Coaster Brook Trout

They were called “coasters” because they cruised the coasts of earth's largest unsalted seas. Like their cousins, the lake trout, some hatched on reefs, but probably in protected bays over upwelling groundwater. Others began life inland, embraced by clean gravel in pools cut by cedar sweeps and cooled by ancient forests of pine and spruce. They fattened on insects that billowed up from stream and lake beds and rained down from grass and brush, then they drifted off into the rich nearshore waters of Lake Superior, Lake Huron and upper Lake Michigan.

Where the Supremes had cracked a window, the Bush administration broke down the side of the house. "They've been very sly here," declares Julie Sibbing, wetlands policy specialist for the National Wildlife Federation. "They've skewed what the courts have been saying. In fact, their own Justice Department disagrees with them. Justice has done an outstanding job of arguing this issue, appealing the three cases that have clearly found for a broader interpretation [i.e., the interpretation promoted by the White House]. Twelve cases have found for the narrower interpretation, and Justice is vigorously defending the ones that are being appealed by developers." The guidance was not written by any of Justice's practicing attorneys but by Jeff Clark, an acolyte of US Attorney General John Ashcroft.

But even then coasters were on their way out, victims of unregulated fishing and the first wave of timber barons who razed the lake states of pumpkin pine, thereby degrading trout water with silt and sun. As early as 1879 A. N. Winchell published the following lament in The Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota: "The brook trout is an object of wanton destruction in northeastern Minnesota . . . . One stream after another is visited. A camp is pitched beside each where it empties into the lake. Then for several days, perhaps a week, the river banks are lined with the creeping, stealthy forms of the fishermen throwing every temptation the ingenuity of man can devise before the eyes of the wary trout. By diligently and patiently continuing at their posts through every hour from daylight until evening, it is surprising if any fish are spared in the stream."

Writing in the September 1889 Scribner's, coaster enthusiast A.R. Macdonough warned that "Unless it is cherished the glory of the Nepigon [sic] may fade, and the story of its marvellous attractions may become a tradition of the past."

Coasters brought people to the upper lakes, pumping money into towns like Ashland, Wisconsin. A Chicago businessman could take the train north on Friday, check into the posh Chequamegon Hotel, catch (and, of course, kill) 100 coasters over four pounds, and be back at work on Monday morning.

Coaster restoration has been attempted off and on for the past century, mostly with dismal results. But suddenly it looks as if it's going to work, at least in Lake Superior—the biggest char habitat on earth. In the 1990s managers, pushed and funded by Chippewa Indians, Trout Unlimited and other citizen activists, started working with known coaster stock, planting eggs and fry in tributaries. Previously, they'd just dumped unimprinted adults. In December 1999 a coaster restoration plan was hatched by the Lake Superior Committee, comprised of representatives from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, the Chippewa-Ottawa Treaty Fisheries Management Authority, the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, the Michigan Dept. of Natural Resources, the Minnesota DNR and the Wisconsin DNR.

When Rob Swainson, of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, got to the Nipigon District in 1988 he had management responsibility for 11,000 lakes, including the Nipigon River's source, Lake Nipigon (60 miles long and 40 miles wide). In addition to looking after these resources, he was asked to do caribou, moose and eagle surveys. Such was the priority attached by the province to its coasters.

Immediately Swainson asked to see the coaster data. There weren't any. In fact, according to his colleagues, there weren't any coasters, at least none to speak of. "I was shocked," he says. "Our department had been working on walleyes - walleyes this and walleyes that. We'd written off coasters." But when Swainson started interviewing local anglers he learned that a shadow coaster stock had somehow managed to hang on--through the construction of three dams on the Nipigon, through power generation that flooded and dewatered the river faster than the Bay of Fundy tide cycle, through raw paper waste, through a fillet-and-release management mindset that was still allowing a daily kill of five fish and didn't even impose a minimum size limit.

In Ontario it is a criminal offense to destroy brook trout habitat, but because the mangers assumed there were essentially no coasters left in the Nipigon they didn't complain when Ontario Power Generation alternately aired out and blew out redds, eggs, fry and invertebrate prey, often within the same day. When Ontario Power announced a drawdown ("usually at 3 am and 40 below," says Swainson) he'd rush to the exposed spawning area and find dead and living fry. Once he dug a trench to the river and chased about 500 stranded survivors to safety. Now the Ministry had some ammunition, and in 1989 Ontario Power avoided enforcement action by cutting a deal for trout-friendly flow regimes.

The same year, with help of anglers committed to native fish restoration and despite porcine squeals from the fish-as-food-oriented Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH), Swainson got the Ministry to implement a limit for the Nipigon River of two fish a day over 18 inches, and to establish no-fishing zones at major spawning areas. In 1997, again over the noisy protestations of OFAH, he and his allies succeeded in closing winter fishing and reducing the daily limit to one fish over 20 inches. "No-kill is the ticket," he told me, "but I can't sell it." Even in the 21st Century people are eating coasters—especially in the tributaries to Lake Superior outside Nipigon Bay (where, inexplicably, the Ministry retains a kill limit of five a day) and in the rest of Ontario's portion of Lake Superior (where, inexplicably, the Ministry retains a kill limit of three a day).