"What's up dog, want some coffee?" Levi whispered as I entered the kitchen, a little groggy but full of anticipation none-the less. "Morning, sure, thanks," I whispered back. "Hell yeah," he replied, "How stoked are you?"
"Pretty stoked."
When the cicadas last came to Central Pennsylvania, I was 11 years old. I'll be 45 when the come back next. That's a lot of time elapsed, and a lot changes. I hadn't yet picked up a fly rod in 2008, in 2042 who knows what life will be like. This year the bugs came again on their cycle and my silly addicted ass trucked it westward thrice, chasing a sickness so good it can't be beat. I've raved about the periodical cicadas before; in 2021 when I intercepted the periodicity in Maryland, and last year when a dual emergence took me to Illinois, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa. When magicicadas come out of the ground, I want to be there. They make up one of the last great biomass events of the sort here in the US, and while many were constant, like the buffalo, and some were annual migrations, like the passenger pigeon, there's something extra special and enchanting about an event that occurs more than a decade apart each time. It is miraculous that we still have these bugs at all, the landscape they live under is different every time the nymphs come up. That they still come up from one of the best regions for wild trout fishing East of the Mississippi... How lucky is that? Though, I suppose the same factors that have allowed the cicadas to persist have not been insignificant in providing habitat advantages for the wild trout either.
Levi and I stepped out into the humid, warm morning air about ten minutes later with a little bit of our gear and a lot of hope for the day. "Hold on, before we go we gotta move the bugs", I said. We were staying at Levi's good friend's, Paul and Kathryn, and they were going to take down a tree in their backyard that day. It was time for a quick rescue mission. We walked over with our phone flashlights on to see dozens of pale, ghostly looking imagos and instars on the tree trunk and low branches. We collected as many as we could and moved them to nearby bushes. When periodical cicadas first emerge they come out of the ground through simple little holes, or sometimes, through turrets of soil that poke up above the ground, small towers of their own design that are made pre-emergence in wet areas in what is presumed to be a bid to keep mud and water from getting into their holes before the emerge. Those final instar nymphs climb out and go for the closest tree or bush, shed their nymphal shuck into imagos- the last, adult stage of their life cycle -and like many emerging insects, take a little while to harden up and get ready to go about their business. They'll go from pale and soft to firm, glistening, black and orange bugs, maintaining deep red eyes through the process. We shuttled as many as we could to safety before hopping in the car to head to the river.
Central Pennsylvania holds fond memories for both Levi and I, though mine are more limited in number and a tad more recent. Levi fished trout in the limestone region the last time the cicadas came out in 2008, I first fished the area with my good friend Michael Carl in 2018. I've since returned a handful of times to poke into places I'd fished that first time, and a few new ones. Much of Pennsylvania is still Bucolic and beautiful, with sparse populations and varied terrain. Here, the Appalachians form a series of arching, near parallel ridges. These start near Meyersdale, and you cross or cut through about a dozen spines headed East towards Chambersburg which sits in a wide lowland with rolling hills and the classic carts topography associated with limestone. East of Chambersburg is a less defined but similarly arching range of hills, encompassing Michaux State Forest and extending, broken by the Susquehanna, almost all the way to Reading. Throughout the main crux of the ridges to the west and north are smaller versions of the same sort of lowlands that Chambersburg and Carlisle sit in, each pocked with farmland and hugged on either side by tall ridges. In many of those low areas between the ridges is where the limestoners or limestone influenced creeks live, though each audaciously cuts through the ridges at some point on their journeys toward the Susquehanna, some more defiantly than others. The Little Juniata scrapes starkly through the ridge above Barree, Fishing Creek winds tightly under the steep topography on her way toward Lamar. And then Spring Creek, toward the apex of the curve of the ridges, gently wanders through a less strip of rock between Bellefonte and Milesburg. The millennia that allowed these streams to eat through these seemingly immovable stone ridges is too substantial for our simple human minds to fully grasp. It inspires aww though, when you stop and look at the landscape for a moment.
Though not as diverse as the southern end of Appalachia, which boast the highest diversity of salamanders in the world and the largest of freshwater fish in the country, these Pennsylvania ridges aren't lacking in life. It's no surprise given that large swaths of this land are still very wild. Though logging has occurred for decades, as well as that farming down low and a slow hum of building in some towns, much of this place is still rugged. The terrain is gnarly and thick, and one can get lost if the try. This is the one of the last places in the country that still allows hunting of timber rattlesnakes, albeit in very limited and regulated form. Indeed they're quite stable here... still, I'd love to see this archaic hunt done away with. Why mess with one of the last best places this species has as a stronghold? Up on those high ridges though, we weren't hearing many cicadas. It was early though, as evidenced by the nymphs crawling out of the ground en masse that morning. We'd need to find an area where the bugs had already been out and flying for a while. Soil temperature has everything to do with emergence timing, and some places warm faster than others. We were committed though, and with windows open and ears trained to a familiar buzz, it didn't take long to find what we were looking for.
"Mark says the shops the guys at the shop basically told him the fish aren't on them yet and not to waste his time fishing cicadas" Levi reported as we drove between spots. "Oh yeah, it's not worth it at all yet" I retorted snidely and we both laughed. We'd just had exactly the sort of fishing we'd driven over five hours for. Not size, albeit, but numbers? Whoa did we ever have that. And we'd had it to ourselves too, leap frogging up a piece of water neither of us had fished in years with not a soul in sight. Just brown trout sucking down big bugs without consequence... until our hooks pierced their lips. It was... absurd? Deranged? What dreams are made of? All of the above. When I fished Brood X in 2021, I got a modest taste of what trout fishing the periodicals could be, with a couple absurdly fat and happy wild brown trout. This was a more complete picture, as good as you hear it is. We traded remarks and shook our heads in disbelief each time we leap frogged, both reveling in the success of timing things well enough not only to have good fishing, but beat the masses. And, so long as the shops were still downplaying things, it felt like we had good chances to find pockets of stellar fishing throughout the trip.
Where we were for that first pound-down wasn't a big fish location, but that didn't matter. Having trout come out of every riffle and pocket to hammer our big foam dry flies was thrilling. You can certainly work through similar water with similar flies- especially early in the morning and at times when some golden stoneflies or hoppers are present, or even if there's a modest number of annual cicadas -and pick up a few fish. This wasn't that. This was interacting with possibly as much as a quarter of the trout biomass of the stretch we fished and catching a disproportionate chunk of it. The fish were giddy. I had more than one nice fish (for this place that was 13-14") charge straight upstream a foot or more in fast shallow riffles to eat my fly. This was the dream.
We were on our way to another spot on the same creek when we received that report from Mark, a stretch I'd fished before and done well with wild rainbows and some browns. The sound out the window as we closed in on our destination and the empty pull off when we got there said we were going to step in it again.
The storied history of trout fishing in the area of State College is an interesting one, and though many eastern trout anglers may know bits and pieces of the story I think a lot of it has been glossed over. Spring Creek has one of the more distinct histories of course. Many may be aware that Spring Creek was a brook trout dominated fishery into the end of the 1800's, when introduced brown trout began to supplant the native char. By 1950 a native trout in Spring Creek's main stem was a rare occurrence. The origins of some of the rainbow trout that exist in the now mostly un-stocked stream remain a bit controversial, though I'd argue on behalf of some being stream born given the alkalinity, relative temperature stability, and shear perfectness of both par and adults of some specimens. of course, hatchery escapees from Benner Springs and Fisherman's Paradise, and stocked fish moving up from Bald Eagle creek contribute. Anyone who wants to can see the results of this in a tiny stretch right in Bellefonte, where you can pay a quarter or two for some pellets from a dispenser and toss them into a short, closed-to-fishing stretch where trout bigger than some of the carp present in the same spot will greedily take whatever you give them. Levi, Paul and I stood on the wall in Bellefonte one day, tossing leftover french fries and watching giant trout eat them. Those fish aren't Spring Creek's calling card though. If you've heard of the place but never been, your familiarity may start and end with the existence of the famed Fisherman's Paradise section. This piece of water was bought by the state Fish Commission in 1930 for construction of a hatchery and to demonstrate and test new stream improvement methods¹. A hatchery was built four years later. With heavy stocking and stream improvement that are now known in some cases to improve fishing more so that fishery health, the place soon boomed in popularity with anglers. The regulations then imposed ended up being quite unprecedented, and even in today's ecosystem might be though of as incredibly strict. Fishing was restricted to May through July, barbless flies were enforced, wading was prohibited, and there was a small and finite number of visits you could make. Even though some of the stricter regulations haven't carried over to present day, the popularity rivals the present day. More than 44,000 angler trips were registered in 1952. Photos from that era reflect this, with a parking lot jam full and anglers standing shoulder to shoulder on the banks of a Spring Creek that looks so different today it may as well be a different river entirely.
In 1982, triggered by kepone and mirex contamination, the commission stopped stocking trout in Spring Creek and enforced no-harvest regulations. In turn, the wild trout population, brown trout specifically, absolutely exploded. It has been said that there have been as many as 3,000 trout per mile in Spring Creek, making it very high on (if not at the top) of the list of most densely trout populated streams in the Eastern United States. That population density has changed with time, of course, having apparently increased until 2000 and being on a downward trend since. That downward trend is likely tied to development in the watershed, and PFBC notes as much:
"In other watersheds, impervious surface area has been used as a good surrogate of urban development; when imperviousness reached 7-11%, trout populations were lost. The Spring Creek watershed had 12% impervious cover in 1995, and in the upper one-half of the watershed, impervious cover was 19%. We suggest that the reason Spring Creek is still able to sustain wild trout with this degree of urbanization is the relatively large input of groundwater into the stream. Further development that increases impervious cover, reduces groundwater recharge, or both, will certainly increase the stress on Spring Creek and reduce its ability to support wild trout."²
As development continues in the area around State College, and as climate change continues, its hard to say what the future holds for Spring Creek. What remains abundantly clear to me is that it, and even some of the more marginal trout streams in Central Pennsylvania, make even the best places we have in Connecticut look like a joke. Part of that is the nature of limestone, but part of it is an indictment on what building can do. Connecticut and our rapidly dying coldwater fisheries should be a good example of what NOT to do if you want to keep strong wild trout fisheries around when it comes to development, road salt use, lack of riparian protection, over-stocking, on and on and on.
One thing Connecticut doesn't fail with is common carp. Europe's most popular "course" fish is highly abundant in the state and isn't going anywhere. Recently, after a number of fish had been caught over the years that could have cracked the former record, someone finally clocked one over fifty pounds. Well over, in fact. At over 58 pounds, Norbert Samok's record fish is a significant achievement. Of course, Pennsylvania has carp too. The state record was caught in 1962 by an angler named George Brown. The fish weighed 52 pounds... ha! We've got you beat there, PA. I can't gloat too much though, because instead of getting the chance to fish periodical cicada eating carp, I can't really wait around in Connecticut. It turned out Pennsylvania was going to give me a challenge too, though.
Levi and I met Mark Hoffman in Boalsburg on our second morning for our first serving of warm water cicada mania. Haze clung to the hills as the light came up, that sort of low morning humidity that suggested a very hot day was incoming. We hopped in with Mark and headed toward a place where carp, overhanging trees, deep lake shore, and periodical cicadas all overlapped. Surface disturbance was visible as we crossed a bridge over the lake on the way in. There was heavy calling as we pulled into the launch. Anticipation was high, especially for me. I know this game a little bit, I've caught some carp on cicadas. But something was going on at the ramp that put a more than slight kink in the plan. The back cove was all muddy, and in various spots on both the near and far side there was a ruckus going on. Splashing, crashing, tail slapping, jumping... these carp were busy humping, not eating cicadas. The thing with the carp spawn is that it can kind of happen any time the water gets warm. I've seen carp spawn as early as April 10th and as late as September 3rd. Sometimes that's just a few pods of fish and plenty are still happily and busily feeding away. This wasn't that, though. We motored all over the lake and for the most part found nothing but carp making more carp. It got hotter and hotter as the day went on, and though I picked up some largemouth on cicada patterns and Levi ran a little chartreuse bugger and put a smackdown on white crappie, this wasn't what we hoped for.
As the heat became more and more oppressive, frustration boiled over. We bailed, sweaty and ready for lunch. It wouldn't be for a couple days, right as our trip came to an end in fact, that we got a shot at the carp again. We met Mark at the same launch, just hours to spare before we needed to hit the road. This time there was no thrashing and crashing on that far bank. The carp should be feeding now, of that I was fairly confident. The most confident, in fact, as the previous attempt had shaken Levi's. In fact it had taken a bit to convince him that this could be worthwhile. We motored out of the launch and rounded the corner, travelling down the shoreline where cicadas were calling their little tymbals off. It wasn't long before I saw it: a carp tipped the wrong way, with it's head up and its tail down, orange lips at the surface, sucking down one of the bugs that had so haplessly bumbled onto the lake surface. The were here....
They weren't easy though, and we weren't the only ones on the water. A few other boats were out with fly rods, all working the banks looking for targets. Any pressure can complicate things, especially with carp. These are sensitive, shy fish. Before we found a couple willing carps, Levi managed to catch one of the nicer largemouth bass I've seen in a while. Getting big bucketmouths on cicadas isn't a bummer at all.
Largemouth bass are America's favorite gamefish. An estimated 16 billion dollars a year is spent on bass fishing. To put that in perspective, the estimated annual market for fly fishing in the US is 750 million dollars. The people love bass, enough so that they've been moved here and there and everywhere. Where we were, just one watershed divide separated us from the native range of the northern bass, but we were fishing to non-native fish where we were. Given their widespread introduction and infusion in the fishing culture, many anglers don't realize when bass aren't native where they fish. In Connecticut, neither smallmouth nor largemouth bass were present historically, and that information is relatively available to anyone who cares to look. That said, it isn't hard at all to find anglers who insist that they are a native fish. Aa great many angler believe a great many things to be true that just aren't though, that is a reality that no longer surprises me. I just roll my eyes with my lips pursed in a tight, straight line and repeat the same statements again-- "actually, the only larger native freshwater predator species in Connecticut were chain pickerel, brown bullhead, and brook trout...." It's remarkable how much of our fisheries are made up of introduced species. In much of the northeast, we're looking at as much as, even more half of the popular target species. Even somewhere like Maine, where landlocked salmon and lake trout did exist naturally, they've been scattered about in all sorts of places they never were before. We think of fishing as a way to be in nature, failing frequently to realize that what we fish isn't actually natural.
Even the lake we were on wasn't natural. In fact, large natural lakes are essentially non-existent in Pennsylvania. The largest natural lake in the state is Conneaut, in Crawford County. At just 243 acres, it is a piddly body of water compared to the Pymatuning Reservoir just miles away, and even it wasn't immune to human alteration. In 1834 connection to the French Creek canal raised the lake by 11 feet. The geology in Pennsylvania just doesn't make big lakes, unless you count Erie, of course. I wonder how the fishing was in the river that made this reservoir we were fishing before the dam went up, and I wondered how many more cicadas there'd been before the land they lived under was flooded. What fish would I have caught here in 1685, just 20 emergence cycles ago. Would I have been catching 20 inch fallfish here? Giant brook trout? How many billions more cicadas must there have been?
What was is now gone, and there's little left to do but find a carp, put a piece of foam in front of it, and not set the hook too early.
¹ Tom Burrell, The Express. Dec 14 2024 The Evolution of Fisherman's Paradise
² Carline, R. F., R. L. Dunlap, J. E. Detar, and B. A. Hollender. 2011. The fishery of Spring Creek – a watershed under siege. Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, Technical Report Number 1, Harrisburg, PA.
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