In the Outdoors: On the contrary Genesee River

“Think how our native, indigenous trout must feel, having to deal with this invasion”

By Oak Duke,

   Should we stock deer, just prior to hunting season like we stock trout?

   Imagine having whitetail breeding farms, as we do hatcheries for trout or for that matter, game farms that raise pheasants.

   Crazy?

   According to national statistics, only about 40% of deer hunters were successful last season, and only 17% tagged two or more deer.

   Despite all the new technological improvements in hunting gear, talk, and money spent…in the billions of dollars, not a very good showing, return on investment.

   Of course it is an absurd idea to stock deer.

   For one thing, imagine thousands of farm-raised deer, released at once in Allegany County.

   They would be ignorant of danger, crowding the indigenous whitetails, and competing for food and probably in spots, herding en masse…as they did on the farms where they were raised.

   But this story is not about deer.

   It’s about water.

   It’s about the Genesee River.

   Upstream from Belmont which has recently received in March (6,870) and April (13,740)…20,610 total Rainbow and Brown Trout. That’s not counting the thousands of trout stocked in the Genny’s feeder streams, such as the Crider out of Whitesville, Dike’s Creek from Andover (I refuse to spell it with a “y.” Nathaniel Dike, the Revolutionary War Veteran, deserves to at least have the stream that he settled on and was named after him spelled the same as his name.) But I digress.

   And add too the over 20,000 trout to the Genesee River in New York State…Pennsylvania heavily stocks trout in the Genny’s headwaters.

   I’m an avid trout fisherman and can’t help but think how our native, indigenous trout must feel, having to deal with this invasion of “stockies.”

   Trout normally, in a natural environment, are territorial. They each have their “lie” or favorite spot in the stream. And they often guard that little spot on the edge of the current flow, maybe protected by a rock, a log, or bit of undercut bank.

   And then to see a blandly colored-up herd of dog food-raised trout that have no idea about natural ways, overwhelm the natural fish’s watery world, soon competing for aquatic bug life that is the trout’s main source of sustenance, comprising, by a number of studies, 80% of its diet.

   Must be beyond mind-blowing…shattering, life altering.

   But maybe I should feel more empathy towards the stocked trout…

   Take their side.

   A contrary notion, just like the Genesee River.

   After all, these stocked trout now have a chance at a real life, free to swim where they want and live and breed and suffer the dangers of predators in all forms; from herons, osprey, mink, and two-legged fishers like me.

   Now they are free from their concrete swimming pool where they were packed together like sardines. And with luck and superior skills, survive and maybe even breed in the headwaters.

   Some, a very few do.

   Swimming free in the contrary Genesee.

   The Genesee River is a different river as it heads north, and cuts a deep swath, actually carving out a canyon in Letchworth, across New York State, contrarily heading northward to Lake Ontario and the Canadian border in the lake’s center.

   The Genesee River’s genesis is in Pa. where three branches, or stems of the Genny come together just south of the NY-Pa border in the aptly named Township of Genesee. The West Branch which cuts through Ellisburg, the Middle Branch, which has it’s beginning in Gold (where the spring with the sign is,) and the main stem of the Genesee, where it comes down through Hickox, combines with the Middle Branch, doubling its flow.

   The West Branch hooks up almost at the New York border, near the intersection of Pa. Routes 449 and 244.   

   In contrast, the Genny’s sister watersheds, take the Allegheny to the west, heads south to Pittsburgh, where it helps create the Ohio River, and on to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.

   And likewise, our next watershed over to the east is the Canisteo River, that also heads south, helping create the Susquehanna River, which dumps into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

   And that’s not to mention the other major river systems in New York, like the Delaware and the Hudson.

   They both drain due south.

   Nope, the Genny heads north, the contrary and opposite way.

   The only one.

   They say the people of Western New York have a contrary nature. I say, “It’s in the water.” I’ve heard that all my life and maybe there is something to it.