Fish on the Niobrara

It rained most of this morning and when it let up Gibson, Harold and I went out to where the water was turned out of the ditch and got a nice mess of chubs, bullheads, and redhorse.

Sunday Harold, Karterman and I rode down to the east end of the meadow by Harold’s place. We got some hooks and string at the American Museum shack and cut some willow poles by the Harris dam. We used rifle shells for sinkers, and Harold and I caught twenty fine chubs in that many minutes. Karterman failed to get any.

Sunday Walter, Harold, Beck and I went spearing above the upper ranch. We got a lot of suckers and red horse and about a six pound carp. I shot the carp in the head with my .38 six shooter when he ran into the shallow water, and then he ran under the bank where they speared him.

We got up early this morning and Win and I prepared to go fishing. I cut some bacon for bait and cut a young dead willow down for my pole (Win said a-b’s on the real one) instead of the one used yesterday. Then we had breakfast and did the dishes and practiced all together. Then Win and I went fishing above the beaver dam. We crossed on the dam and fished up the river a ways but didn’t get a bit. We came to one hole where I caught 3. The third was the biggest caught. They were chubs, of course.

A little farther on we found a good hole. Win caught 9 and I caught 15. The bucket was small and just packed. Win threw back 4 fish she caught that were too small. I threw back one. We came home to find Mr. Osborn, Mr. Barnum Brown, and Mr. Thompson there, and had those and the seven other fish for dinner.

The day before, the U.S. Fish men brought us a truck loaded with some 24,000 Loch Laven trout, for our nursery ponds here. Eventually we are going to have some real trout fishing in this stream!

Went fishing when we came in last night, and caught a 3 lb. 10 oz. German Brown Trout!

Sunday, Margaret & I fished, from 11 to 2 P.M., & caught some fine trout. I caught a Brown that weighed exactly 4 lbs, but was only 20” long. A very fat, deep, splendid fish!

Quite a few have been caught here this year, weighing 3 to 5½ lbs — mostly Loch Haven, or Brown trout. It is pretty fine to be able to get fish like that, literally at your own back door!

We have done almost no fishing here in months — mostly for lack of time. However, as it was warm & still yesterday afternoon, we took our poles, and I fished just one deep, “gnarled” hole, under a willow, that I knew had a big fish. I put on special hook and “7-strand” wire leader, and special bait, and finally got him to bite, and hooked well enough to hold him out of the brush; and landed a 22 inch Loch Laven.

About Oct. 1, 1965 the Nebraska Game, Forestation and Parks Commission will undertake the chemical removal of fish in Box Butte Dam. As a necessary part of the project the stream above must be included to prevent a swift reinvasion of rough fish. The Niobrara will also benefit in the long run as sampling indicated a high undesirable fish population. The chemical used will be liquid rotenone, which settles on the gills of fish, preventing the utilization of oxygen, and in effect, suffocates them.

The Niobrara and White rivers are small streams. They won’t stand much more fishing than they get now. The State Game and Parks people poisoned the Niobrara 10 years ago, and it has never fully recovered. Between Highway 19 and the Monument boundary, on ASR land, there is a stretch of the river with rocky bottom favored for spawning by the trout; it must not be fished if the river is ever to recover and become a good trout stream again.

There is little public confidence here in the wisdom of Game and Parks Commission plans. No one here has forgotten when, some 12 years ago, the Game and Parks people persuaded local ranchers to agree to their plan to poison the Niobrara river “to get rid of the trash fish.” It failed dismally, because the “trash” fish are as numerous as ever, but trout fishing has never made a comeback.

Glen came for a visit Thursday afternoon. We did some fishing, Glen doing fly fishing which he does so well, and I trying my old fashioned bait fishing. We tried up in the West meadow where the river is swifter, shallow, and wider, and running very clear, without carrying any sediment, and there are no reeds, weeds, or cattails along the river. Glen caught 7 fine rainbow and I got 3 fine rainbow, plus two large Brown trout, the larger one being 16” long and weighing 1½ lbs. This was the best trout fishing I’ve ever had and the most fun. It was the fulfillment of a long time wish to catch a really nice trout here.

There is so much work needing to be done but I decided that if I couldn’t go fishing on Sunday morning I’d never get in any fishing. One could work every day of the week and still not get the work done — so why not go fishing. So this morning Evan and I went up to Spring Draw and he fished up stream and I fished down stream. I got 5 nice brown trout, the smallest 11” long, 3 about 15” long, and the largest 20” long which weighed about 3½ lbs. That is the largest trout I have ever caught. It’s a real joy to reel one that size in.

I went up below the upper dam to do a little fishing. I caught one about 12 inch brown, but I first caught a 25 inch, 6 lb. brown which is by far the largest trout I have caught since I have been here.

I think that it is impossible for anyone not living here to realize how much work we do on the place. I am busy most of the time doing things that need to be done around here, but things that mostly are forgotten and don’t show. There are always so many things that need doing that I always feel guilty for taking the time to go fishing. I wish that were not so for it diminishes the pleasure I get from going fishing.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, members of your Commission conducted a program intended to improve fishing on the upper Niobrara river. This program consisted of poisoning the stream to get rid of the “trash” fish. Of course, this killed all the fish in the river, including the successfully adapted breeding population of trout, as well as chubs, sunfish, redhorse and carp. Crayfish, a principal source of food for trout, were also wiped out, and are only recently returning in any number. Even the frogs were decimated, and slow to return.

May I suggest that you acquire some native stream-raised brown and rainbow trout and release them in the upper Niobrara, then close the stream to fishing for a year or two until they have had time to adapt and multiply? If the Commission were to do this, it would in part redress the great damage to fishing in the Niobrara, done years ago by the Game and Parks Commission.

Jack Peterson and his colleague from the Game and Parks Division came about 2 o’clock with another load of Rainbow trout from the Alliance ditch. They came yesterday with over 300 Rainbow trout, and over 200 today. They will be back Monday with some more, enough to try to make the total 1,000. These are trout well established in the Alliance ditch and they do not migrate.

This is all in response to a letter I wrote early in the summer. How stupid of me not to have complained to the Game and Parks department sooner. Mr. Peterson will also stock the river here with 1,000 Brown trout in about another month. So we are probably getting as close to wild or native fish as we can get. We certainly hope they will do well here.

There must be at least twenty miles of river between the two houses of the ranch. As a result there is no dearth of fishing. One can go almost anywhere and catch a splendid mess of fish and then go to a bend of the river close by the house and get a bed of fresh watercress on which to serve our catch, and then we defy the world to produce anything better.

One friendship among animals which is unbelievably queer we have observed among the cattle and the fish. In the water gaps the chubs congregate in large numbers, and when a cow critter walks into the water, body deep, on a hot noon to cool himself and get a drink he is quickly surrounded by these little fish, which will leap out of the water to seize the Texas horn flies which they see on the animal’s sides. It seems much more curious than the cooperation between the cow and the rusty little cowbirds.

Father had stocked the pond here with a native sunfish, the little fellows with a spot on the gill that would at the most, perhaps weigh half a pound, but they are gamey little fellows. He caught some of the young ones in backwaters and put them in the pond and they soon multiplied to where we had a great number of them. It was no trouble to go out and catch all that would go in a skillet for a dozen people in a matter of an hour or two.

The 2008 inventory reported that the roughly eighteen kilometers of the Niobrara running through Agate Fossil Beds had become remarkably impoverished. The survey produced only a dozen specimens of just two fish species, in contrast to the nine species and several hundred specimens that earlier University of Nebraska surveys, in 1979 and 1989, had recorded on the same stretch. Drought pressure, non-native trout stocking upstream, and other changes over the intervening decades were cited as likely factors.

The 2011 follow-up confirmed and extended the 2008 finding. Northern pike — a predatory species absentin the 1979 and 1989 inventories — had become the dominant fish in the Monument’s stretch of the river. Only the white sucker remained from the earlier native community; green sunfish had been added. Total species on our reach of the Niobrara had fallen from nine to three; total fish counted, from more than six hundred to fewer than seventy.

The same team sampled upstream at The Nature Conservancy’s Cherry Ranch, above a control structure on the Nunn property that apparently blocks upstream migration of pike. There they found a basically intact native fish community of ten species, in good numbers. The contrast between the two reaches is the clearest scientific statement to date of what the family has been watching for three generations.