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Thinking big, starting small
Herman Garcia (L) of CHEER and Matt Clifford, California Water Attorney for Trout Unlimited, at an off-stream storage project site along Little Arthur Creek. In 2006, the Pajaro River on California's central coast came out of obscurity to make national headline---for the wrong reason: it was named the most endangered river in America. Historically, the…
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Trout in the Texas Hill Country
GRTU president Mark Dillow in his element on the Guadalupe River. Trout Unlimited has 4,000 members in Texas, all part of one Texas-sized chapter: Guadalupe River TU (GRTU). Amazing for a state that has no native trout, and relatively few trout streams. When I lived in Colorado, it was commonly believed that all anglers residing…
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Fathers
Photo: The Steelhead Whisperer and his daughter on California's Big Sur River. I spent Father’s Day this year not fishing. That was fine with me, though. My son was with me and we were at 7,500 feet in the Sierra Nevada range, where winter had not yet gathered up all of her train. And we…
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Reconciliation for fish and people in California’s Central Valley
Dr. Rene Henery leads a small team of Trout Unlimited program staff who work on improving and restoring habitat, passage and flows for imperiled Central Valley salmon and steelhead. This effort has taken promising strides over the past several years toward a collaborative, adaptively-managed approach to rebuilding wild runs of native fish and the fisheries…
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New water rights guide helps California landowners, streams
There are many things rural California landowners can do to leave more water in streams for fish and wildlife. Most involve changes to water use practices that will also increase the security of the landowner’s water supply. So why don’t more landowners do this? One answer is California’s complex system of water rights. It can be difficult to…
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Youth key to steelhead restoration in Pennington Creek
Native south-central California coastal steelhead. Photo: Capelli/NOAA Fisheries. Steelhead, the sea-run version of rainbow trout, have one of the most diverse life histories of any fish species. On the West Coast, this life history diversity has enabled steelhead to colonize and persist in coastal drainages in a region—the south-central coast of California—with highly variable precipitation,…
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New hope for coho in San Geronimo Creek
San Geronimo Creek, which provides important spawning and rearing habitat for endangered coho salmon in Marin County, Calif., flows parallel to the road in the center of this photo on the far side of the former golf course, up against the forested hillside. Imperiled coho salmon benefit from major land acquisition and open space conservation…
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