Sixty-six percent. Two thirds. Two out of every three. No matter how you say it, that’s a big number. It seems like an even bigger number if you love fishing for Brook Trout and your local fisheries biologist just told you that 66.5% of Wisconsin’s Brook Trout habitat is estimated to be lost in the next 35-45 years. This was part of WIDNR biologist, Kasey Yallaly’s, message to us at Kiap-TU-Wish’s October chapter meeting at Junior’s Restaurant & Tap House in River Falls, WI. Wisconsin is currently blessed with 18,615 miles of Brook Trout streams spread throughout the state. Within the next 35-45 years, the WIDNR is estimating that 12,375 miles of these streams will no longer be able to support Brook Trout, leaving only 6,240 miles of Brook Trout streams in the state. That means we are projected to lose two out of every three miles of currently available Brook Trout water within a generation. Even if you don’t love Brook Trout fishing, losing two thirds of our state’s Brook Trout water in such a short period of time should cause us to pause and think.
The first thing I thought was that the WIDNR was overreacting and blowing this whole “climate change” thing out of proportion. We’ve all heard it all before. Sometimes I think we’re all a bunch of Chicken Littles. Every generation seems to believe the sky is falling and finds some cause to rally their troops around, so they can stand up or sit in or march to prove that all the other generations need to wake up and take action now, or we’re all going to die. I know this sounds bad, but that is what I thought. Maybe I had a bad day at work, or maybe I had just taken a private lesson in how to be a good curmudgeon from Mike Alwin. But that is pretty close to what I thought.
So, I went home and dug into the study from which Kasey Yallaly was quoting. The study was run by the WIDNR Brook Trout Reserve Team, which was initiated in 2015 to study Wisconsin’s current Brook Trout habitat and how this habitat would likely stand up to changes in groundwater, forestation, stream temperatures and other factors in the coming years. One of this team’s goals was to identify the places temperature sensitive Brook Trout would be most likely to survive and then attempt to conserve, or fortify these places, to make them more resilient for Brook Trout. The name this team chose for these thermally resilient places was “Brook Trout Reserves,” but more on that later. My current goal was to dig into the study to prove that the climate change alarmists were overreacting. Unfortunately, when I dug into the team’s methodology, my male ego took a bit of a hit. Even though I didn’t understand much of the scientific nomenclature, I did come to understand that the team took quite a number of local, national and international climate and groundwater temperature models into account and averaged them together to take out the peaks and valleys in their model. I had to admit, their methodology seemed, I hate to say it, reasonable. Groundwater temperatures and temperatures in our trout streams really are rising throughout the state. Even if these temperatures rise a little slower than the team’s estimates, many of our favorite Brook Trout streams are now, or will soon be, approaching the thermal limit for Brook Trout, beyond which Brook Trout can’t breath; they suffocate. The sky might not be completely falling, but this is serious business.
Now back to the rest of Kasey Yallaly’s excellent presentation. Kasey went on to tell us that the Brook Trout Reserve Team had identified 54 Brook Trout Reserves throughout Wisconsin. These were streams that had a combination of several attributes, including strong groundwater inflows, strong Brook Trout genetics, proximity to natural habitat and stream buffers, connectivity of streams to allow for free movement of fish up and down streams, clusters of Brook Trout streams that could replenish each other, amount of streams protected by public ownership or conservation easements, along with several other factors. Kasey shared that going forward, the WIDNR would be prioritizing its conservation easement purchases, its stream habitat work, and its selective stocking of highly resilient native Brook Trout with the goal of enhancing and strengthening these 54 Brook Trout Reserves both now and into the future.
Kasey shared quite a bit about what the WIDNR is going to do to fortify our state’s Brook Trout habitat into the future. Given the WIDNR’s estimate of Wisconsin losing 12,375 miles of Brook Trout streams in the next 35-45 years, my question is: What are we as a chapter going to do to prevent as much of this loss as possible? What are we as members of other organizations, as groups of friends and as individuals going to do to lessen this massive Brook Trout habitat loss and fortify our state’s 54 Brook Trout Reserves both now and into the future? What am I going to do?
Happy (and thoughtful) Fishing. —Scott Wagner
