Stocking efforts keep Central New York anglers coming back for more
Syracuse New Times, Justin Park
Published April 5, 2005
Give a person a fish and they'll eat for a day; teach a person to fish and they'll eat for a lifetime. Today that phrase doesn't mean much: Few, if any, can literally subsist on their catch alone.
Despite a wealth of lakes, rivers and streams, that's even less likely here in Central New York, where many fish populations are too fragile to support any heavy angling on their own. As it is, most of those fisheries, and locals' love for sport fishing, are propped up by extensive stocking efforts by governmental organizations, especially Carpenter's Brook Fish Hatchery, operated on Route 321 in Elbridge by the Onondaga County Parks Department.
At one time, fish populations helped support entire Indian tribes, but today there are far more humans and far fewer fish. Schools have been depleted by heavy fishing and even more by pollution, epitomized by Onondaga Lake's toxic brew, and modernization of natural streams that has brought unpredictable waters under human control but compromised habitat for native fish. In the Adirondacks especially, fisheries struggle against the harsh effects of acid rain created by air pollution from cars, Midwestern power plants and local agriculture. As a result of the extreme acidity, some lakes are nearly fishless.
Native fish like the brook trout still populate streams and rivers, but they share space with species such as the rainbow trout, imported from the western United States, and brown trout, native to Europe. The lakes are filled with fish, but the original diverse populations are now a partly engineered mix of bass, trout, walleye and other species that state and federal agencies--rather than unbridled forces of nature--monitor and maintain.
Even with strong populations of various fish, mercury and other contaminants are coming to the attention of health and wildlife groups as a real problem for many aquatic species as well as for the humans that eat them, often in mass quantities. Environmental legislation at both the state and federal levels may prove the difference between healthy aquatic ecosystems and toxic tinctures that only the hardiest creatures can withstand.
Stock Exchange
As in much of the country, fishing in Central New York is a sport and a hobby rather than a means to sustain life. Despite overfishing, pollutants and habitat degradation, angling thrives and is often touted as one of this region's greatest attributes and defining characteristics.
Onondaga County is one of the most heavily fished areas of the state, and as a result, also one of the most heavily stocked. A good part of that stocking burden falls on Carpenter's Brook Fish Hatchery and its five devoted employees, not to mention an eager cadre of angling volunteers with a vested interest in keeping the fish biting.
Onondaga County alone sells the most fishing licenses per capita, 23,805 in 2003-2004, of any county in the state. To accommodate that volume of lines cast, Carpenter's Brook dumps roughly 70,000 trout into Onondaga County lakes and streams each year. The state's Department of Environmental Conservation adds more than 200,000 in a greater variety of fish, including walleye, tiger muskellunge and others from hatcheries around the state like those on the Salmon River in Altmar. The demand is so high, in fact, that Onondaga County is one of only three counties in the state to have its own fish hatchery; the others are in Warren and Essex counties.
While some people may imagine upstate streams and lakes naturally filled with fish, most anglers know that stocking supports their pastime. In fact, some even know exactly where and when the fish have been released. Carpenter's Brook keeps detailed records of where, how many and what kind of fish have been stocked around the county, and that information becomes a valuable commodity when trout season opens on April 1.
The hatchery even has a hotline, 689-0003, that people can call to find out which streams are teeming with trout. Alongside lures and poles, knowledge of where the fish have been dumped can be the angler's best tool. Says Travis Stanek, hatchery operations manager at Carpenter's Brook, "Some people don't even realize we stock a lot of the fish they're catching. But others know and they call 'cause they want to know where we put them."
Ferne Twomey, office manager at Carpenter's Brook, adds, "So many people want to know where the fish are, we have the hotline set up. They sure like that."
Some anglers are so dependent on the county's stocking efforts that they go straight to the source. "I had a group of people come up once and try fishing right out of the stocking ponds," explains Stanek. "I told them that they had to go further down and they got mad at me!"
While Stanek and company stock a lot of smaller, year-old fish to try to get trout established and spawning, a quarter of the fish they dump are 2-year-old trout, many of which are big enough to eat. "We do almost 20,000 2-year-olds right here in Onondaga County and the state only does 100,000 and that's for the whole rest of the state," Stanek says.
By March 31, the eve of opening day, Carpenter's Brook had poured roughly 16,971 trout into area streams. By the end of May it will have dumped approximately 50,000 more. The fact that Carpenter's Brook dumps so many fish each year speaks to how many fish dinners are pulled out of Onondaga County waters. Add to that the 200,000 fish dumped by the DEC and you have a pretty good idea of the level of stocking required to keep Central New York anglers in business during the fishing seasons.
This aspect of fishing really sets it apart from the other sportsmen's favorite, deer hunting, which represents an almost opposite system of wildlife management. Bows and shotguns cull deer populations every hunting season and the DEC counts on those kills (as well as highway mishaps) to keep the swelling deer population under control.
For a variety of reasons, civilization, especially suburbia, is generally beneficial to deer reproduction and growth. With fishing, more fragile populations, like trout, need extensive human assistance to survive, especially under the strong, selective pressure of a thriving sport-fishing industry, indicated by the success of fishing-focused sporting goods stores such as Bass Pro Shops in Auburn and Gander Mountain in Cicero.
April Showers
Somewhat high and murky waters and spotty catches didn't deter the angling faithful on April 1, the annual opening day for trout fishing. Lines littered the area's crown jewel for that fisherman's favorite, Nine Mile Creek, from the mouth of its trout-friendly section in Marcellus, north into Camillus.
In addition to anglers, there were plenty of DEC officers combing the streams and checking for licenses. They were making sure the opening day's sportsmen had paid their fee, generally $5 to $19, depending on age and type of license, to the state to help support DEC efforts like stocking and habitat development.
That extensive human assistance the fisheries require also means plenty of taxpayer support to maintain and expand programs in addition to monies taken specifically from anglers in the form of license sales. Gov. George Pataki's 2005-2006 budget proposal would grant $150 million to the Environmental Protection Fund, which helps expand public access to streams and lakes throughout the state.
On April 1 almost a dozen fishermen lined the banks of Nine Mile Creek in Marcellus Park, off South Street in Marcellus. Whether they knew it or not, they were fishing a section of waterway that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had tried to enhance with the addition of some limestone boulders along the stream banks. According to Stanek, the boulders were added last summer to improve an overly straight section of the creek that had developed after a man-made dam had been removed. "That section was fairly long and fast-moving," he explains. "They added the rocks to give the trout some places to hide. The trout need those eddies and pools to camp out in."
Inadequate habitat issues, such as that section of Nine Mile Creek, pale in comparison to some of the water-quality issues that streams and lakes have faced since Europeans arrived here in the 17th century and claimed the land as their own. Onondaga Lake, and its main-culprit polluter Allied Chemical, is the most obvious example of how fisheries can be ruined, but there are plenty of other, more subtle, examples that continue even today.
For example, each spring farmers who use liquid fertilizers add to the pollution of streams such as Nine Mile Creek that run through agricultural areas; rain and generally wet conditions exacerbate the runoff. That only adds to problems created by people like the Martisco Paper Mill officials jailed in 2001 for at least a decade of dumping pollutants into Nine Mile Creek. In the city of Syracuse, raw sewage flows into Onondaga Creek during storms and, unfortunately for Onondaga Lake, such polluted tributaries dunk their junk into its already hurting waters.
Another more sinister form of water pollution falls from the sky, and its source is cars and coal-powered plants to the south and west. Prevailing weather patterns bring pollution from around the world eastward and dump it on New York state in the form of acid rain, a decades-long situation that has left many Adirondack lakes nearly lifeless. One of the pollutants that has become almost universal is organic mercury or methylmercury, which is absorbed by aquatic life and eventually by humans that eat the poisoned fish. While tuna has been the subject of most national attention regarding mercury content, concerns swirl around freshwater fish as well.
Mercury Rising
In fact, the DEC advises that people eat no more than one meal (one half-pound) per week of fish taken from the state's fresh waters as a precautionary measure against eating too much mercury or any other pollutant. Additionally, they offer specific, stricter guidelines for especially rancid bodies of water such as Onondaga Lake (we double-dog dare you to eat a landlocked salmon caught from this body of water) and parts of the Hudson River.
While the pollutant levels in New York waters may seem a bit depressing, the federal Environmental Protection Agency passed the Clean Air Interstate Rule in March that some groups and lawmakers feel will put some teeth in pollution regulations and start the healing process for the air and for waterways around the country, but especially in the hard-hit Northeast. After President George W. Bush's Clear Skies Initiative failed in the Senate, the EPA followed up with CAIR in an attempt to deal with air pollution from power plants, without the controversial pieces of the Bush legislation.
John Sheehan, communications director at the Adirondack Council, a wilderness preservation lobbying group, says CAIR is a much-needed update to air pollution rules that ultimately are among the most important protections offered to freshwater fish populations. "Most regulations were aimed at ground-level ozone and smog. Therefore, there is a huge amount of nitrogen pollution in winter that falls on the snowpack," says Sheehan. "When the snow melts there's a huge acid shock in spring. We needed year-round protections not possible under the existing {1990} clean air act."
While some groups such as the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C. environmental advocacy group, feel the new rule doesn't do enough to curb pollution and gives industry too much leeway in continuing to pollute, Sheehan says it's a start and leaves room for the EPA to strengthen the rule over time.
Sheehan does concede that another rule enacted last month and pointed specifically at mercury pollution is not what his group wanted. "The mercury regulation is a step forward but a very small one," Sheehan says. "Most of the curbing of mercury pollution between now and 2015 will be a co-benefit of CAIR."
Sheehan explains that even though most mercury particles are too heavy to travel far in the air, other pollutants like sulphur and nitrogen create acidic soils that allow existing inorganic mercury to be converted into its more dangerous and absorbable organic form. Sheehan says that mercury should be less of an issue in Central New York because our soil is generally more alkaline, that is, less acidic and less likely produce organic mercury. However, he warns that mercury is pretty much ubiquitous: "You have this cycle where it gets in your body or in a fish and it's in there until it's dead or eaten by something else."
Liz Moore, a spokeswoman for EWG, says there aren't clear enough guidelines that let people know what a serious problem mercury in seafood can be. "The Food and Drug Administration has released some fuzzy guidelines about seafood and women of childbearing age, but those are heavily influenced by the tuna industry," she says. "They're obligated under the Data Quality Act to release scientifically sound information and we're convinced that these are not sound advisories."
The EWG also claims that most state advisories about fish contamination are insufficient. Moore warns that notices like the DEC's are based on averages and that any given fish may present higher-than-average levels of mercury or other pollutants.
Those opening-day Central New York trout fisherman can breathe a tiny breath of relief, however. The EWG says that farm-raised trout, such as those hatched at Carpenter's Brook, should contain some of the lowest levels of brain-damaging mercury. So fire up the grill and put on some salt potatoes; dinner's almost ready.
