Finsylvannia

In this episode Bill Dell from the troutbitten project and I discuss wild native brook trout and their management here in Pennsylvania. We cover topics like setting expectations for anglers who want to fish for them, their often underestimated resiliency, and how we could be managing them better here in PA. We discuss how states like Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia and others are managing native brook trout much more effectively ...

In this episode I sit down with Professor of Fluvial Geomorphology Doug Thompson to discuss the overwhelming failure of engineered instream structures to help streams over the past century. In fact, engineered instream structures have harmed and scared many streams in that timeframe by destroying channel complexity, preventing tree growth in the riparian zone, decreasing ground water/spring recharge, and creating a habitat thats ho...

Tim Schaeffer just signaled he is going to grant 13 class A stream stocking exemptions(5 new and 8 renewals) including Penn’s Creek! This was disclosed at the december 23rd hatcheries and fisheries committee meeting 2 days prior to Christmas and WAS NOT listed in the meetings agenda. Further it has been brought to my attention that one pay for play trout club owns property on many of these streams and we are currently trying to fin...

This week on Finsylvania Mike Evanko creator of Wooly Bugged and author at Dark Skies Fly Fishing discuss loss of stream access to posting of private land. Many noteable anglers around the state are sounding the alarm on this loss of access that is not getting significantly replaced by Pennsylvania Fish and Boat. We discuss why “angler opportunity” always seems to mean stocked fish and not access in PA. We discuss the future of our...

Show description and links below this weeks action alerts!!

Action alert 1: e-mail Governor Josh Shapiro’s office and tell them we need adoption of an emergency stocking authorization in Pennsylvania to mitigate the vast ecological damage from unregulated private stocking. Please also mention we need commissioners taking the 3 vacant spots that will actually use it to say “no” to irresponsible private stocking once an authoriza...

Finsylvania is a podcast dedicated to discussing and changing how we manage fish in Pennsylvania. In this episode we discuss the elephant in the room, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission’s failure to manage our states aquatic resources coherently. I lay out a high level overview of the problems with the current myoptic focus on stocking invasive hatchery trout. These issues include wide spread ecological harm to native aquati...