Just a heads up..........

A "salter brook trout" Red Brook

Well I hope everyone's Thanksgiving was what they had wanted. I also hope the turkey is now digested and your NFL team performed admirably. Today is Black Friday and some are thrilled beyond words and I am one of them, for I will be alongside a stream in a special mall where there will be no lines and no angry words. This will likely be my last post for a few days. My son and I will be heading out early Sunday morning for Pennsylvania for our annual deer hunt. It's a tradition we have enjoyed for almost 30 years. With some luck we will be successful in the harvest of a whitetail, and if not success will be still enjoyed just by spending time in a natural setting for a few days together.

The first salter stream to benefit from the success of the Quashnet work was Red Brook, a historic sea-run brook trout stream flowing through the towns of Plymouth, Wareham and Bourne before emptying into the saltwater of Buttermilk Bay. The salter brook trout of Red Brook owe their survival to several generations of the Lyman family who acquired 638 acres along Red Brook and then—inspired by the success of the TU work on the Quashnet—deeded their stream over to a management partnership formed by TU, The Trustees of Reservations, and the Mass. Div. of Fisheries and Wildlife. After thousands of hours of TU grassroots volunteer labor to restore habit and raise funds, and the removal of four dams by a broad coalition of state and federal agencies and private donors, along with TU and other nonprofits, Red Brook’s salter brook trout are thriving once more. In fact, Red Brook’s salters are doing so well that they are now the subject of tagging studies being conducted by a collaboration of USGS, Mass Div. of Fisheries and Wildlife and the University of Massachusetts. So far, the studies indicate that part of Red Brook’s trout population makes use of Buttermilk Bay during the fall and winter months, and may even move out to the Cape Cod Canal and Buzzards Bay.

The above is an excerpt from "The Salter"..a newsletter of the Sea-Run Brook Trout Coalition. It's fall publication is now available. You can get the full publication by e-mail, you just need to visit the site for details. The newsletter is a great read with lots of information about sea-run brook trout. The link is below this post. Check it out folks.