Ep 166: Native Fish and Biodiversity, with Matthew Dickerson
Matthew Dickerson is a freelance writer who has published in The Drake, Backcountry Journal, American Fly Fishing, Written River, and Fly Fishing International. He has also written many books of both fiction and nonfiction. In addition to writing, he is passionate about native species, particularly those in the Salvelinus genus, such as brook trout and Dolly Varden. In this episode, we talk about his appreciation for native species and biodiversity, what it’s like to be an artist-in-residence for a national park, how Yellowstone Lake was affected by the introduction of lake trout, and much more.
Instagram: @troutdownstream
Blue Sky: @matthewdickerson
Facebook: /MatthewDickersonBooks/
Recent Books:
The Salvelinus, the Sockeye, and the Egg-Sucking Leech
A Fine-spotted Trout on Corral Creek
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Katie
You're listening to the Fish Untamed Podcast, your home for fly fish in the backcountry. This is episode 166 with Matthew Dickerson on native fish and biodiversity. All right, great. Well, I start every episode by getting a background on my guests and how they got into the outdoors and into fly fishing. So I would just love to hear how you were introduced to the sport in the first place?
Matthew
My first time fly fishing, believe it or not, was in Colorado. It was in the early to mid 1970s. I think it was 1975. My father had a business trip into Granby, Colorado. So the whole family went out with them. And as the birthday present for myself and both of my brothers, I was a young teenager. We were all teenagers at the time. My father hired a fishing guide to take us fishing for the day. And he was fly fishing guide. This was the mid seventies when there wasn't a lot of interest yet, really nationally. We, it hadn't become the big trend. There were not a lot of fly fishing guides. We didn't know that the guy he hired was, was something of a legend and will become a legend in the sport, in the years to come. But we had this phenomenal day. And what I remember, we were in the West branch of the Colorado up near Granby as he was just demonstrating how to cast a fly rod, how to look for the trout in the water. And he was fishing with two dries, probably, I think one was an Adams and the other Hornberg. And on his first cast, he hooked two fish. So I thought, oh, I guess this fly fishing thing is pretty cool.
Katie
Now, had you been an angler before or was this kind of like out of the blue?
Matthew
No, I have grown up fishing. So when I was eight years old, my father took me to the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in northern Maine. It was the year that it received its national designation as a wilderness waterway. I think two years earlier, the state of Maine had designated it. But then in 72, it got its national designation as a wilderness waterway. I had grown up near three rivers earlier in my life. One of them in Western Maine was Androscoggin, which in that same year was listed as one of the 10 filthiest rivers in the United States by Time Magazine. There's raw sewage, paper mill refuse floating down the river. I had briefly lived in Boston on the Charles River, which was so bad that apparently if someone were to fall under the river, they would have rushed them to the hospital because it was so toxic. And then the other one was the Nashua River, which flowed out of Massachusetts into New Hampshire. And that also was in the news for how bad it was. So I grew up without bald eagles. It was also, you know, the age of Silent Spring. It was before DDT was really eliminated. So I grew up without osprey, without bald eagles, without moose or deer or blue heron or anything. And when I went to the Allagash as an eight-year-old and saw actually what a clean river would look like, what land and landscape and water and wildlife could look like when it was protected. And so I began to fall in love with rivers, with the wilderness, with clean rivers. And also all of that was associated in my mind with fishing. So I was fishing from the eight years old and up. But my father grew up in Michigan and he grew up trolling. So that's how I started fishing, was fishing with my dad was trolling from a small canoe, four horsepower motor. And then probably about the age of 13, I began to do some spin fishing on my own in little brooks and streams around our house. And then there was that introduction to fly fishing in Granby, Colorado. And that began to transition towards that as my first love.
Katie
Now, were there any fish in the three rivers that you grew up by that were super polluted? Or were they just dead to the point that you couldn't you and fish them if you wanted to.
Matthew
Oh yeah. They were, they were dead. They were dead waters. Yes. I'm not sure if anything could have, could have lived in them.
Katie
So it wasn't that, that, you know, you hadn't been growing up trying to fish and not doing well. And then you discovered these clean waters like that. The discovery of these clean waters kind of was your introduction to like, oh my God, I want to immerse myself in this.
Matthew
That was exactly right. That was the introduction. And again, in my mind, there was a strong connection between fishing as the activity that brought me to these places and the places that they brought me. Once I started fishing, there were small, small streams around my house that were stocked with trout by the state. And if I got backwoods enough, I actually could get into some, some little native brook trout that were still living far enough from the roads or either native brook trout or brook trout that had survived some earlier stocking. The state mostly stocked brown trout, but I would occasionally get into brook trout. And then there was a pond behind our house through the woods. And I would go back there and fish for a largemouth bass.
Katie
Now, was your introduction in Colorado, like, you know, a light switch for you where you wanted to only fly fish at that point, or did you know
Matthew
at that point I didn't even own a fly rod, but my older brother ended up, we, I think I know at some point my, he built a fly rod from a fly rod kit. He was three years older. And then my dad and I remember one year, I think maybe when it was 19 or 20, bought him a, a fly rod. I think maybe it was his first graphite fly rod in the eighties when they were first coming out. and so I was sort of following the footsteps of my older brother, I was probably 18 or 19 before I bought my first fly rod. Fairly heavy, five-weight, nine-foot fiberglass rod.
Katie
Now, is that kind of your primary, not this rod specifically, but is fly fishing kind of like your pursuit at this point?
Matthew
Yes. If someone invites me fishing, I will, to say, go out on a lake in a boat and troll with them. I will go do that in order to spend time with this friend. But for me, sitting in a boat and watching a rod behind the boat, you know, hooked to downriggers is not my idea of fishing. So I don't even think of that as fishing. I think of it as spending the day in the boat. But I haven't done that in years. I don't think I've done anything other than fly fishing and some one or two days a year of ice fishing.
Katie
in Maine for several years. You said you're in Vermont, correct? Yes. Tell me about the fishing around you just generally. What kinds of things are you fishing for? What kind of waterways are you fishing? I haven't talked to a lot of people from Vermont, so I'm just curious.
Matthew
Well, within 30 minutes of my house, there's probably 30 or 40 different named streams and rivers that I could fish. Six miles south of me, there's the Middlebury River that flows down out of the mountain through a gorge. It's a cold water stream. Two miles north of me is the New Haven River that's very similar to the Middlebury. Both of them have myriad little headwaters up in the Green Mountain, or live right across the street from the Green Mountain National Forest. So both of them have myriad little small tributary streams up in the Green Mountain National Forest. And then they both flow into Otter Creek, which is the main river that runs through the valley, which is a much larger, a larger river. Like Middlebury and New Haven are very, very wadeable from once the snow runoff is done. They're very wadeable streams. And so in Otter Creek, there is some pike fishing. For me, getting a pike over 36 inches there would be pretty rare. But, you know, the occasional 40-incher will show up. here and there. They're pretty good smallmouth fishing. And then there's a half dozen places along the river where there's a cold water tributary or a waterfalls or something and enough oxygenated water or enough cooling of the water that there's some trout in it as well, mostly stocked. The Middlebury and New Haven are heavily stocked by the state. So it's mostly a put and take fishery. You know, the dumb hatchery fish, when you walk over to the shore, they swim up to you waiting to be fed. So lately I have been spending more time, not on those rivers, but just up in little tributary streams just because of my love for native fish. So I would rather get up in a small stream in the mountains and find some six and seven and, and maybe the whopper eight inch, eight or nine inch brook trout and fish for those in Vermont, where they probably have some stock genes, but they're at least wild fish self-sustaining.
Katie
Yeah, I know you marked ahead of time that you really have a passion for native fish, and you don't need to convince me of what's special about them, but I want to hear what makes native fish so special to you, and maybe we can get into some of those species that you've had good experiences with. I know we talked about trout, dolly varden, and stuff like that.
Matthew
Sure. Yeah, I would say a couple of things. I mean, one is the difference between going to a chain restaurant, you know, whether it's, you know, your, your McDonald's or something where every place you go in the country, you get the same food. And to me, that's what if I'm outside of Alaska or the West Coast where rainbow trout are native everywhere else, if you're fishing for these stocked hatchery stocked rainbow trout, it just kind of feels the same all over the country. It's like going to some, you know, beautiful little town with some great little local chef. And instead you go to the McDonald's so you can get the same same thing no matter where you go. So part of it is that that idea of something that's tied to the landscape and to the river and that's different. It's a different experience. So not only do I enjoy spending time with these beautiful fish, but I also think they're worth preserving and protecting. Part of it, I would also say, is environmental. And I think the best examples would be cutthroat trout in, say, Lake Yellowstone, where the whole ecosystem has evolved around cutthroat trout. It's a really important food supply. It's just when there are 2 million cutthroat trout on the lake, there's a lot of pounds of nutrients that are making their way up these little streams and rivers during spawning season. And the removal of the stocking of lake trout, it was not an intentional stocking or it was not a legal stocking, but the introduction, let's use that word, the introduction of lake trout in Yellowstone Lake caused a 90% collapse roughly in the cutthroat population, which in turn caused a 90% collapse in the osprey. population. I was talking to one ranger and I think the, the, it went from 65 nesting pairs to, to three pairs of osprey. So, so native fish are, are very often closely tied to the, to the rest of the ecosystem. Everything else is of the, the brown bears, that it's an important when cutthroat trout are spawning in the spring after ice out, it's a really important source of nutrients for, for the grizzlies at this time when they really need nutrients they haven't been eating for the winter. And it's not the same having lake trout. That's not accessible protein. It's not the same having brook trout in the streams, which are another invasive species in the West, because there's fall spawners. They're not up in the streams in the thick numbers like cutthroat are when the grizzly bears need them. So there's that personal cultural thing, but there's also the environmental aspect that matters to me.
Katie
It's interesting that you bring up Yellowstone Lake Cutthroats because actually I'm talking to someone next week who was recently there and he was inspired by the documentary Cutthroat, or what was it called? I think it was like Cutthroat Race to Save Yellowstone Lake or something like that. I'd have to look it up. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's about that. And yeah, people were wondering why don't the lake trout serve that same purpose? It's still just a trout. And they were talking about how the lake trout's behavior is just so different from the cutthroats that it's like, you know, it's down at the bottom. It's not near the surface, so nothing can feed on it. And it's just, when you think about it at a really shallow level, you think, well, what's the big deal? It's one fish instead of another fish. They're both trout. What's the big deal? And then you realize like all these little things that when everything evolves together, it evolves in a way that, you know, everything sustains everything else. And you throw one of those off and suddenly the whole system kind of collapses. And yeah, it's just interesting that you brought that up because we're talking about that next week.
Matthew
So that's exactly right. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. I mentioned osprey, but we could mention several other things. The fact that grizzly bears don't have that food source that they would have had for years means they are now going to be looking for food elsewhere and maybe targeting elk calves. The osprey, of course, are specialized feeders. They hunt only fish, but bald eagles are generalists. And if you take the bald eagle food source away by the collapse of the cutthroat population due to lake drought, the bald eagles will start feeding on other things. And they have decimated, for example, and I should stop talking about this since you have a guest next time.
Katie
No, no, no, it's interesting.
Matthew
But they have targeted like the trumpeter swans and I think also the pelicans. So Yellowstone is one of the few maybe only places outside of in the lower 48 where trumpeter swans would raise cygnets because of that ecosystem. And that population has been harmed. So the introduction of this non-native lake trout there has had devastating rippling effects out into the ecosystem.
Katie
Yeah, I'm curious what other examples are out there to this extent. Because, you know, this instance is highlighted because of how devastating it was. Yes. But I'm curious, and I don't actually want to find out the answer because that would be horrible to actually do it. But, like, you know, if brook trout, for example, were removed from eastern streams and replaced with something else, like, I wonder what the effects of some of these other areas would be removing the native species. I mean, in Colorado, you know, our cutthroats have been struggling because of other species, browns and rainbows, And they're making a comeback, but I don't get the impression that they're all as big of an effect as Yellowstone Lake. But still, I mean, there's still things that you might not realize until years later that by the time you realize it might be too late to fix it.
Matthew
Yeah. Yeah, that's Yellowstone Lake's probably an extreme example. But Kurt Foush, I think one of the most important cutthroat trout experts in the country. He was, I believe, a graduate student. Oh, my goodness. Trout and Salmon of North America. I have the book right here. Benkhe, yes. He was one of Benkhe's graduate students. He has a beautiful book called For the Love of Rivers. And he, in lay person's terms, writes a lot about his years of studying stream ecology. And one of the things that sort of they have seen and learned is that when brook trout are introduced, and I think their studies were in Idaho, not Colorado, although Faust taught at Colorado State University, that the introduction of brook trout, in addition to cutthroat trout, has a really significant impact on the macroinvertebrates that escape the river and become food for spiders. And so the introduction of brook trout causes a decline in spiders, which then causes a decline in passerine birds, which feed not just on the mayflies and the macroinvertebrates, but your spider eaters. And so when you don't have these spiders along the shoreline because you don't have emerging mayflies and caddisflies and stoneflies, you lose all the things that eat those, including spiders and songbirds. So yeah, dumping brook trout into streams in Idaho or the Rockies will cause a decline in the songbird population.
Katie
Yeah, brook trout are probably the most likely for me to see in places that cutthroats would live. I mentioned rainbows and browns earlier, but actually when I think about it, those are two kind of lower elevation species that we have here. I'm not usually typically seeing rainbows and browns are the higher elevation streams and lakes where our cutthroats are, but brook trout seem to really love the exact same spots that cutthroats do, and they just do so much better. They will just take over.
Matthew
They overpopulate.
Katie
Yep.
Matthew
And the brook trout I've seen in the high Rockies, right? They have these huge, like they have the huge head of like a 10 inch, I say huge, you know, a six inch brook trout will have the head of this 10 inch brook trout because they don't have the nutrients, I think, to feed them. So they overpopulate and they look almost freakish. But I have been on little streams in Wyoming and I've walked up to the shore and there were so many brook trout. It really looked like the raceway of a hatchery. They're so thick, it's like sludge. And if you look at, I had a few years ago, I had the privilege of being the artist in residence for Glacier National Park. So I spent a month in Glacier National Park. And my artist residency was actually focused on writing and doing photography and videography. I'm mostly a writer, so that's the primary thing. About streams and native fish and especially cutthroat and bull trout. And prior to lake trout moving in, which are not native on the West Slope, there were 12 lakes in Glacier National Park that had bull trout. And the invasion of lake trout has extirpated bull trout from 9 out of 12 lakes. And it would have been 10, but there have been some really dramatic efforts in one of the lakes that was small enough to target lake trout. And they found ways in that small lake to be able to really cut down the lake trout population. These were some of the biologists with USGS and National Park Service that I interviewed about this process. So that's nine out of 12 lakes that an important iconic species, bull trout, have been extirpated because of invasive lake trout. No, they were stocked down in Flathead Lake a long time ago. And that's another story that I tell in my book, A Fine Spotted Trout in Corral Creek, that for a long time when they first introduced lake trout in Flathead Lake, they didn't really overpopulate. There was not a great food source for them. And then many years later, they introduced, you know, the state introduced sockeye salmon, obviously in the kokanee, you know, the freshwater version. And that became this amazing fishery, like a commercial salmon fishery out of Flathead Lake. They would swim all the way up the Flathead River up to Glacier National Park. So then they said, well, let's make the salmon fishery even better by putting in Miocene shrimp into Flathead Lake. Like all this tinkering. The problem is, is that these shrimp are vertical feeders and they're only feeding in the places where the salmon are when the salmon aren't feeding. But they were an amazing food source for the lake trout. And in fact, not only were the shrimp not a food source for the salmon, they competed with the salmon for smaller species like insects. So the salmon population that had been this commercial salmon population collapsed, but the lake trout population exploded after the introduction of shrimp. So three invasive species. And once the lake trout exploded 60 or 70 years after they were introduced because of the continuous tinkering, then they started invading their way all the way up the whole Flathead River system and getting into all these upper lakes.
Katie
Had there been anything in Flathead Lake before the lake trout were introduced?
Matthew
Yes. Native West Slope cutthroat. And was that not a good enough food source for the lake trout
Katie
I think of them as being piscivorous I'm surprised that the population didn't explode, just basically eating all the cutthroats away
Matthew
Yeah I don’t know what it is that's different about flathead that made them made the cutthroat not as accessible to the lake trout there as they were in in Yellowstone it may just be where the rivers were where the cutthroat spawn. So I don't know what the difference is there.
Katie
Yeah. It kind of comes back to our point that everywhere is a little bit different. And something that'll have dramatic effects one place may be kind of tempered in a different place for reasons that we might not know.
Matthew
Okay. So I haven't actually gone back and looked at this for a few years. So I'm speaking from memory here, but I'm quite sure there were bull trout also in flathead. And so the cutthroat and the bull trout were adapted to each other. And even after the leg trout were introduced, bull trout actually continued there for some time as the top of the line predator. It may be that the bull trout were keeping leg trout in check. And I don't know why it flips around in other places, but it wasn't until the salmon and then the shrimp were introduced that everything else then collapsed.
Katie
Sure. Tell me a little bit more about being an artist in residence. I don't truly know what that means. And I'd love to hear what a day in the life of an artist in residence in a national park is like.
Matthew
Well, I mean, it would vary significantly based on what your art is. I think this summer I was artist in residence at Glacier. One of the other artists was a quilter and was designing quilts around the barks of native trees in the park. And some are painters and some are photographers. I was there primarily as a writer. And what I wanted to write about was the rivers and the waters and the native fish. And I've also been artist in residence for Alaska State Parks and for Acadia National Park as well. In Acadia, I wrote about salter brook trout, which are the anadromous brook trout that move out to the ocean and back, and about alewives. So I gave a couple talks, gave a couple workshops while I was in the park, but mostly I wrote. So a typical day for me is I would get up a couple hours before breakfast, maybe when the sun was just coming up. I would hike or drive someplace, usually to a river or a lake, and I would sit there for a couple hours observing, listening to the birds, seeing what wildlife was moving around me, taking notes. Then I might go back, eat breakfast, take a hike someplace. And then in the afternoon, if it was hot, if it was raining, then I would just take my notes and try to turn those into more coherent essays or put together little video stories or something. So it was like four weeks of that in a cabin with no cell phone service and no internet. And every two or three days I would drive to the other end of Lake McDonald so I could call my wife and talk with her. So it was just, it was a lot of writing and learning and reading. I was reading some books about cutthroat trout, about tree biology, and trying to make sure that my writing was informed. I was interviewing a scientist. There were three different fisheries biologists I interviewed with. one of them, USGS biologist whose specialty was, again, native fish and studying bull trout and cutthroat trout. And during surveys, I spent a day with him as he was teaching a class there and trying to learn and trying to communicate what they were doing and what they were studying into terms that you didn't have to be able to read a scientific journal on biology to be able to read.
Katie
What does the park provide for you to be an artist in residence? Is it like, here's a place to stay and some food to eat?
Matthew
No. No, just here's a place to stay. That's it. Here's a place to stay. I'm responsible for all my own transportation, car rental, food, et cetera. They just provide a place to stay. There are artist residents all over the country in national parks, a few in state parks. There's a lot of private artist residencies. They differ. Some have a really high application fee. Some have a low application fee. Some have no application fee. Some of the ones with a really high application fee also provide some sort of a, a budget or an honorarium for you, but they might have a hundred people applying and give out one of them. They might have 500 people applying and to give out one and the application fee is a couple hundred dollars. So, most of the national park artist residencies have a much lower application fee and, but they also don't, they don't give you anything except the place to stay. And there's generally expectations at the end. They can range from you give a presentation while you're there in the park, or you give a couple of presentations while you're there in the park, or maybe you donate a work of art.
Katie
Okay, that was maybe going to be my next question, which is like, what is the motivation, both as the artist coming and from the National Park side, like, what is the motivation to have an artist in residence? But it sounds like you kind of, you know, you give back in a way to the park by creating things that are inspired by and educational for people. And is that kind of on track?
Matthew
Yeah, this is actually fun for me to think about because in about three weeks, the Outdoor Writers Association of America is having their annual gathering. It's in Chattanooga this year. It's a really wonderful organization. I've been involved for about 10 years now. And this year, I'm actually giving a workshop on how to apply for artist residencies, how to apply successfully, what to do while you're there, why would you want to do it, and then what to do after you're done. So that's about two and a half hours worth of workshop material. So you get the AI summary version of this. I think my intelligence is not artificial. I think my intelligence is actually very biological. So here's the biological intelligence summary. In the sorts of artist residencies that I'm applying for, the main thing I'm getting is the place to write about something I want to write about and learn about. So it's really the location.
Katie
Okay, okay.
Matthew
It cost me a decent bit of money to do it, but I've had several books that have come out of these. I have, I think, four books that have either been partly or largely written or either written during the residency or I learned the material and had the experience during the residency that led to those books. And numerous magazine articles, several newspaper articles, one series of three newspaper articles won the New England Newspaper and Press Association Award for the Best Sports Column of the Year. So a lot of writing has come out of those.
Katie
So it's kind of an immersion for you. It's a way to put yourself in a place. And is there, I feel like, of course, you know, selfish pride has to be a thing. But like, is there, is it a good thing to kind of put on a resume? Not necessarily like you're applying for something, but just to be able to say that you were an artist in residence in one of these places. Is that notable? Is that something that people care about?
Matthew
I certainly put that on my resume when I'm applying for something or writing, whether I'm submitting a magazine story or submitting a book article. I certainly mention that.
Katie
I just wasn't sure if it carried weight, if it had a sort of weight behind it, or if it's more of a personal – if the benefit is less about the weight of the title and more just you got to have this experience and have a rich writing project from it.
Matthew
That for me was the real benefit was the rich writing, the rich writing project. I mean, it's really different when you're in Glacier National Park or Acadia National Park, when you're there for four weeks and you're getting up every morning and going out and sitting someplace and writing. And you can visit the same place three or four times over the course of four weeks and see how it changes. Even from the peak of ice out, you know, when I first arrived at Glacier National Park in early June, the rivers looked like a kale smoothie with the blender running. I mean, it was this opaque green, white, you couldn't see four inches through the water. And then fishing was completely out of the question in the Flathead River. And then by the end, you know, you have this, this stream where fish are rising and the waters dropped significantly. So that's, that experience is, was really the main thing. But there's definitely been times when like this conversation now, when you heard that I was an artist in residence and your eyes kind of lit up again and you, and you're, I don't know if you thought that's really prestigious, but you thought, well, that sounds kind of cool. That that's more of the response is not this guy must be really cool. Cause this really, cause he got this, but the experience is really cool. I think that's more the response I get.
Katie
Tell me a little about some of the things you've written about. I know I came across your name in regards to brook trout. And when I mentioned that, you were like, I do love brook trout, but I also love Dolly Varden and all these other things. And it sounds like you have kind of a wide variety of writing topics, including things like fiction and fantasy. So I'd love to hear about that too. But specifically about fly fishing and these species, what are some of the ones you've written about and why have those species really struck a chord with you?
Matthew
Well, Dolly Varden would be the easiest one for me to write about when my brother moved to Alaska in 2008 for a job and immediately started visiting him every chance I could. And then when the pebble mine was, I think, really a threat and was moving forward, that's actually one of the things that started bringing me back regularly to learn about and write about the pebble mine. So the fish that I really fell in love with more than any salmon, more than Alaska's famous rainbow trout, even more than the pike. And I will say I did hook and catch a four foot pike, which is a pretty amazing experience that was far and away the personal best for me, but it was a Dolly Varden for a couple of reasons. One is that they're just absolutely gorgeous fish. I don't know if you've ever seen a spawning male Dolly Varden char.
Katie
Not in person, but I've seen photos and yeah, they're pretty incredible.
Matthew
The coloring, just the richness of the magenta spots on the sides, how bright red the belly is. Their lips turn almost like orange, like an orange or a tangerine. They look like a kid who got into their parents' lipstick and just slathered it all over their lips indiscriminately. They're just a really beautiful fish. And there's something lavish about it. Like they just remind me that for all the violence in nature, you know, it's a dog eat dog world and a bird eat fish world and a fish eat bird world and a bear eat other bear world. I mean, it can be a violent world, but the beauty in the world is just lavish at times. And at times it seems to me that it far exceeds anything that's actually practical or necessary for survival. And, and Dolly Varden may be the epitome of that for me, but then you begin to learn about them and they're just, fascinating in their, in their variations. They, to, to be technical in the biological terms, you can find Dolly Varden that are, that have a fluvial life history. They spend their whole life in a, in a little stream or a river. There's places where they will spend their whole life in this mountain stream. And the biggest you'll ever find is five or six inches. And the magenta is very muted. They're very silvery because they're in this glacier and then the stream full of glacier, glacial flower. And you can find them where they're lacustrine. I mean, not lacustrine, but where they're ad fluvial, where they get really big in a big lake and then only swim up into the rivers to spawn or to feed. There may be lacustrine forms or certainly Arctic char that are lacustrine that spawn in lakes where there's enough oxygen coming through. Even like there's sockeye salmon that'll actually spawn in lakes and lakeshore because there's enough seeping of spring water in through the lake. And then you can find them in an anadromous form. You can find ocean run dollies. There are some that overwinter in Alaska and spawn in Russia. And there's some that spawn in Alaska and overriver overwinter in Russia. Like they cross each other across the Chukchi Sea. Why does one group like overwinter in Russia and spawn in Alaska and the other group does the opposite? So there's just so much variety to their life histories. They were mercilessly persecuted by the state for several years because the state was convinced that Dolly Varden and Cha were eating young juvenile salmon. And in order to protect salmon, we have to kill the Dolly Varden char. So there was a bounty for several years on Dolly Varden char, which was horrible for one thing, because a lot of people were bringing in tails of Dolly, tails, not as in T-A-L-E-S, but actually trout tails, fish tails, and to collect their bounty. And they were bringing in rainbow trout and salmon tails. But then it turns out that their consumption of salmon was minimal, that actually silver salmon were much more likely to be eating juvenile sockeye than the dolly varden. So you had this effort to wipe them out of the state, and the effort didn't survive. It didn't work. They came back. So there's this amazingly resilient fish also.
Katie
Well, it's crazy that they would try to wipe out a native species. Yes. it's totally one thing to put a bounty on like brown trout are eating this native species so like let's kill the brown trout like I can kind of get on board with something like that but to try to wipe out a native species for eating for potentially occasionally eating another native species you know like like the food chain that exists you know it's just it's so strange
Matthew
Yeah sockeye salmon have been spawning in water with dolly varden and char for thousands of years
Katie
they've got it under control like the population is okay, they can handle each other
Matthew
yeah that's right. That is crazy. They do gorge on large amounts of eggs, but they're the eggs that don't get into the gravel anyway, that they're just floating down river.
Katie
Yeah. I mean, that's an established part of the ecosystem is that there are so many eggs that there are enough eggs to be eaten and also to sustain the population. So that's no reason to wipe out a species over it. Right. Yeah, that's crazy. I've never fished for Dolly Varden, but I've seen pictures and they look really cool. And it's one I don't hear a ton about. I mean, it's not that I haven't heard about them, but I feel like they get kind of overshadowed by some of the other things that exist up in Alaska to the point that I'm aware of them, but kind of not beyond the fact that they exist. And here's some pictures of them and that's it. I don't know a lot about them.
Matthew
And I think that's probably also part of why I go. You bump into people going to Alaska and they're going there for the salmon or the trophy rainbow trout. And then some people go for the pike because the pike fishing is really amazing. So I don't bump into people who say, yeah, I'm going to Alaska for the Dolly Varden. But I just, I, I love the places where they are as well. I would rather fish for them than really anything else, anything else up there. I've had great experiences. I think I met a, a bush pilot who lived his whole life. He, he, he owns his own lodge. he's a third generation bush pilot is his father and his grandfather are famous pilots as name's Glenn Osworth Jr. And when I went in 2015, the first time I went in to visit the rivers that flow out of pebble mine, he was the pilot and guide for me, also the lodge owner. And we became friends and we've had a lot of great fishing experiences also. And probably again, falling in love with Dolly Varden, Char probably had something to do with the places where I just would meet them in my time hanging out with Glenn and flying around in Little Plains with him around Alaska when I was working on one of the books and he was providing the photography. So just my experiences at the farm lodge, the farm lodge in Port Allsworth also. Like my falling in love with fishing itself and with rivers and conservation grew out of my eight-year-old self visiting the Allagash Wilderness Waterway with my dad. Part of that love of Dolly Varden probably traces back to just time hanging out with Glenn in these beautiful places.
Katie
I wonder if there's also something to be said for me. I've noticed that species that kind of have a smaller area and are kind of more niche, like there's something magical about those to me in a way that species that have been spread all over the place just don't have. And not that I wouldn't appreciate a brook trout, for example, in its native watershed, but we have so many brook trout in Colorado that it's in some ways lost a bit of magic to me, especially when I'm not in its native range. And I feel like things like Dolly Varden that are still kind of isolated to the areas where they've always been, like you're not going to find Dolly Varden just swimming all over the lower 48. They are still kind of a treasure that is where they're supposed to be. In the same ways that I'm kind of fascinated by Apache trout and Gila trout down in the southwest, that is where they are. And there's no risk of them being spread all across the country like rainbow trout are. And there's something magical about that. And I don't really know why. It's not the brook trout's fault that they've been put everywhere, but it's just kind of nice to have a treasure that only exists in one place.
Matthew
I think that's actually very insightful. That may be, for example, for me, why when I went to Alaska, I think you probably hit the nail on the head, maybe when I went to Alaska, right? The rainbow trout up there are bigger and wilder and beautiful, and I really enjoy catching them. I enjoy catching them partly because that's where they actually are native. That's where they actually belong. But I'd caught so many stocked rainbow trout in the streams around New England that are pale and pasty, and they're all the same size, that there wasn't that sense of mystery about them. Whereas when I got to Alaska and saw the Dali Varden, that was entirely new for me and nothing I can get anywhere else. And I think cutthroat actually fit that as well, not because of cutthroat of this ubiquitous thing, but because there are so many different subspecies or strains of cutthroat that are very different. And so the cutthroat you see in Yellowstone Lake, they're visibly different than the West Slope cutthroat or than the Colorado River cutthroat, if you can ever get some place where you actually get into them. And that gets back to what I said at the kind of the beginning, why, you know, when you have something like rainbow trout or brook trout that have been stocked all over the world. I've caught brook trout in the mountains of Spain. They don't belong there. Yeah, that it loses something. It becomes more like the McDonald's rather than a small local restaurant.
Katie
I think that's a good analogy. I've never heard anyone liken it to like a mom and pop restaurant versus a chain, but that is kind of how it feels. And like, yeah, once you've eaten it, a hundred McDonald's is like the next one. It's like, you know what you're going to get. So in that's kind of nice because it's, you know, maybe that's what you're craving right now. But, you know, going somewhere and being like, this only exists right here. Like, I will never get this food anywhere else in the country. You know, there's just something special about that, that like, you'll remember that meal. Like, you'll remember when you ate at that place. I don't remember all the McDonald's I've eaten at. Like, you've eaten, you know, one of you have eaten at a mall. I am curious, and I don't know if you'll know the answer to this, but cutthroats, the number of strains of them, I know that there's strains of rainbow trout, like, especially along the West coast, like, you know, different strains in different lakes and rivers and stuff. But I don't hear about the strains of things like rainbows. I don't even know if there are strains of things like brook trout, which might just be my ignorance, but why, why are cutthroats so like, why are there so many strains? And they're all kind of treated as different species. Like people talk about the strains. People don't really talk about the strains of rainbows to, to an extent. Like they, they mentioned them a little bit on the West coast, but otherwise it's like a rainbow as a rainbow.
Matthew
There are. So part of that is because I think most of the rainbows that have been spread around the country all come from one strain. So there are a couple of different strains of rainbows. For example, the red bands. There's one in Southern British Columbia, the name of which is slipping my mind right now, but it's very unique to Southern British Columbia. But most of the ones spread across the country come from just a couple of gene pools. But like steelhead is a strain of rainbow trout.
Katie
Sure. Like I know they exist. It's just, I feel like cutthroats are, the strains of cutthroat are almost talked about like their own species. Like people will say, we have West Slope cutthroat here. We have greenback cutthroat here. People will usually just say like, there's rainbows there. Yeah, that's exactly right. Or there's browns or there's brook trout. I don't hear about them talked about like species as much as I hear about cutthroats talked about that way.
Matthew
So I think there's two things there. Cutthroat are actually genetically more complex than rainbows. I think on average, like six more chromosomes, six to eight more. So they're genetically more complex and they have been isolated from each other for so long. And, and waters that really have resulted in, in somewhat different adaptations, size of spots, number of spots, when they spawn. So I think that genetic diversity is really, is really significant. And if they remained isolated long enough, they probably would become different species.
Katie
I wonder if that's because of the mountains, things that are living, let's say, I'm not talking about a specific species here, but species that lived on the plains. All those rivers are going to be flat. The species could all move up into all the tributaries and mix. Whereas in the mountains, you might have cascades that are separating an upper river from a lower river, and they just won't mix because there's a barrier.
Matthew
Right. And the big events have been the times they've been able to cross one of those barriers.
Katie
Yeah, yeah.
Matthew
Like what is the – along western Wyoming, is it, that there's a stream that splits?
Katie
Oh, that's –
Matthew
What's the name? Two Ocean River?
Katie
That's the one that they talked about in that Cutthroat documentary because that's relevant in the lake trout saga of how they're guessing the lake trout made it up there by going up one drainage during like a high water year. and then coming back down into the lake. They made it sound like they don't actually think it was an illegal stalking. It was like a random event that allowed them to kind of cross the continental divide, essentially.
Matthew
And also, it could have been, it's much less likely with lake trout than it is with other fish, but they could have been carried by a bird as well.
Katie
Yeah, I mean, this is a theory, I think.
Matthew
So they have crossed a few divides at times, and then they become isolated, and they begin to adapt. And even within a species, the biologists I've talked with have suggested that one of the reasons it's been hard to reestablish cutthroat is even within, say, Colorado River cutthroat. They've adapted, you know, they've evolved over many hundreds of years to a particular stream. whether or maybe to a lake versus a stream or a small stream versus a big river or a particular time when they need to spawn for ideal water temperatures. And so just taking a Colorado river cutthroat and putting in another stream that used to have Colorado river cutthroat where they've been extirpated, doesn't necessarily work. They want to bring it from this, another stream as close as possible to the stream they're trying to restore. When I was working on my book on, Bristol Bay, got to spend some time with one of the salmon biologists. And he said there are at least 60 known genetic alleles where sockeye are adapted to very particular waters. We think of sockeye, right, in the way we think of rainbow trout is really ubiquitous. But even sockeye salmon are finely adapted to a very particular water. And if they drift to another stream, they get caught up with another school or their navigation system leads them astray. They enter into Google Maps where they're trying to go and there's a road closure and Google Maps sends them to another stream four miles away. Their success rate at spawning is very, very low. And so some of the adaptations include egg size. You'd think all sockeye would have the same eggs, same size eggs, but some of them have larger legs and some of them have smaller legs, eggs, right? You'd think, well, there's a genetic advantage to a larger egg. There's more nutrients in it. It's going to sink better. But if the gravel's too fine, a big egg won't get down into the gravel. So egg size, when they spawn, and even apparently the size of the hump, right? You know, sake have these big famous humps on their back, the males do when they're spawning, which is apparently, right? It's a genetic. Most people think it's a fitness trait. It makes you more successful at mating. makes the females are more likely to pick that larger male. But if they're spawning in a really shallow stream, that big hump is detrimental because you get into three inches of water. And I've watched this happen. The socket will tip over. The big tall socket will tip over. And the males that are really streamlined torpedo-like are the ones that can shoot up this four inches of water where the big tall ones flop over like a pancake. So these micro adaptations.
Katie
I wonder if that's the equivalent. And I know these are things you could actually or like the size of the eggs and, you know, the size of the hump. But I picture, you know, how we look at a sockeye and we say like, that's a sockeye. But we look at other humans and we see all the differences amongst, you know, a human. Whereas a sockeye probably sees us and just says humans, they all look the same. Yeah, right. And so I wonder if with all these fish, you know, even if they're not divided into, you know, official strains, just like every creek probably has its own little thing where if a brook trout in this creek saw a brook trout in this creek, they might think like, oh yeah, I see you're from over east because you have this variation. Accent. They all look the same. Yeah, an accent.
Matthew
It's got a real down east accent. And boy, that one really talks Midwest.
Katie
Yeah, the same way you could look at people and listen to what they sound like and see how they dress. And to a fish, we all look the same. But to each other, you could never mistake one person for another person. They look so different to you. So I just wonder what the different perceptions would be in the fish world.
Matthew
Which kind of gets back to where I started. And when you ask why I have a particular passion for native fish, it is those differences. The idea that it's not just this rubber stamped, you know, this little mold where you just reproduce that same thing and you spread it all over the country. And it's the same food and the same clothing, the same attire and the same accent everywhere.
Katie
Well, last thing I wanted to ask you about, which is completely unrelated to fishing, but I just I found it really interesting when I was browsing your website, is that you also write fiction, like something completely different to fly fishing. How does that compare? How do you go from writing about, you know, what you saw in your hike in Glacier National Park that morning to, I don't know the details of like what kind of fiction you write, but like those strike me as two very different worlds. How does your brain go back and forth between the two and how are the processes different?
Matthew
So a couple of my novels are medieval historical novels set in early 7th century Northern Europe, which I researched for, you know, for several years reading old English literature and poetry and archaeological journals and history. So I'll tell you two similarities first, like the same part of my mind working in both places. One, there is a certain amount of research involved. Like even with a novel, I want my writing to be informed. So I'm not just going to make up what life was like in 7th century Friesland. I'm researching how did they build houses and what sort of food did they eat? What jewelry did they wear? What was the poetry like? Like when I'm writing about fish, I'm actually trying to write as accurately as I can about their life histories and life cycles. The other thing that I think is maybe the most important thing about both is it's narrative, It's storytelling. It's stories that draw in our imagination, give us empathy and sympathy, which I think are very important things. They're very important human traits that help us learn to treat other people well. But stories do that much better than just abstract, esoteric facts. We're drawn by story. So whether I'm writing a novel or trying to write about fly fishing in a way that maybe draws somebody into what I'm writing or maybe communicates conservation ideas, which I think are really important. It is through that story and through the narrative. I guess I would add another thing, which is the strength of good writing is in the details. It's in the specifics. Good writing isn't abstractions and moral principles. It's what does this tree look like? And what does this plant look like? And what does that person's hair look like? And that make good writing. So I think there's actually a lot more similarities between my writing a fiction and my fly fishing. But I will tell you how I got started very briefly. I was in graduate school. I was actually studying computer science in graduate school. And I found out that one of J.R.R. Tolkien's former students was teaching English where I was in graduate school at Cornell. And I decided to take some courses in Old English language and literature from one of Tolkien's former students. That kind of made me J.R. Tolkien's academic grandchild. And so I did a couple of years of studying Old English language and literature. And my published medieval historical novels grew out of that. And I've also written several books about the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, books and book chapters. So I think my best known work is probably my book on the environmental aspects of Tolkien's writing, his conservation vision, that was really well ahead of its time. Before Rachel Carson, he was writing about how militarized and industrialized agriculture is so destructive to the landscape and the water. And he was writing about that in The Lord of the Rings very consciously before Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, before Wendell Berry's essays came out, before many of us had heard of Aldo Leopold.
Katie
Yeah, I'm actually rereading Lord of the Rings right now. So I feel like now I'm going to be
Matthew
looking for this now that you bring it up. Yes. Well, when you finish it, then you need to get a hold of my book, Ents Elves and Eriador, The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Katie
Okay. Yeah, I might look that up to look back on it and see how much of that I picked up. Because yeah, it's not on my mind when I'm reading it. But now that you've pointed it out, I might be looking a little harder while I'm going through it. I'm about halfway through the trilogy right now. So I'll start taking a look.
Matthew
Yeah. Our next podcast with you will be, We'll talk about the Lord of the Rings and we'll find a way. Because there is a fishing scene in the Lord of the Rings.
Katie
When does that happen?
Matthew
When Gollum swims down into the... It's not fly fishing. It's in the end of the two towers, or maybe the middle of book four, when they've entered Ithilien. Sam and Frodo have entered Ithilien. And Gollum swims down into that forbidden pool. I think that's maybe the title of the chapter, the forbidden pool. and comes up with a fish and eats it raw. So it was not fly fishing, and it was definitely not catch and release.
Katie
So you could make an argument that Lord of the Rings is a fishing trilogy.
Matthew
It's a fishing story.
Katie
That's right.
Matthew
Yeah.
Katie
Well, Matthew, just to wrap up, where can people find your website, your books, if they want to check out your work? Where's the best place to do that?
Matthew
You know, any bookstore can acquire my books. They're through the normal distribution. My books on fly fishing, my most recent two are, I have one on Bristol Bay in Alaska, the one that really focuses on Dolly Varden and Char, and it's called the Salvolinus, the sockeye and the egg-sucking leech. And there's a subtitle that's about diversity, abundance and diversity in Bristol Bay, but also fragility and the risk of it. But Salvolinus, as you probably know, is the genus name for Char, which would include Brooke Trout. So that's the title, this Salvolinus asaca and the egg-sucking leech. And I have one about cutthroat trout in the Rockies called the fine-spotted trout in Corral Creek. Fine-spotted trout being one of the subspecies, the snake river fine-spotted. Some biologists argue that it's this genetically undistinguishable from Yellowstone cutthroat, so it shouldn't be its own subspecies. But you can look at the difference and you can tell whether it's a Yellowstone cutthroat or a snake root or fine spotted. I was going to say, of all the different cutthroat species,
Katie
I feel like the fine spotted one is one of the few that I can actually look at it and be like, oh, I see that that one's different. Yeah. A lot of the other ones, I'm like, eh. Depending on whatever specific body of water they came out of, they could look wildly different even within the same strain. So it's funny that that's one of the ones that they argue about.
Matthew
And I'll mention one other. It's a new book. It's very different from my others. It's not about fly fishing. It is a lot about ecology and conservation, but it's more just practices of attentiveness to nature. And it's got a much more explicitly spiritual or theological side called birds in the sky, fish in the sea, attending to creation with delight and wonder. So that's a collection of essays of experiences with nature, with a sort of Christian theology of why attending to or paying attention to nature is actually a really important good spiritual practice, why it's healthy for us and healthy for the world.
Katie
And remind me what the website is again, too, where people can check out all the works.
Matthew
They can find me on Instagram at Matthew Dickerson or Trout Downstream might be the easier one for your readers to remember, Trout Downstream. I have a website called TroutDownstream.net and also a website called MatthewDickerson.net.
Katie
All right. Well, if anyone has, you know, everyone listening likes fly fishing, but if you also like Lord of the Rings or any of the other old English stuff that you've written, maybe this is a good crossover for somebody who has these two passions. I'm sure there's somebody out there who has both, so you'd be a good place to check out for that.
Matthew
Yeah, I hope so. Yeah, I have a lot of books. I think I'm 16 or 17 in the last 30 years.
Katie
Awesome. Well, I will link to the ones that you listed, the most recent ones. I just want to thank you for taking the time to do this today. It was great to meet you.
Matthew
Yeah, this was a lot of fun.
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 at 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
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