Thinking About Baitfish and Trout

 I've noticed a general lack of baitfish knowledge among fly anglers in southern New England, and I think it stems from a lack of interest in small fish themselves. This isn't true of everyone, obviously, there are some guys that have a very extensive knowledge of baitfish and how to imitate them. However, rather than being interested in the fish communities present in the trout streams they fish, a lot of fly casters seem to focus on the fish species trout are known to eat. Perhaps the best example is sculpins. Trout love sculpins, right? 

Slimy sculpin

Sculpins are rare in Connecticut. We only have two freshwater sculpin species, native slimy sculpins which are present in a mere handful of notable trout streams, and invasive knobfin sculpin which as of this date are only found in one watershed. Yet I see people fishing large sculpin imitations all over rivers that just flat out don't have sculpins, to trout that have never seen a sculpin or anything like a sculpin. Of course fish are not that smart, so you can still catch a trout on a sculpin even if it has never seen one, but it takes a lot less time for fish to stop reacting positively to a streamer if they see a lot of it but never see the real fish it imitates. 

Moreover, a lot of the flies being used to imitate sculpins are way, way bigger than the vast majority of sculpins found in the water they are being fished. Three inches is a gigantic, rare slimy sculpin in CT. I have never seen one. I only know of one place that routinely produces 2 inchers. Everywhere else they pretty much max out at just a bit over and inch... very small. Think about that when you are pawing through your streamer box. The best sculpin pattern in there probably isn't even a sculpin pattern. A good sculpin pattern for CT, one that actually imitates the fish itself, is going to be tan or light olive, a little bit mottled, slimmer than most commercially available sculpin patterns, and a bit less than 2 inches long. Flies that I like are Domenick Swentosky's Bunny Bullet and Rich Garfield's Sirloin. 

Bluntnose minnow

Notropis sp.

Other than sculpins trout anglers seem to flounder around trying to identify common trout forage. The years of hearing fisherman call fallfish, juvenile suckers, and common shiners "chubs" have made this incredibly clear to me. I believe being able to identify fish is one of the most important skills an angler can have, yet most anglers are shockingly bad at identifying fish. I have my own struggles, but I at least put in an effort. The photo above this paragraph says "Notropis sp." because that's as narrowly as I could identify that fish with the photos I took of it. Notropis are a notoriously difficult genus to identify, and that fish was caught in an area with a few different species. In CT though we have only one species, spottail shiner, and trout do eat them. It is very helpful to know what they are, where they live, and what they look like for some trout fisheries around here.  I consider them a baitfish of notable importance to trout fisherman. In Southern New England there are really not too many species of small stream dwelling fish, so it doesn't take much to learn about each one. 

The species that are of particular importance to trout anglers are the aforementioned slimy sculpin and spottail shiner, as well as tessellated darter, creek chub, fallfish, bluntnose minnow, cutlips minnow, common shiner, white sucker, blacknose dace, longnose dace, alewife, banded killifish, and brook trout. Knowing the range extent, behavior, habitat preference, and what flies imitate these fish will put you a step above the rest. The range and habitat will dictate where you fish their imitations, the behavior will dictate the action and weight of the fly and how your present it. Species like tessellated darter hug the bottom and move along as their name suggests, by darting about with pauses in between. Alewives swim continuously suspended off the bottom in schools and are found in some large lakes or in rivers with access to saltwater. 

This beautiful winter wild brown took a streamer in a crystal clear, mirror surface run on a bluebird day. If you match the forage, it becomes easier to fool difficult trout in less than ideal streamer conditions.

Unfortunately, streamer fishing seems to draw some amount of thoughtlessness. Perhaps that's because it appeals to a more restless sort of angler than other methodologies; the sort of angler that would rather flog the water all day with a massive fly than sit and look at a piece of water for a while and think about the best approach. There's also a contingency of anglers that throw on a streamer as an after thought. The trout aren't rising, nymphing is slow, I'll just throw on a big woolly bugger. That's no more likely to be successful than the previous example.

There are a lot of very good streamer anglers out there too, pushing the limits of both action and imitation. What inspired me to write this post was a cumulative effect of conversations with other anglers and reading some other writings. This certainly isn't all original thought, though I've tried to add my own twist to it. I can give a huge amount of credit to Joe Goodspeed, Domenick Swentosky, Blane Chocklett and others for making me think about this stuff at all. When I started streamer fishing I was chucking Headbanger sculpins and Zoo Cougars in rivers that, well, don't have any sculpins... and Double Decievers in rivers that don't have any broad-bodied baitfish. When I think about it now I realize just how silly that was. It isn't at all surprising that it rarely produced any notable fish. Over time I started to pay attention to the action of my flies, and that was an important step. It wasn't until more recently that I actually started matching my flies to the forage present in each stream I fish, even though I've been mircofishing and studying small freshwater fishes for quite a few years now and knew full well what was present. 

If you ever want help identifying baitfish, always feel free to send pictures and ask. I'll also be setting up an online class either late in the month of February or in early March about common Connecticut trout stream baitfish. I also happily run on long tangents about this sort of thing in the field with clients, so if you want to learn more book a trip and I can really show it to you in practice. There are also tons of other great resources and guides if you don't live in Connecticut or Rhode Island, all it takes is a little bit of digging.