Coaster Brook Trout

Still, the fishing from the Nipigon River to Minnesota is better than it's been in half a century. One day last September my friend and fellow fish writer, Shawn Perich, caught 11, including a 24-incher--all by mistake, while steelheading in a little freestone stream he asked me not to name. "Nipigon's a mill town, not the kind of place you'd expect people to release fish," he says. "But they do because of Swainson. I've had people at the boat landing break away from a serious beer party to tell me to please release brook trout. That just blew my mind." Swainson has even given them T-shirts that say, "Turn off a light and save a Nipigon brook trout."

"The improvement is astonishing," declares Gord Ellis, an outdoor writer/photographer from Thunder Bay, who caught and released the handsome coaster that illustrates this piece. "It's not unusual to catch a 20-incher, and this is a river that the Trans-Canada highway goes over. When the Nipigon came back Lake Superior started to come back all down the north shore." Last year an 11-pounder was taken in Sturgeon Bay, Ontario; and Minnesota's Pigeon River, where coaster restoration by the Grand Portage Chippewas and the US Fish and Wildlife Service has been underway since 1991, yielded a new state record of six pounds, five ounces.

Ellis and other activists are helping Swainson tag fish. Provincial fish regulations don't apply to Indians, but gillnetter Gilbert Martin, of the Pays Plat band, tags and releases every coaster he catches, keeping immaculate records; and he rises at four in the morning so he can pull his nets before any die.

When Swainson was invited to the states by TU and the Fish and Wildlife Service to talk about his coaster program, he felt himself pulled in two directions. On the one hand, he wanted to encourage an aggressive, lake-wide restoration effort with uniform, restrictive regulations. On the other hand, he didn't want a bunch of Americans descending on his fish. In 1997, when the one-fish-over-20-inches regulation went in, he starting making his pitch. Everything he had heard from his colleagues in the Ministry in 1988 he heard again from managers in Minnesota and Wisconsin: "We don't have any habitat. We don't have any fish. We've stocked the lake for a hundred years with no success." When he asked them if they had ever bothered to look for coasters, they allowed they hadn't. Managers in Michigan appeared goosey—having been badly burned by a failed grayling restoration effort in the late 1980s—but they were not so negative.

Prodded by TU, Minnesota managers finally did look for coasters in the fall of 1997. With backpack electrofishing units they and volunteers from TU's Gitche Gumee Chapter sampled 289 brook trout from 22 streams. In October many of these fish had been in spawning condition, but by November they'd disappeared. And since the streams have barrier falls, the only logical conclusion was that they'd migrated back to the lake. Moreover, on several of the streams where ripe brook trout turned up, no fish had been found during routine summer surveys. The largest of these apparent coasters measured only 13.6 inches.

"My guess is there are coasters associated with virtually every stream on the Minnesota coast," says Perich. "We catch small, silvery brook trout while we're steelhead and salmon fishing." If Perich is right and if the troutlings surveyed by the Gitche Gumee Chapter and the Minnesota DNR are really young coasters, it could mean that these fish were traditionally picked off by anglers as soon as they grew to pan size. Maybe the modest resurgence of coasters in Minnesota has something to do with the daily limit of one fish over 20 inches and season closure on September 1 that the state imposed in 1997.

The most dramatic coaster success in Minnesota--in fact, in the United States—has been on the Grand Portage Chippewa reservation tucked up against Ontario where, for a decade, the band and the Fish and Wildlife Service have been planting three little streams with Nipigon stock. Instead of just dumping big fish, they've been releasing fry in the spring and burying eyed eggs over artificial upwellings in January. Adult fish are now running up from the lake. As an experiment the band didn't stock one of the streams for a year. The next year it was full of fry. The Indians love to fish for coasters and are very good about not killing them—better than non-Indians. "You're no one up there unless you have a four-pounder," says Lee Newman of the Fish and Wildlife Service.

The Chippewas are also leading the charge in Wisconsin, where the Red Cliff band has committed its hatchery entirely to the production of native fish—lake sturgeon, walleyes and coasters. And while it has yet to document natural reproduction on the two creeks it has been stocking, it produces about 1,000,000 coaster eggs a year, enough to supply the needs of the Grand Portage band and some of the restoration effort in Michigan. "This year we're kicking off a huge project to start restoring whole watersheds of several other streams in the reservation," comments the band's natural resources manager, Greg Fischer. "We're also looking at some of the smaller stream systems for whole-watershed approaches—managing flow and sediment load, working with state, feds, county, TU and individuals."

Two years ago the Fish and Wildlife Service dedicated the Whittlesey Creek National Wildlife Refuge, which will protect 1,800 acres of coastal wetlands and spring-fed trout habitat. Coaster restoration is a major refuge goal.

Good things are happening in Michigan, too. There are reliable but unconfirmed reports that a population has been discovered in northern Lake Michigan, where coasters had been presumed extinct. There's also evidence of a population in Lake Huron. On the Superior shore a run persists in the Salmon Trout River (named for its giant brook trout), thanks to the stewardship of the Huron Mountain Club. These fish may be used to develop a Michigan-adapted brood stock. For the last two years the Copper Country Chapter of TU and the Michigan DNR have been stocking the Gratiot River on the Keweenaw Peninsula with fall fingerlings from the Red Cliff band's Nipigon eggs; this will continue for at least three more years. Some of the fish are getting out into the lake and surviving, and this fall the first spawners are expected back. As part of the Coaster Brook Trout Habitat Acquisition Project, Michigan DNR and TU have committed to the purchase of 100 acres on the lower Gratiot, which will secure 3,000 feet of river and 4,000 feet of prime lake frontage. In Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore the state and the Fish and Wildlife Service have seeded three streams with fall fingerlings for the last two years and will continue for at least another three. The fish being used here are Michigan natives, a brood stock derived from the reef-spawning coasters of Isle Royale's Tobin Harbor. The state wants to compare their performance with that of the Gratiot's Nipigon fish.