Western USA water usage, which relates to stream flows/fish

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Mike

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If you don’t feel like reading this summary article, then consider checking the maps at the top of the article and the italicized explanation of the maps at the bottom of the article.
https://news.nau.edu/fewsion-water-shortage/
 
Hi Mike,
Been in NZ for ten years now. The trout fishing is pretty good here. Have a question for you. When I was at Nolde I used to fish the Wyomissing in the borough park a lot. Caught a lot of wild browns and the occasional stocked fish. A friend of mine recently fished it and said he caught several native brook trout. I don't think I ever caught a native brookie there, a couple of stocked fish from the boro fishing derby. I did not want to question his ID skills. Are you aware if there are reproducing brooks there now or is it a case of mis-identification of small browns?

Also if you are interested I send out a weekly email about my fishing here, mostly to people in PA. We are currently in a corona virus lockdown, so no fishing for at least another two weeks but after that the season runs until June 30. Hope you are doing well.
Dan
 
Dan.
The “wild” brook trout in Wyomissing Ck in Mohnton threw us for a loop as well, so much so that we electrofished every near-by trib of any size to try to locate the source of the fingerlings. We only found wild browns in the tribs and the rest of the main stem of the Wyomissing. We then completed our digging into the possibilities, particularly since we only found the brookies at one site on the Wyomissing and at an odd location...in town instead of the headwaters.

I eventually tracked down the source, which was the “Trout in the Classroom” program. The kids had raised brook trout to fingerling size and then released them within 100 m of where we collected about a half dozen of them two or three months later. They looked exactly like wild fish...no fin damage and great colors. Frankly, I never thought that we would find multiple fish from that program a few months later in any stream except for perhaps a limestone spring without competitors.

As a side note, Wyomissing is now a Class A stream from the old Mohnton Dam site (now breached/removed through PFBC initiative, habitat restored) at the upstream end of town to the headwaters in addition to the original Class A limestoner stretch in the Wyomissing Boro Park downstream to Museum Rd in West Reading. I don’t know if you were still in the area when agencies were able to successfully press for the Museum Dam to be breached. That formerly impounded stretch immediately went to Class A. In the past few decades the stream went from no wild trout below Museum Rd to the Schuylkill R, then went to Class C or B about 10 yrs ago, and most recently supported few or no wild trout again. Will PM my email address.
Mike
 
That map reminds me of the time my dad was flying from Boise to a coaching clinic at Notre Dame with his current head coach who grew up in Idaho. As the plane started to descend to the airport in Indiana the other coach looked out over the farmland and exclaimed, "where are the canals? Where are the wheel lines?" My dad who grew up in Pa rolled his eyes and said, "It rains out here."

I don't think people from different parts of the country really understand the gigantic variations in weather and climate even within the borders of the US let alone the rest of the world.
 
I was still around when they removed the dam at the museum. At that time you could not fish on the museum grounds. I used to fish below the bridge to the Schuylkill occasionally and usually found few trout. At the time(about 40 years ago) Holy Name H.S. monitored the Wyomissing Creek just down the hill from the school as part of Nolde's Water Quality Monitoring Program for high schools. On one of their monitoring days the students found the West Reading pool, accidentally or otherwise, releasing chlorinated pool water into the stream. We reported it to then DER. I wonder if that could still occasionally happen and impact the stream. One would expect that if the stream was Class A on the museum grounds, it shouldn't be that much different a couple hundred yards downstream. Of course you have the sewage treatment plant, runoff from Museum Road, etc., so there probably are several factors affecting the stream there. I was always amazed how the runoff from impervious surfaces from a local thunderstorm could quickly impact the Wyomissing.
 
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