated, extremely unique and rare Arctic grayling population. So, you know, we started wrong. And I'll give people, you know, I'll cut them some slack because those decisions were based on, you know, the scientific norms of the time. But we know way more now to be 50 years into this and still supporting what we all know to be bad science is disingenuous. We know better. Stop defending it. And you know, take the position like we have that, you know, you can't fix what's broke that's not, you know, fixable. So don't try, don't threaten it. You know, my home water is a stock brown trout fishery. I'm down there whenever I can be down there, because it's what's there. I didn't break it. It can never be fixed. So I enjoy it. But if I'm going to travel and go out of my way, I mean, I'm typically looking for remote wild native fish, but I'm not saying I won't hop on a drift boat and throw giant streamers at brown trout in Arkansas. It's fun.
Katie
So what are some of the strategies for various types of waterways? Because you have some that have native populations that need to be protected. Then you've got some, well, I don't know all the different types of water that you guys work on, but you could reintroduce native species that used to be there that are no longer there. Maybe you can stock them back in. Then you've got places that used to have native fish and now have non-native fish. You've got places that never had any fish at all. So like, what are the different avenues you take to try to protect native species, doing the least amount of damage possible while giving them the best chance of survival? Like what does the Native Fish Coalition do in these various situations?
Bob
I'll give you a couple examples of the kind of things we looked at. There's a project in Montana to use chemical reclamation to remove non-native rainbow trout from a stream just outside of Yellowstone National Park that is leaking rainbows into some of the premier Yellowstone cutthroat water in the world. And they present an absolute immediate current and forever threat to the cutthroats as a result of hybridizing. So Here's a project that on its face sounds like a great project. Let's go in there, get rid of the rainbows, and give the cuts a fighting chance. And however, the section of Buffalo Creek that they're talking about rotenoning was historically fishless. Now in the same proposal is a proposal to introduce, not reintroduce, Yellowstone cuts after we remove non-native Rainbow tribe. And so we decided to take a non-position, if it was in a state where we had a present, we would have taken a position against it. it at least the half of re of introducing, getting rid of one non-native and introducing another. It makes no sense. It's self-serving. And the other thing was they, of course, were going to leave this quote refuge open to angling. And so, what are we doing here? So, we took a non -position and then we got hammered for taking a non-position as if somehow a non-position was an opposition. And, you know, we talked to the different groups. This thing will be litigated waste, we'll waste years in court, millions of dollars fighting it. When one side is probably willing to draw down on the litigation in regard to the chemical reclamation, if the other side would draw down in regard to putting, you know, cuts in as soon as we're are done removing rainbows. So that's how crazy this game is. But so there's an example of, you know, we would absolutely support the removal of the rainbows using whatever tools are necessary, including chemical reclamation, including, you know, the minimum amount of mechanical intrusion, because it is a wilderness area. So there's one. Another, we've got a big project in Massachusetts on a stream aptly named Trout Brook. It was a beautiful spring fed suburban Boston wild native trout stream. It was said to be the coldest tributary to the largest watershed solely and wholly in Massachusetts. And it was just getting worse and worse and like nobody was paying attention to it. And we started talking to some groups down there and they're like, "Oh no, it's done. You know, it's not worth the effort." And I'm going, "Well, of course it's worth the effort. Now is when it's worth the effort. It's in trouble. You know, you wait too long, it might be dead." So we're in there, and we've put a lot of time and money into this project. And we're in there from top to bottom. We've spent an entire season collecting data and learning, you know, things about that watershed that no one else knew, including, you know, pushing through, you know, a bridge to bridge section and canoes that I don't believe has seen a canoe in 30 years. And what we're finding is that the cold water characteristics of this stream have changed and changed notably. And it's due to groundwater use, development, sucking too much water. It's due to a chronic drought. It's due to some level of invasive species coming in from a private pond and then a town pond that's stocked for kids, and excessive beaver activity. You know, beaver are a part of the natural order. However, they don't have a predator anymore. And that's what I tell people. I'm not a guy to beat up on beavers. They belong there. But, you know, we destroyed the balance of things when we eradicated wolves, that that preyed on them. And then you add to that prohibitions on trapping in a place like Massachusetts and the fact that it's heavily posted and the fact that the, you know, fur values are down anyway. And what looks to be natural really isn't that natural. You know, had we not meddled, those beaver would never have got to the level they are now. And so they're in this giant floodplain, unique cold water floodplain, and they just keep damming it up, and every time it spills over the sides, they build another dam, and they've turned the floodplain into a pond and warmed the water and silted it up. So there's another example of we're going into a very stressed watershed, not with guns ablazing and proposals flying, where, you know, everybody else, oh, pull this bridge, you know, change this culvert, and we're like, whoa, we're not going to do anything until we understand what we're up against, because I don't want to spend somebody's money and not delivered. So, you know, that's the kind of stuff. And we're doing some acid mine deposit work in Pennsylvania. And we're working with a grant and some other groups to mitigate the input, influence of this, these acid mine into the stream. The streams we're working on will probably never have any trout or fish, you know, they'll have some level of insects. But they're, you know, they're so polluted from mining. But what we're trying to do is mitigate the impact on the streams that these things flow into. And that has to do with you'll have to dig some settling ponds and ugly stuff, but it's either that or accept this, you know, copper colored poison water flowing into the stream and killing everything downstream. So, you know, there's a lot of thinking out of the box as an industry now. There's never been more habitat money available than there is right now. It seems like it's a race to spend it irrespective of whether it's going to do any good or not. I mean, we are applying solutions before we even understand the problem at a rate I've never seen in my life. And every time you talk about anything, it's bring in the heavy equipment, you know, let's cut a road into the stream and bulldoze it, move rocks around and cut trees. It's insanity. It's too much. And, you know, we're looking at some unique stuff. You know, I'm sure you've heard the term perched culverts. You know, a culvert that is above the water level and it's got a little waterfall and that's keeping fish from moving. So the, you know, the everybody in the culvert game today, it's let's get hundreds of thousands of dollars, let's tear the road out, let's drop the new culvert and, you know, and get a couple of photos and move on. And, and that's not always possible because in some case it's easy to do on private land and stuff, but it's not easy to rip up a highway And so we're looking at things like, you know, if we've got perch culvert, rather than spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or worse, walk away because we can't get the permitting, rather than, you know, focusing on bringing the culvert down, we're looking at things like bringing the stream bed up to meet the culvert with rocks and manpower. And you know, so we're just looking at all these things that have been ignored over the years. And, you know, I just saw an article by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist who I was shocked. I mean, he basically is saying what we've been saying for a while. We're doing this all wrong. You know, it's too small picture thinking. It's too focused on, you know, here's a solution, now find me a problem. And so, you know, that's where this game could get really different. And we opposed the dam removal in New Hampshire, which is something that you don't typically see with fish groups. And we opposed it because removing this small dam was going to give stock fish, stock brook trout, and non-native and highly invasive yellow perch access to water they didn't have access to today. And we asked, is there a plan to mitigate the problem with the-- get rid of the perch? No. Why are we opening this dam? "Well, you know, we want to try to, you know, reconnect the pond below with some historic spawning water above." And I said, "Does that mean we're going to stop, you know, stocking the pond?" "No. No, of course not. It's a popular fishery." I'm going, "So what are we gaining here?" And nobody could answer. We had every organization and agency involved on site, standing in front of it with me preaching away. And I said, "Am I alone on this? Does anybody see the craziness of this? We're going to spend all this money and have no ecological gain. All we're going to do is move more fish around. We're going to continue to stock it and nothing's going to change." And one gentleman said, "I'm with him." He says, "I'm with Bob. I didn't see it this way, but now that I do," he said, "I can't support this in good faith." And so, that's that paradigm shift. stop doing what we've been doing for so long and so blindly and start, you know, thinking a little more. And you know, it's - you know, it doesn't make sense to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to do habitat work that will have no benefit. There's so many places that need it, you know, we're very quick to do our work where we can see it. You know, that's another problem. Nobody wants to work where nobody sees it. They want to be able to, you know, photo op and maybe put up a little sign and talk about wonderful things we did. And yet, you know, I've got a beautiful little wild unstocked native brook trout stream with a bad pelvic problem. And, you know, we're struggling for two years to try to find money. Meanwhile, you know, they're putting rocks and stock streams, moving boulders around. And so, you know, this is a long game. I have no belief for a moment that I'll live long enough to see the changes that need to happen. But I do think they'll happen. And I do think that younger people who are involved today will be the ones there tomorrow when the world gets a little smarter. And I think economics will come into play. Sportsmen are dying. License sales are down. They're never going to get to where they used to be. Cost of raising trout in a hatchery is going up and up and up and transportation costs and everything else. So with declining revenue and increasing expenses, something's going to have to change. And we're already seeing it in some places where some departments are running out of fish. They can't provide what they always did. So, to keep the noise level down, they're saying, kind of like a chess game or a shell game, they're going, "All right, you know, I got these five waters over here. A whole lot of people go there. If they decline, you know, we're going to get a lot of noise. We're putting fish in these five places over here that nobody really looking for them." So they're moving those fish to where they're going to be noticed. And what that does on the other end is most of those waters, they pulled those fish from, they don't need those fish. They're going to benefit by the suspension and stocking. We're seeing it all the time. We're seeing wild native brook trout come back once we stop stocking. Maine, at one point, had 44 active sea run brown trout stocking programs. We now have four. And it wasn't as a result of some, you know, ecological enlightenment. It had a lot to do with the ESA, with Atlantic salmon being an endangered species. So over the years, as we went from 44 to four, I would say the vast majority of those that were being stocked with brown trout are now wild native brook trout fisheries. The brook trout came back as soon as we gave them a break. And you know, so I've always said free is better than paying. And if we can nurture free fish, especially the ones that belong there, you know, who needs all these hatcheries and stuff?
Katie
In what context do you think stocking is a good move? You know, the situation that comes to mind for me is, somehow they have maybe eradicated a non-native species and now they're going to restock the native species that was in there is the only species that's there. Tell me if I'm off base there and if I'm missing anything about like when would NFC support stocking of any kind?
Bob
I mean we don't actively oppose recreational stocking unless it's being done over wild native fish. We stay away from these glamour artificial fisheries where they just pound trout in every two weeks. It's never going to change for social reasons. Some of them, you know, couldn't support wild trout if they wanted to. So we stay out of those. We absolutely support what's called conservation stocking and restoration stocking. Restoration is, should be a one and done. You know, you've got the bad guys out and you get the good guys back and then you let it, you know, nature take its course. And conservation stocking is ongoing and it's done, you know, in the example of Atlantic salmon, it is, they are propped up almost solely through stocking in America. If you, for better or worse, if you suspended Atlantic salmon stocking tomorrow, I'm going to guess that within 10 years, Atlantic salmon would be extinct in America. And so, you have to support it. However, I don't think we're doing a great job of it. And we are seeing some changes in regard to, you know, the 30-year-old, 40, 50-year-old model of, you know, this large-scale commercial stocking of inferior fish that don't have a prayer in the wild. And Downy Salmon Federation of Maine, they're using a Scottish technology called Peter Gray, some non-biologists from what I understand, who decided that rather than manage for the highest yield possible out of the hatchery, I'm going to give these fish some tough love. I'm going to give them untreated water from their natal river, and they're just going to have to sink or swim. And so his hatchery yields are, you know, way below what, you know, these hand-fed, highly domesticated fish are. However, his smolt return is higher. And that's all that matters. If you put a million of these overly nurtured traditional hatchery fish and only 10 return, or I raise 100,000 of these little athletic fish, as they call them, little athletes, And 20 of them come back, I'm way better off. And that's something years ago in Maine, most of the remote stocking was done with fingerlings, little fingerlings. There, if people understood the cost of hatcheries, big cost is feeding. So if you can get these fish out, the quicker you get them out of the hatchery, the cheaper they are. And then, so you get way more fish for your dollar out into the wild and then mother nature decides, you know, who's going to live and who's going to die based on their genetic makeup and whatever. And so you end up with, you know, better fish. But so we support conservation. There's other times when you could have a genetic bottleneck, genetic diversity, where, you know, this isolated populations got, you know, so inbred that its fertility rates are down and they're not, you know, living long. And so an influx of genes is not a bad thing. And we support that. You know, for the layman who doesn't know that much about the fish side, that's how we save Florida panthers. Florida panthers, people thought were a bottleneck by habitat availability. It turned out that genetic diversity was the real bottleneck. They were so isolated from all the other cougars in America that they'd become inbred over years and they brought in a bunch of Oklahoma cougars and kicked them into the Everglades and said, "Good luck. Do your thing and get eaten by alligators." And so, you know, we support all that. And, you know, what we don't support is just this ongoing, unsuccessful, traditional methods of salmon more than anything. But we are seeing changes. I think there's going to be more and more push to change salmon restoration. We've been spending way too much money on it for way too long for way too little return and I think people are getting tired of it but the one thing I you know and then on the other side of the salmon thing it's all the habitat work and and we support that because as I say even if salmon never come back and I hope that's not the case Atlantic salmon all this habitat work it benefits alewives smelt eel you know brook trout I mean on and on everybody else is benefiting so I say to people be careful what you call wasteful. I'll give you that hatcheries can be wasteful, but habitat work is rarely wasteful if it's done correctly.
Katie
Is habitat work the foundation or the... I like to use a medical analogy, like putting a bandaid on something versus actually curing the problem. I'm seeing, for example, conservation stocking, that seems like a bandaid. I'd rather have Atlantic salmon be stocked than have them go extinct, but putting more fish in than that are just going to die, that's not a sustainable solution. There's something grassroots below that that needs to be fixed to make the survival better instead of just stocking over it. So is Habitat work that kind of bottom level thing that needs to change or are there other things that also need to change to stop having to put band-aids on stuff?
Bob
I mean that's that holistic approach and that's what our model is. We call it holistic and restoration. And there is no restoration until we've had an assessment. And it's always top to bottom, you know. There's no, you know, this is that ready, fire, aim thing. And so, you know, habitat work, when done right, in the right place, is great. It can have, you know, lasting, significant impact. But, you know, with that said, we're doing some pretty stupid habitat work in the wrong places. I photographed a, the term they use is chop and drop. Basically means go into the woods, cut trees and large woody debris deposits. There's all kinds of names for this stuff. And it's, you know, cut down a bunch of trees, drop them in the water and improve the habitat. The assumption is that as a result of logging, you know, mother nature doesn't deposit trees in the woods like she used to. And in some cases that's true, in other cases it's certainly not true. But this one site that we went to and photographed, they cut live trees off out of the stream bed and dropped them in. And they created, they eliminated a canopy, which of course would warm the stream. They fell across the stream rather than in it as bridges. And they did it in high gradient of flood prone, flash flood prone section of headwater. And you know, when I first raised the flag on this thing and said, "This is crazy," you know, I was Judas. You know, all of a sudden I was the guy criticizing all this wonderful habitat work. And I said, "Those trees will be gone next year. You will not be able to find them. They'll be up in the woods somewhere." And sure enough, they are. And all it left behind was some stumps and less canopy than we had before. There was another case we looked at some crib work with, they call them deflectors. So it's stacked logs with rock piled into it in order to create zigzagging and artificially straightened section of stream. A good idea in theory. But again, they went in, they spent a lot of money. They did it at the lower end of a three-mile-long dead water. And you know, when we first saw this plan, we opposed it. And I said, "I'm very familiar with this stretch of water. Ice is three feet thick. And when it breaks up in the spring, it comes down in sheets." I said, "It takes the bridge out every five years. It's going to destroy these structures." And it did. You know, we spent a lot of money doing this and, you know, first spring flood, you know, ice break up, it did exactly what I said it was going to do. It lifted the crib up, spilled the rocks out, and now what you have is a pile of useless debris in the water that just annoys fishermen because they get their hooks caught on them and stuff. And it's interesting because, you know, the average person I bump into up there, I just happen to have some people up and I want to show them this example. And we stopped and I walked this group down and there's a person fishing and I said, "You know, you ever catch anything around this?" "No." I said, "I used to fish better before they put this crap in the water. All I do is lose hooks." And I said, "Yeah." And, you know, there's another one not that far away where we split a guardrail. We took a flatbed and rolled in a couple, craned in a couple of giant boulders, just dropped them next to the road in the river and you know, wrung our hands and said, "Wow, this is awesome." And off people went. And you know, for 15 years of guiding that stretch of river, they call them, I won't say what they call it. But they, you know, people have a nickname for these rocks. And, you know, every time I'd float a boat by, I'd go, "There is, you know, $30,000 worth of habitat work. Get a rod, fly in there quick so we can find all those fish. We never once caught a fish anywhere near there." And people go like, "There's nothing there." It was a stupid thing to do. So that's the big challenge with habitat work is people are so quick to spend money right now. And you know, to bring in the heavy equipment that it's not all good. If you know, if everything we did was good and done in the right places for the right reasons and done right, I mean, it would be awesome. It would have huge effect. There's a structure, it's 60 years old, it's called Gabion. It's a European, looks like chain link with rocks in it. And it's used for stabilizing banks. Some of the oldest Gabion in America is on a beautiful, small stream in New Hampshire. And you know, it's all eroded, it's caved in on the water, it is a mess. There's been papers written by academics on this thing. And you know, we have volunteered to go in and both cut these things loose, these cages, and let the rocks all fall back into the stream where they used to be. I don't think we flew them in there from somewhere else and do get rid of as much as we can with as little riparian damage as possible. Nope, nope, nope. We've got a plan, you know, of course now the fleet of bulldozers is going to go in there and make a mess out of things when we could have done it manually because everybody is it seems like it's a race to spend money right now. But you know, the short answer is, you know, habitat work done properly, done in the right place has lasting effect. Where stocking, I mean, in today's model, what's changed notably in my lifetime, I'll just take, you know, the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We are stocking bigger and bigger fish all the time. Massachusetts, I don't think they stock anything less than 14 inches. You know, it probably cost eight to $10 to raise that fish, get it to the water. And because we're stocking bigger and people are, you know, we have overly generous daily limits so, you know, they get their five fish once the stocking truck. And then you have this brief period where there's no fish and then two weeks later the truck's back in. When you're in a situation, in a beautiful place like the White Mountains of New Hampshire with historic wild native brook trout water and you have to bring a truck in every two weeks during the summer to maintain a quote viable fishery, you're doing something really wrong. So, there's more to it than genetics, than habitat. You know, there's, and stocking, there's problems with expectation setting, with angler exploitation. You know, there's a term they use called supplemental stocking. It means in addition to, and it means in addition to wild fish. We beat up the wild fishery enough through harvest, unregulated or limited regulations, and you know, as soon as we go a little too far, they go, "Oh, geez, the fishing's down. We better bring a truck in and move more." And of course, that suppresses natural reproduction. So you know, in most cases, and no one is more consumptive when it comes to eating fish than the trout fishermen. I don't care what anybody says. I do not see that lack of discipline in other people. I mean, how on earth did we create an army of rural people who would rather, you know, die than see a big bass die? I mean, they treat these things like they're the most valuable creature on earth. At these tournaments, they put them in, you Meanwhile, the trout angler is still frying up brook trout. And yet somehow, you know, we keep telling everybody, we're the good stewards, the rest of you guys aren't. But you know, the bass angler, the serious bass angler, you know, they don't keep anything anymore. And they're really good at what they do. I tell people, you know, those guys are good. They are crack anglers and they put a lot of time in. It's a money making machine. There's so much more money in bass fishing fishing, you know, it's like we are nothing compared to the bass industry. And, you know, so if you're purely talking economics, nobody's done a better job of making, you know, their sport an economic engine than hardcore bass angling.
Katie
On the topic of, you know, finding the cheaper solution to get the results you want, not just like throw money at a problem that money's not actually going to even fix. I'm curious What are your thoughts on when states will pay anglers, for example, to keep non-native fish when they want to clear out a waterway? I don't think that's really a viable option for truly clearing out a population. You're never going to catch every brown trout in whatever given waterway. Sometimes I see these, "Come here and catch northern pike out of this lake and get 20 bucks a pike," or whatever it is. What are your thoughts on those methods versus dumping rotenone in or whatever? even if the efficacy might not be there.
Bob
You know, it's a weird one where there's a lot of people and myself at times will say that we can't angle our way out of trouble. Now, with that said, how did we get in trouble in the first place? Why did stocking start? Stocking started because we over angled. Most, you know, some of it was habitat, of logging and whatever, But we love to blame the other guy. And, you know, so we're all really quick to say logging ruined all of this, you know, whatever, whatever, mining. And we blame habitat for everything now. It's all habitat. In Maine, my problem is not habitat. I don't have a habitat problem up here. I got a habit problem, you know, stocking and harvesting. Very little of what you'd point to up here, and it's non-native fish is the number one threat to Maine wild native fish. The number one by far, it's not even close. So while people will say that we can't angle our way out of trouble, I'd say, "Well, we did a damn good job of angling our way into it. So I think we can make a dent, and a notable dent." Even in cases where you can't truly remove them, keeping their numbers down is huge. Take Yellowstone Lake. You will never get those lake trout out. But we've turned a notable corner in regard to Yellowstone Cut biomass. It's gone way up. In fact, it's gone up to a point where the upper river now is worth fishing again. was a window where, you know, I stopped fishing Buffalo Ford, now called Nespers Crossing on the Yellowstone because, you know, you couldn't catch anything. And, you know, in year 20 years before that there'd be, you know, 25 anglers within sight of each other and everybody's hooked up at once. So, and that's mechanical. So it's not road known and it's not angling per se, but it is, you If I've got a shiner infestation, I just pound the minnow traps to it. Now, I'm a little bit concerned with paying, let's just say, paying bait dealers to remove unwanted bait fish. I mean...
Katie
It's kind of a conflict of interest there.
Bob
It sure is. And, you know, I'm not going to accuse anybody of anything, but would it be possible that somebody might say, "Wow, I'm making a lot of money removing these things, and now they're gone. I better get some, you know, more out there. So it's just, you know, the bounty thing. I don't like it when it involves people who commercially benefit by it. But, you know, the messaging with the average angler to catch these, to kill these is good messaging because it's also drilling at home that it's a bad thing or we wouldn't be paying you. You know, is it a good return on investment? I don't know. If I was going to do that and I really wanted to just blow the numbers hard on something, let's take pike for example. Pike are not a numerous fish. You know, there's no such thing as like overpopulated pike fishery because they are the top of the food chain. There's, you know, when they eat whatever was there, they started eating each other. So you'll never have, you So, if I had pike in whatever and it's too big to reclaim and I want to knock their numbers down to benefit whoever, could be bass, could be trout, I'd do something. Say all right anglers, get rid of these things. And rather than pay per fish or anything weird, I'd probably do some tagging and say, "You know what? There's a $10,000 fish out there and you all get that thing, you get 10 grand. You're going to have to pick the whole bunch to get there, but we want them all dead. And maybe I'm going to, you know, like we've got the bass issue up here. I've always said, let's put a whole bunch of people on the water at once. Let's get some coolers and let's get some fillet stations going and just pound as many as we can, fillet them up and haul them to the homeless shelters and whatever, and make use of these things. So there's a lot of ways to go at this, but the purr fish bounty might be one of the least effective. You might get some people who are going to sit there all day and be real good at it and make a whole lot of money, but most people aren't going to do something that's not really what they want to do for $50 a day or whatever the heck the bounty. But you'd get my attention if you said there's a $10,000 fish in there.
Katie
For sure. I think you've only got to pay out if someone actually gets it So you might you might save the ten grand if people just catch, you know, a hundred other fish
Bob
Just look at the numbers. I'd say listen What do you got to spend if they tell me they've got a budget through some grant of a hundred thousand? And we're gonna pay a dollar a fish. I'm gonna say why don't we pay ten thousand for ten fish? Why don't we tag ten of them because now I'm gonna have an army of people out there kill. And I want all these fish loose. And if you are caught releasing an untagged but targeted species, you're out. You know, game's over for you. You go sit on the bench. So, there's ways to get that done. But the messaging is good, to just say, you know, and you're also going to the source. Because who do you think's moving these fish around? Let's take bass in trout water. Is it greenies? Is it antis? Is it, you know, it's anglers. We're doing it." And, uh, and I had a little thing years, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago where I, I found a, um, it was a survey on a BASS website and it had a couple of questions. And one of them was, "Have you ever moved fish from one body of water to another?" And the second was, "Knowing what you know, would you continue to do it?" Now, I don't remember numbers but I'm gonna say it was 30 something percent said yes I've moved and 17 said I'll do it again and I wrote an article about it and I got you know some blowback from BASS and they leaned on my publisher and he panicked and they wanted a withdrawal you know on my part I said no I didn't say anything wrong I didn't because what I said is those responding to the survey I didn't say bass anglers or BASS members. I said it's public record. And you know I knew it was just bad press and people would rather it just went away and my guy folded and wrote some pathetic apology. And you know but I had some conversations with some people in DC and one of the things I said was this is coming your way. Right now it's my way. My But I said, "But you're going to be in my position, I promise you. Within my lifetime, within your lifetime, you're going to be talking about pike in your bass water. And pike will do to bass what bass do to brook trout." And that's what I warn people. There is no winner in this game and there's no end to this game. You will always be trumped by someone else if this is where we continue to go. And there is this point of no return at the top of the pyramid, musky or pike, where it's over. Or it's largemouth in red-eye water or whatever. But there is a point where, you know, there's nothing else that I can do short of sticking alligators or something in there. And so, you know, it's, there's a lot of losses to get to that final loss.
Katie
Well, just to wrap up, Bob, what would you advise, you know, the average angler out there to do that could help make a difference. Obviously, maybe join the native fish coalition, but some of these things just seem so daunting. The average person's not going to go out and do targeted habitat work and reclaim a stream for native fish. That's just such a large undertaking that's overwhelming. But if you had to give some advice of how somebody could help native fish in their area, what would you tell them?
Bob
You know, I'd say do your own part what you can't do. I mean if you're an angler and you're fishing for wild native fish You know limit your harvest use low impact Tackle, you know reduce your incidental mortality if you're fishing for non-native fish in native fish water You know the the law in Yellowstone says you are supposed to kill them The rules in Shenandoah say brown trout are supposed to be killed. And you know, I tell people within your own moral compass, if the law says you can do it and you're comfortable doing it, do it. I'm personally, I'm not always that comfortable because of, you know, that, you know, especially when it's futile. I'm not going to kill bass that are going to make no difference, you know. But you know, where it can make a difference and where you're comfortable doing it. I tell people support the orgs that are practicing true science. And don't support the ones who aren't. And educate your friends. And you know, do your part. It's not just fish. It's you know, fertilizing your lawn. It's excessive lawn watering. It's you know, throwing you know, Roundup on an invasive bush you don't like in your yard. that big picture thinking that gets us all a little more in tune with this world that supports us because, "Hose it up enough." And, you know, I know there's a bunch of people who are looking at, you know, life after earth and all these places we're going to supposedly go live. I hope I don't live long enough because, you know, maybe Bill Gates thinks that's a good idea but the last thing I want to do is live on a friggin rock planet. I prefer we fix the one we're on than look for an alternative you know. If all you think about is computers in your life then maybe that's not a bad place to be but I don't think that's what most of us want.
Katie
And where can people find Native Fish Coalition? Website, social media, any other places online that they can come learn more about the organization and consider joining?
Bob
So it's a nativefishcoalition.org Info@nativefishcoalition.org goes direct to me. I answer every inquiry personally or direct it to the person who can best answer it. We have Facebook page. We have most of our state chapters have Facebook pages. I'd say half of them have Instagram pages. And you know, we do some cool stuff like Native Fish Friday, a bunch of the chapters. pick a fish every Friday, put pictures up, scientific name, little discussion about it. Could be a three-inch, you know, darter that, you know, the average person will never see in their life, but it's really cool little fish with wonderful colors and so that kind of stuff. And, but, you know, there's a lot to be said for the personal footprint thing. You know, while you can't save the world by yourself, if everybody did their part, you And you know, and I get, you know, we, as a primarily volunteer organization, my whole thing with board, and we don't, we're not pay to play. You don't just get a membership in NFC and then boom, you go to meetings. We actually have vetted boards, deliberately small, that are our boots on the ground, who do the, you know, bulk of the work in that given state. And then they use volunteers when we need them. But, you know, what we tell everybody is, you know, nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something. None of us are that busy. And, you know, and so I just say, you do what you can based on what, you know, your current world is. I mean, you know, you got a bunch of kids and you work 50 hours a week and, you know, you're driving kids to soccer. You probably do less than, you know, somebody who's retired or somebody self-employed. We all have time and we all have the ability to contribute. It's just finding that sweet spot that works.
Katie
Absolutely. Well Bob, I appreciate what you're doing for native fish. I know you're out east but out here we've got obviously plenty of our own native fish problems with cutthroats and all the non-natives that are plowing through them. So I appreciate your work and hope that you continue to expand and get the message out there.
Bob
And thanks for having me and I You know, we're in a good place. It's working and working better than I thought it would It's great to see young people plugged in like yourself. You wouldn't do this if you didn't care
Katie
Well, thank you again Bob. I enjoyed chatting with you and I'm sure we'll catch up again sometime.
Bob
Okay. Take care
Katie
All right. That's a wrap Thank you all for listening If you want to find all the other episodes as well as show notes You can find those on fishuntamed.com. You'll also find the contact link there if you want to reach out to me. And you can also find me on Instagram @fishuntamed. If you want to support the show, you can give it a follow on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app. And if you'd like to leave a review, it would be greatly appreciated. But otherwise, thank you all again for listening. I'll be back here in two weeks with another episode. Take care, everybody.
Note:
These transcripts were created using AI to help make the podcast more accessible to all listeners, including those who are deaf or hard of hearing, or anyone who prefers to read rather than listen.
While I’ve reviewed each transcript to correct obvious errors, they may not be 100% accurate. In particular, moments with overlapping speech or unclear audio may not be transcribed word-for-word. However, every effort has been made to ensure that the core content and meaning are accurately represented.
Thank you for your understanding, and I hope these transcripts help you enjoy the podcast in the way that works best for you.