Thursday, May 24, 2012
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: Hunters and anglers still in the conservation business
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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Outdoor sportsmen often look back 50 years and more to the golden era of conservation, when their efforts restored waning populations of deer, turkeys, bear and other wildlife.
You might think those days are over, but you’d be wrong. Hunters and anglers still are in the conservation and restoration business. Just consider what has happening during the month of May in Virginia. From the breakers of the Atlantic to the mountains of the far southwest, there have been major projects to restore elk, bass and trout. Let’s take a closer look at them:
Elk restoration
Following a long absence, Virginia is back in the elk restoration business.
On Friday, 11 elk from Kentucky were released into a short-term, 5-acre holding pen that Mark Taylor, outdoor columnist of the Roanoke Times, described as being “high atop an open knoll on a reclaimed strip mine site in Buchanan County.”
The animals wore brightly colored tracking collars and had tags in their ears bearing identification numbers. They were outnumbered 20-to-1 by spectators who had been invited to observe the release.
As the animals cautiously sized-up their new quarters, they hardly projected the appearance of the majestic creatures you’d expect to see bearing 6-foot antler spreads and bugling in the snow-caped mountain terrain of Colorado.
But they were a start, like seeds being planted in rich Virginia soil with the hope they will bring forth a good crop. There were five bulls, five cows and a week-old calf.
The Rocky Mountain Elk foundation called the release “conservation history” and contributed $300,000 to help make it happen.
The Department of Game and Inland Fisheries was cool toward the idea for a long time, stating concern over spreading diseases to cattle and deer herds. But the agency had an increasingly difficult time answering the question, “Why not?” in view of the tremendous success just over the border in Kentucky, a state that now proudly calls itself “The Land of 10,000 Elk.”
Nearly 80 percent of the Kentucky residents in a recent survey said they supported having free-roaming, wild elk in the state. Kentucky’s restoration zone is 16 counties in size.
Virginia’s goal is to stock 75 elk in Buchanan County the next three years, with the idea that elk fever will spread to adjacent counties.
Bass in Back Bay
Anglers were catching so many trophy bass during the 1980 season at Back Bay that few paid attention to warnings from Department of Game and Inland Fisheries that the population was certain to crash. That year, 240 citations—bass 8 pounds or more--were awarded anglers fishing this 25,000-acre stretch of shallow, brackish water wedged against the Atlantic Ocean in southern Virginia Beach. That was about 40 percent of the state’s total. The top fish weighed 12 ponds, 6 ounces.
Then came the forecasted crash. Suddenly the bass were gone. So were the waterfowl. The Bay was pretty much dead. All kinds of things were getting the blame: bacteria washed in by runoff, the lack of aquatic vegetation, sedimentation, turbidity, an imbalance of salinity. Money for research dried up. Back Bay was a lost cause for more than 20 years.
Around 2005, things began to change for the better. Renewed efforts to improve the Bay as a habitat for fish and waterfowl slowly began to pay off. Biologists came up with the idea of stocking fingerling bass in 2009, something that is normally ill advised unless you have money to throw away. But less than 6 months later the fish were 10 inches long.
This month, stockings have been carried out in earnest. The 125,000 fish being released are a cross between the northern and Florida strain of largemouth bass, which means they have potential for getting big.
It still is too early to say Back Bay is back on the map as a largemouth hotspot, but that reality is beginning to show promise.
Tumbling Creek trout
Little Tumbling Creek is well named as it comes leaping out of the mountains north of Saltville. It has all the makings of a self-sustaining brook trout stream, everything but trout, that is. The water is simply too acidic to support these delicate creatures. It has been that way for more than 20 years.
This winter, the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, with a lot of support, loaded a 4-mile section of the stream with lime to deal with the ravishes of acid rain. Last week, 4,000 fingerling trout were stocked.
The project has gotten major help from the American Electric Power Foundation, the Virginia Council of Trout Unlimited, James Madison University, and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
The DGIF would like to eventually stock Little Tumbling with southern stain brook trout, but that creates a major challenge. All the Virginia hatcheries raise the northern strain as do other hatcheries in the Southeast.
Virginia officials now are considering building their own hatchery to raise the southern strain, which was the native stock in Little Tumbling as well as most other brook trout streams south of the New River.
That will take time and money, so in order to give anglers something to fish for in the transition, the trout stocked last week were cultured so as not to spawn. That means the southern strain can be stocked without competition when they become available.
Little Tumbling Creek is serving as a lavatory to provide lessons on how other southern brook trout streams can be restored, and that’s still another modern day conservation story.
