By Craig Springer, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
It’s a curious word: “redd,” both a noun and verb. Young brook trout in the Appalachian chain from Georgia northward through the Carolinas and Virginia, that juts on up to Maine will emerge from their natal redd in spring to begin life in the colder blue lines that vein off the mountainsides at higher elevations.
Redd comes from old English, usually expressed as to “redd up” something, such as “to redd up the house for company.” It means to make ready.
Female brook trout redd up pebbly creek bottoms for their fertilized eggs in late fall, vigorously fanning out sediment from small gravels where cold oxygenated water percolates through the little gold and orange orbs, incubating while nestled, protected between clean stones.
When autumn hardwoods go dormant for the winter and falling leaves are burnished the colors of death, the skin of ripe brook trout mirror the crimson and olives and creams that litter the forest floor or thickly congest the surface at the tails of little pools. In a complete antithesis, the trout are brightened the colors of life.
Their eggs incubate the winter long. Those tiny black dots in a brook trout egg will be in a couple of seasons the eyes that detect the dimple of a dry fly landing on a glassy glide or the glint of a sixteenth-ounce silver spinner dressed with a squirrel tail skirt pulled through a pool.
The opportunities for brook trout anglers to do just that are growing. Thanks to federal excise taxes paid by the manufacturers of fishing tackle and on motorboat fuels, a brook trout conservation endeavor in North Carolina and Tennessee expanded the population of brook trout, or specks, as they call them in the southern Appalachians.
“Watersheds holding brook trout span many states and we work cooperatively across state lines as needed,” said Jacob Rash, a biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. He is also the chair of the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, an enterprise that facilitates data sharing among citizens, scientists, and agencies from 17 states for the betterment of the brookie—helping to ensure healthy, fishable brook trout populations.
