Trout stocking has begun two weeks early
Ice was opened for the stocking of trout Tuesday at Keystone Lake in Westmoreland County. With a few ice anglers in the distance watching their tipups, Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission staff and pre-selected volunteers from New Alexandria dumped buckets of rainbow and golden rainbow trout into the state park impoundment.
It was an unusual stocking by Fish and Boat standards. The year’s first trout were delivered to southwestern Pennsylvania two weeks earlier than the norm, and the public was not invited to participate. The single statewide opening day is April 3.
For the second year, COVID-19 is impacting how trout are stocked and when anglers can catch them.
As trout stockings go, the stop at Keystone Lake wasn’t as unconventional as in 2020. Last year, each trout-stocked waterway was visited just once with no replacement stockings, and no volunteers were permitted,
This year the state will maintain its annual stocking of 3.1 million adult trout hatched and raised in its hatcheries plus another 1.2 million provided by cooperative nurseries. The stocking schedule has been published in advance at www.fishandboat.com and the FishBoatPA mobile app.
At the hatcheries, schedules were moved up two weeks to accommodate the early stocking season. One Mentored
Youth Trout Day will be held March 27, and the regional opening day for southeastern Pennsylvania was scrapped.
Tim Schaeffer, Fish and Boat executive director, said the changes are intended to reduce contact among anglers and staff.
“The move to an earlier statewide schedule for trout season ensures that we can preserve our cherished fishing traditions while reducing the amount of travel across multiple opening days,” he said. “We wanted to give anglers as much time and information as possible to plan ahead.”
Schaeffer said starting early gives trout anglers statewide two more weeks of fishing.
Due to these changes, all streams designated as Stocked Trout Waters were closed to fishing when statewide stocking began Monday. A regulation change stipulates that trout stocked during the preseason in lakes, reservoirs and ponds designated Stocked Trout Waters Open to Year-Round Fishing will be open for catch-and-release fishing, but no trout can be harvested until the statewide Mentored Youth Day and statewide opening day. That includes ice fishing — no harvest of trout from Monday through opening day.
Despite two years of precautions in the stocking program, Kris Kuhn, director of the Bureau of Fisheries, said the agency has not deviated from its 2020-24 Trout Management Plan. The number of brook trout that are stocked has been reduced; 70% of all trout stocked in Pennsylvania are rainbows.
“In the early 2000s we were evaluating trout residency and found that brook trout tend to move farther from the stocking point. Rainbows stay longer, are more catchable and tolerant of higher temperatures,” he said. “Also, we’re reducing the brook trout stocked where there are wild brook trout to reduce direct competition and the transmission of diseases and parasites.”
Again this year, a higher percentage of stocked rainbows will be golden rainbows. Some 10,000 big hatchery breeders beyond their reproductive years — 2 or 3 years old and 14-20 inches — will be stocked in high
density on some Delayed Harvest Artificial Lures Only waters enrolled in the Keystone Select Stocked Trout Waters program.
Kuhn said the changes designed to protect anglers will have no impact on the fish. The water will be a little cooler than in early March, but trout are a coolwater fish comfortable at those temperatures. Prey species may be a little sluggish in colder water, but that’s a gift for hatchery trout learning to feed themselves in the wild. An earlier start and longer-lasting trout season will result in early angler success, but replacement stockings should keep trout fishing going on into early summer.
An earlier season shouldn’t change the ways that anglers fish. Snow melt could cause more annual flooding during the early weeks of the season, but spring rains have always been an issue. Small streams drain faster than bigger waters. On lakes, when high flow clouds tributary in-flow, trout move to clearer, deeper waters. Hunting and fishing stories will be published throughout the week in various print sections starting Monday. All Outdoors stories are published under the Life heading at www.post-gazette.com/life/outdoors.