West Virginia Wildlife from Eyewitness News

Trout Stocking

Small fish with big potential.

October 29, 2008
Reporter: Patrick McMurtry
Videographer: Brad Rice

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C L I C K T O P L A Y

"Getting these fingerlings into the streams really helps the trout fishing opportunities that anglers can enjoy in West Virginia."

The cold water fisheries part of the DNR is responsible for raising hundreds of thousands of fingerling trout that get stocked into West Virginia rivers and streams across the state.
Some get thousands of the fiesty, little guys!

Mike Shingleton/DRN Biologist says:
"A lot of the streams we look at 500 fingerlings per mile and depending on how many miles are available for stocking determines the number of fingerlings. Some streams may only get 500, some get 1,000 and some of the bigger streams may get 5-10,000 fingerlings."

And the best part is, you get a chance to fish every mile of streams stocked by the DNR and, in this case on the Laurel Fork, the group of Trout Unilimited volunteers.

Steve Sattler/Trout Unlimited says:
"We stock 20 streams in 8 counties with fingerling brown trout. Labor of love? Absolutely. We only do this on public land, land that's not posted, it's not something we do for ourselves, it benefits everybody, it's public access streams."

Spend one day with this amazing group of volunteers, and you'll quickly discover how much they love their trout.

It's really cool to look at this big guy and realize that he was probably stocked in this stream by volunteers after being born in a DNR fishery. While you may not catch a brown this big, the lucky folks that do provide vital information when they get back with a good fish story to tell.

Mike Shingleton/DRN Biologist says:
"A lot of the information comes back through fisherman's reports. They say they fish these streams and catch some nice browns and we see that we collect in our surveys 3-4 year classes or if anglers say they caught 10, 16 or 20 inch browns that indicates the different year classes so they're surviving year round."

With that kind of success, you can bet there will be a great trout fishing tradition that will survive generation after generation. For West Virginia Wildlife, I'm Patrick McMurtry, Eyewitness News.