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BLM proposes safeguards for Arctic fish and wildlife habitat
The opportunity to protect a vast swath of public land does not come around often. This September, the Biden Administration announced a rulemaking to protect 13 million acres of public land from oil and gas leasing within the National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska (NPR-A). Northeast National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Photo by Bob Wick (BLM) Protection of…
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Beers, backcountry, e-bikes: Angler scientists at work
A volunteer chapter in Washington State is going the distance to collect trout and salmon eDNA samples in their home water Fed by glaciers and deep snowpack, the Nooksack River joins the Pacific Ocean near Bellingham, Washington, a half-hour drive south of the Canadian border. Upstream, the basin’s cold headwaters originate high in the Cascade…
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Fooling Dollies with dancing streamers
All trout and char, to some extent, are predators — even the little fish that swim in small water and eat virtually nothing but insects. But there are true predators in the salmonid world, and these are the fish that make fly fishers tremble. They're big browns that feed on smaller fish and, during the…
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Fishing the pegged bead
It's the pegged bead — the target of much derision from the purist crowd, but an oft-used technique to catch big trout and char when salmon eggs are in the water
A nice Dolly Varden that fell for a pegged bead. Chris Hunt photo. The ethics and the logic examined Fly fishing is a craft that appeals to the purist in all of us — the notion that fooling a fish by casting something that resembles that animal's natural food source without resorting to bait is…
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One salmonid for the rest of my life? I choose Dolly
You can try to time the silver run or the king run, and maybe you'll get lucky and hit it just right. Odds are, you'll time your date with Dolly perfectly — she's rarely a no-show
I made an off-hand comment on a friend's Facebook post this morning — he uploaded a great photo of a Dolly Varden in Southeast Alaska and I quickly opined that, should some higher power ever dictate to me that I could only catch one salmonid for the rest of my life, it very well might…
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Pursuing ‘the people’s fish’ in Alaska
“When we think about people, and the ‘habitat’ people utilize, we don’t just look at the superhighways where they can easily be seen traveling," he said. "People don’t live on the freeways, people don’t ‘spawn’ on the freeways or on their commute.”
The author traveled to the end of the road in his pursuit of Dolly Varden. Daniel A. Ritz photo. Searching for Dolly Varden in southeast Alaska Daniel Ritz is fishing across the Western United States this summer in an attempt to reach the Master Caster class of the Western Native Trout Challenge, attempting to land each of…
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Dolly Varden: all you need to know
Dolly Varden (Salvelinus malma) Species summary and status: Though similar to, and often confused with trout, Dolly Varden are in fact a char. To tell a char from a trout you can look at their spots — char have light spots (white or yellow to red) on a dark body, while trout have dark spots (brown…
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