If you’ve ever caught a rainbow trout in Montana you’ve benefited from bucket biology.
It’s true that redband trout, a rainbow subspecies, inhabit the Kootenai River, so if you catch one there, it could be a native Montanan. Elsewhere, Montana rainbows and brown trout were introduced to the state by bucket biologists.
These days “bucket biologists” is used to describe rogue anglers moving their favorite fish around, not the organized efforts of state and federal fisheries biologists spreading nonnative trout across Montana. That’s how biology worked before society and the law placed as much importance on native species as they do today.
The biology of fisheries was in its infancy 100 years ago. Hauling trout fry around in milk cans so they could be dumped into waters lacking “proper” gamefish constituted much of the fishery’s work of that earlier era. It was popular and highly successful.
Those rainbow and brown trout across Montana — fish so revered the state is the ultimate destination for fly fishers in the United States, south of Alaska at least — are the result of bucket biology when that was still considered cool. That’s no longer so.
We’re not so flippant about moving fish around these days, especially nonnatives. Fisheries management now often involves eradicating nonnative species, especially fecund fish such as rainbow trout or pike, then reintroducing natives such as westslope cutthroats, often over the objections of anglers who like those altered fisheries just the way they are.
Where government fisheries managers left off, wildcat anglers have picked up the ball. These contemporary bucket biologists might be new to western Montana, and where they came from, they fished for bass or walleye, or worst of all, northern pike. Now, they don’t want to drive over the divide or fly out-of-state to harass their old favorites, so they bring a few home in the live well of their fishing boats and slip them into their new home water when no one’s looking.
I said pike are the worst of the nonnative invaders, though maybe that’s a little unfair. They are impressive gamefish, but one look at the toothy maw of a northern pike and you’ll need no further explanation — these are fish-eating machines.
Trout, especially stocked trout, are an ideal meal.
The discovery of pike in Pine Grove Pond has the potential to wipe out a stocked-trout fishery and family recreational opportunity a short distance from Kalispell. Add a couple of pike to a small pond filled with stocked rainbows and cutties, and soon you’ll be left with one giant pike. Or maybe, one giant pike and a swarm of skinny, hammer-handle slime rockets.
Skinny hammer handles are what you get when a hungry swarm of pike decimates its food source. As for slime rockets, if you’ve ever held a pike long enough to pose for a hero shot, you know exactly what I mean.
It’s not that I dislike pike so much. I’ve got a grudging admiration for the species, though I rarely fish for them. It’s the people who move pike around — discounting the interests of every other resource user and replacing those interests with their own — who deserve our collective anger. These fish eat and breed too fast to leave room for a trout fishery in the pond.
My scorn isn’t limited to modern-day, northern pike-hauling bucket biologists. They’re just the antagonists of this story. But there are folks across society who operate under this kind of “Me First” code of conduct. We’ve far too much of that these days.
Fish, Wildlife and Parks caught a pike out of the pond in January. By some miracle it might be the only one. If not, these fish reproduce quickly and Pine Grove Pond likely won’t be a trout fishery for long. Restoring that resource will require expensive and controversial (not with me) rotenone treatment to wipe out the pike.
What a waste.