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Description and Habitat
Originally from Europe and North Africa, the brown trout (Salmo trutta) was introduced to North America in 1882. Of the thousands of eggs imported to Massachusetts, the three surviving fish were the source of today's North American brown trout fishery. Like other members of the trout species, brown trout (called speckled carp by early anglers) are cannibals. Still, brown trout are one of the trout species most likely to strike an artificial fly. For this reason, the brown trout has remained an all-time favourite of dedicated fly fishermen since the fifteenth century.
This hardy fish can tolerate water temperatures from five to more than ten degrees warmer than can other trout species, as well as inhabit semi-polluted waters and rivers with lower-than-average oxygen levels. Brown trout are territorial, and weathered anglers use this knowledge when they find a seemingly empty region of a river. Instead of bypassing the barren stretch, anglers should assume that this stretch is the territory of a large brown trout that has successfully defended its homeland and eaten smaller intruders.
Behaviour
Light sensitive, trout feed under shade-providing brush piles and after dark. The obstruction-filled waters inhabited by brown trout hamper most attempts at presenting any lures, baits, or flies to the protected fish. In open water, too, the fish has a tendency to swim directly for underwater cover and grasp a submerged object until finally opening its mouth to breathe.
Unlike brook and rainbow trout, brown trout prefer natural-looking artificial flies to blatantly fake red, white, or blue flies. Trout have impressive faculties of vision, smell, and hearing, able to focus on two objects placed at different distances at once in dim, cloudy waters.
Like other trout, browns spawn in gravel nests dug on the river bottom or over shore gravel bars in lake waters between seven and fifteen feet deep. The fish spawn from September to December, as dictated by the climate and water conditions. Predatory minnows and crawfish eat a large portion - around 95 per cent - of the eggs and hatched fry. In three to five weeks, the vulnerable fry hatch from the surviving eggs.
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