Spring Creek, Center Co. 4/25/11

csoult

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Fished spring creek today. Air temp in the 80's. Water temp unknown. The day started off slow, I started with an olive skud, couldn't get a nudge. Switched a few times until I settled on sucker spawn, this proved to be the ticket. I saw alot of bug activity but no risers.
 

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I really like the markings on the first picture.
 
I don't fish SC often but have never caught a rainbow there - didn't know any were in the creek. Did you get that rainbow up near the Benner Springs hatchery?
 
Looks like a wild rainbow to me, clear white tips on the fins. There are quite a few somewhere else in the watershed, I won't say where, but they are in there for sure. But even in this place I am thinking of, browns are far more common. IMO it is likely that at some point rainbows from Benner succesfully reproduced in Spring Creek and based on that assumption I would guess that the whole stream probably has a small rainbow population.

Nice fish. Thanks to finals coming up I'm gonna miss some good fishing weather this week.
 
Yes I caught it near benner springs. That fish was a fighter.
 
Last year I ran into a pod of rainbows below the Benner Springs hatchery in some fast moving water where i pulled out probably 7-8 rainbows within 2 hours all had nice color and of various sizes.
 
I catch a few rainbows a year in spring, mostly at benner. I have also caught one or two by the handicapped access. I've always assumed they were stocked somehow.

Same goes for penns. I usually catch them around tunnel road, and they are almost certainly from the nearby stocked water.

In my experience, the only large central PA stream that has rainbows that seem to be wild is the j. I have heard of them in spring creek, but haven't been convinced that any of the ones I've seen are wild. That includes the fish above. Nice fish, though.
 
Pretty sure that one was wild, fins were pretty sharp. I could be wrong though I am no expert on telling if a fish wild or not.
 
Here's a wild one I caught within the Spring Creek watershed miles away from Benner. Much smaller than the one posted before but has a fairly similar pattern. Last fall my friend lost one that was only 3-4 inches long, so I am confident these are wild fish, though the original population probably came from Benner escapees.
 

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Do all wild rainbows have white tips on the fins? I thought maybe they were holdovers whose color is almost back to natural. I know some rainbows swim upstream in spring from bald eagle creek which is stocked.
 
I wouldn't say all, but they all will have sharp fins, and a lot of wild rainbows I see have the parr marks like the one psu posted
 
I have noticed a lot of wild bows, mainly below Bellefonte.
I know that the color doesn't always indicate a wild fish, but I would say a majority of hatchery fish have some sort of damage to their fins. definitely an outstanding fight for their size. Had an 11" zipping around like a steelhead the last time I caught one.
 
I have noticed a lot of wild bows, mainly below Bellefonte.

Sometime last summer, I started catching a bunch of 3"-4" rainbow trout, which are now 5"-8". These fish literally appeared out of nowhere in August. I've probably caught several dozen of these fish, and my opinion is that there is no possible chance that the ones I've caught are wild. When a huge number of identical fish show up simultaneously, its a good bet that they've come from a hatchery.
 
They're prob Fingerlings that espaced or were planted in the
LBE that decided to move to cooler water.
 
I catch a number of Rainbows every year from Spring Creek. Some I'm sure are escapes from the hatcherys.. But many I think are wild fish. Alot of rainbows escaped the hatcherys in 2004 during the high water of Hurricane "Ivan". Many died but some did survive and IMO are breeding.
 
Its not uncommon to see a few rainbows spawning in spring creek in the fall. Of course, a true wild rainbow will be a spring spawner, and I don't think I've ever seen one of those in SC. I think any "wild" rainbow population in spring creek is still dependent on the hatcheries.
 
Yes, Spring Creek has a wild rainbow population. There are a few throughout no doubt, but there is a particular area where they are most common, as PSUFishMenace says, and they are indeed spring spawners.

That said, there are also a much larger number of rainbows with hatchery origins, and they are concentrated around the two hatcheries (though some disperse), as well as bigger ones downstream from Bellefonte (thanks to the demonstration area in town). They escape at various stages in their lives, some of them very young, and live in the stream for years. Color is a function of diet, and fins do grow back. Thus, fin wear and color would only be reliable indicators on fresh, adult escapees, i.e. not the norm. If you catch one that looks like a stockie, it's a stockie for sure. If you catch one that looks wild, I'd still guess there's a 70% chance or more that its from a hatchery, but I don't think there's any way to tell for sure short of sending scale samples to a biologist. So, that being said, who cares? I have as much pride in a fingerling stocked fish as a wild one, it's still acting wild. I don't then see much difference between a fingerling stocked fish and a fingerling escaped fish.

If there's anything that leads me one way or the other, its number of spots. The ones I felt sure were wild, from the area where wilds are most common, were silverish with few spots, like PSU's picture. The darker fish with lots of spots, like the OP's, I think are hatchery products. But again, there's no way to know for sure, and who knows, maybe the modern hatchery products successfully breed now and then, and thus there could be 2 distinct genetic strains in the stream?
 
Alot of rainbows escaped the hatcherys in 2004 during the high water of Hurricane "Ivan".

They escaped in mass during that event. But there's always been a few escapees trickling out of those hatcheries on a regular basis, before and after Ivan. Take a look at the "women's section" at Paradise, our the fenced outflow stream at Benner, and you'll see what I mean.
 
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Two fish from Spring Creek caught far apart. One is probably wild. The other is definitely a hatchery escapee. Which is which?
 

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