Education a big key to saving cutthroats

Improving the Coeur d’Alene River cutthroat trout fishery could be fairly simple, if everyone goes along with it.

Backed by a draft report from a telemetry study that followed the movements of 75 cutthroats for more than a year, Idaho Fish and Game Department researchers are making recommendations that could lead to significant improvements in numbers of the native trout.

Educating anglers and clamping the drag on poaching would be a good start, they say.

Nearly 70 percent of the cutthroats longer than 12 inches die each year, and most of those fish are killed illegally, said Joe DuPont, the department’s study leader.

“If it wasn’t for the illegal harvest in the lower North Fork and Little North Fork, the annual mortality would be 30 percent or less, and that would maintain a lot more big fish,” he said.

The illegal harvest in the upper river catch-and-release areas was fairly small, he said, “probably because fishermen tend to police themselves in those stretches.”

The problem is in the catch-and-keep sections where anglers are killing fish within the protected range of 8-16 inches long.

“People are more likely to violate size restrictions than keep more than their limit,” DuPont said. “A lot of people don’t have tape measures, and you know how fishermen are with sizes.”

The researchers also suggest that the agency establish catch-and-release sections based on where fish congregate rather than simply in the upper river sections.

The Coeur d’Alene cutthroats behave differently than other cutthroat fisheries such as the St. Joe River fish, which winter in the lower river where they generally spawn before migrating up to 60 miles upstream to find colder water during summer.

“During the heaviest fishing pressure, most of the St. Joe fish are upstream in the catch-and-release section,” DuPont said.

“But in the Coeur d’Alene, the fish tend to spend the summer in the same area where they winter, whether it’s in the upper part of the drainage or the lower part. They might travel a long distance to spawn in April or May, but by the time the fishing season opens at the end of May, most of them are back.”

Other recommendations involve educating landowners and agencies on the need to prevent stream-bank erosion, continue to reduce heavy-metal pollution, restore instream habitat in the river and tributatries and maintain groundwater that’s critical in cooling the river to temperatures trout can tolerate during summer.

“The cooler ground water is the key to survival for a lot of fish in the heat of the year, and most of those areas are influenced by private property,” he said.