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Stock rainbows in rivers

1K views 26 replies 12 participants last post by  CaptainFly 
#1 ·
I went to my favorite close to home spot on Sunday to brush off the fly fishing cobwebs. The water was clear as could be and a little low. There wasn't a lot of bug activity but there was some.

Do stock rainbow trout usually make it through Colorado winters? I caught 2 brown trout further upstream from where they stock. Where they stock the rainbows I could not see any fish where mid to late summer I could count hundreds or at least see activity.

Do these fish die off every year? Move out to deeper water? Get pulled out by all the bucket fisherman?
 
#4 ·
Put/take. I don't see any bucket fisherman for the most part. A lot of fly fisherman catching and releasing. There are a few deep holes and really no where for the fish to make it upstream due to multiple dams. Downstream to a reservoir is likely.

This is just off putting since the late spring through late fall there is visually a lot of fish ranging from 9-16 inches.
 
#6 ·
It really depends on where you are talking about. Some of our Front Range creeks suffer from mine-runoff pollution, some suffer from severely low flows in the Winter, and some suffer from both. That would be my guess as to the main contributors to stocker death rather than people keeping them.
 
#7 ·
If you are up north, Boulder to Ft Co, the fishery north of Ft Co was damaged pretty heavily in the flood and they took those trout to 3 different lakes. But, last count as of the flood was over 4,000 fish per mile in the rivers, brown, rainbow, cutts and brooks combined. Heard that directly from a DOW officer. Not to mention they are going to be in the deepest and slowest moving water right now until it warms up, my guess is they are there, they just aren't presenting themselves too often.... my 2 cents
 
#15 · (Edited)
Even the information on the site is 2012.

It seems unproductive to even stock rainbows. Catching and releasing them is also for not. Might as well feast. I was releasing them on the pretense that I would catch them again a year or two from now and allow for reproduction.

I understand stocking in heavily fished ponds and streams but they should really devise a better method for acclimating these fish into winter effected waters. Even if that means they use natural selection on a closed section of water to reproduce rainbows that survive winter and using that stock for reproduction.

I probably don't know enough about this to make an educated analysis but it seems like a waste of money and life. When I was younger my dad used to sacrifice a stocked rainbow to see if it was pink (naturalized). If so, we would keep a couple to eat. This was in lakes where survival rates are probably much higher.
 
#16 ·
Have you fished that spot in late winter/ early spring before? If so were many fish visible during that time? A couple thoughts- as already mentioned, trout won't necessarily ( in fact rarely) hold in the same spots in winter that they do in summer. Look for the deepest holes you can find there, odds are that's where you will find them this time of year. Rivers are also constantly in flux, some spots may stay consistent year after year while other spots may change due to run off or other high water events. A third possibility as bleak as it sounds is that they may all be dead whether from over fishing, natural predation from animals/birds or simply not surviving the winter. At least you got some practice with the fly rod, right?
 
#18 · (Edited)
I did catch 2 small brown trout in this river where there are usually hundreds of rainbows. Obviously fish can survive through the winter in the "holes" this river provides.

The rainbows either:
1. died
2. moved

They cannot move upstream further from where I was at (dam). Downstream or dead are the only options. Either way, they don't stick around. My guess is I will see hundreds again shortly after they stock them. :thumb:

It has put me off enough that I will probably try to find a better close(ish) to home goto fishing spot.

I live in Wheat Ridge, just west of Downtown Denver. I wish Clear Creek east of Golden/Coors had a good trout population. The river runs through multiple ponds near my house and my guess is that Carp are all to be had through the connecting sections.
 
#21 ·
I would take catching 10 rainbow to 1 brown myself. It always seems when I find rainbows, I am in for more than one (can see them to boot). Probably an ode to my beginner fly fishing status but most brown trout I have caught, I have been fishing blind (If i was a fish I would be there).
 
#23 ·
Maybe the problem is brown trout more than the winter?


The experiment

In August, the DOW and volunteers removed 1,400 brown trout, or 90 percent of the estimated population, from a 0.6-mile section of the Poudre River downstream of the Poudre Unit hatchery, then moved the browns to a different location. At the same time, the agency planted thousands of rainbows in the section where browns were removed and in a control section where browns were not removed.

Special antennae at either end of each section have tracked movement of fish by reading tags implanted in the stocked rainbows. The relocated browns were also tagged, and Fetherman discovered that some of them made it back to the removal area.

The DOW planted 4,000 rainbows using strains that are resistant to whirling disease, which wiped out wild rainbows in the Poudre in the 1990s. Half the 'bows were Hofer-Harrison crosses, and the rest were Hofer-Colorado River Rainbow hybrids.

In late October, Fetherman and others did a fish count in both the removal area and the control area, to check on populations of browns and rainbows. The results were significant.

"In the short term, the removal was successful," a smiling Fetherman said. In the control area, where browns were not removed, only 503 rainbows remained – 26 percent of the planted fish.

In the removal area, however, the DOW counted 1,185 rainbows, or 60 percent of those planted.

This initial success suggests that, as hoped, stocked rainbows can succeed when competition from browns is removed. Fetherman thinks it's likely that removal of the browns gave the rainbows a toehold in the territory before competing browns moved back in.

And indeed, browns from the neighboring stretches of river did eventually find their way into the removal area.

By late October, the numbers of browns in the removal and control areas were close to the same: 678 browns in the removal area, and 744 in the control area.

The study has also produced data about the surviving rainbows. Rainbows in both sections showed good growth and weight gain, Fetherman said. But, the Hofer-Colorado River Rainbows had a better survival rate than the Hofer-Harrisons in both areas.

In addition, Fetherman found evidence that browns do prey upon the rainbows. Nine browns that were captured in October had rainbow tags in their stomachs.

DOW senior aquatic biologist Ken Kehmeier said this experiment shows that 6- to 7-inch rainbows can "stay in there really well" if competition from brown trout is eliminated. "They dig in, and they're going to make that home."
 
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