Short casts: Fish ladders don’t work, public lands support in CO, whirling disease in the Bow

John Day Dam on the Columbia River. A new Yale University study provides some daunting news for water and dam managers across the country: fish ladders aren’t the “fix-it” solution to fish migration over irrigation or hydroelectric dams. The study, which took place on three East Coast rivers—the Connecticut, the Susquehanna and the Merrimack—showed that…

Video spotlight: New England Mountain Fly Fishing

Being a western guy with roots in the Rockies, my angling experience in the mountains of New England is pretty limited. I did spend a great afternoon several years ago chasing fat rainbows in Connectictut’s upper Farmington River before being chased away by a rainstorm, and I got to fish some Adirondack streams for native…

Tracking trout in the wilds of Vermont

By Mark Taylor Scientists tend to have a pretty simple philosophy about data: More is better. So Jud Kratzer can be forgiven for not hurriedly working up a paper on results he’s seeing while surveying streams in Vermont, where he has been studying the effects of habitat restoration work on brook trout populations. After all,…

For sale by Congress: YOUR LANDS

Congress has only been in session for a few weeks, but some members have wasted no time coming after America’s best idea – your public lands. On day one, the House of Representatives passed a rule change that eased procedural hurdles for handing over America’s public lands. Then we saw legislation introduced that would allow…

Of monuments and missed opportunities

By Chris Wood The one that got away isn’t always a fish. Eighteen years ago, I got a phone call from the forest supervisor of the Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest in southwest Oregon. He wanted President Clinton to use his authority under the Antiquities Act to make a big chunk of the forest a national monument…