Upstream

Nearly two years of dickering over whether to free the Muddy Bridge Branch from its concrete culvert in Glen Burnie have ended with the stream still in a man-made channel."

Gov. Michael N. Castle is appealing to Pennsylvania Gov. Robert P. Casey to have environmental officials in both states work together to come up with a plan to prevent increased pollutant discharge into the Brandywine River.Ninety percent of the water flow ing down the Brandywine in the summer is chemically treated -- much of it at sewer plants upstream -- before it reaches the Delaware line at Smith Bridge."The water we're going to be paddling our canoes on this morning is the same water we're going to be drinking this afternoon in Wilmington," Mr. Castle said last week.

An agreement capping nearly two decades of negotiations is expected to result in the reopening of hundreds of miles of spawning habitat in the Susquehanna River for American shad and other migratory fish.The agreement reached this week calls for three utility companies, including Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., to spend an estimated $30 million to build mechanical fish lifts at three Pennsylvania hydroelectric dams by the end of the century.The three utilities agreed in principle this week to construct the lifts to get fish past Holtwood, Safe Harbor and York Haven dams in southern Pennsylvania.

You'd think fish, of all creatures, would be smart enough to go with the flow.I was telling a group of fifth-graders about the amazing migrations of spawning herring and shad, how they used to climb the tributary rivers of the Chesapeake Bay, bucking the spring runoff for hundreds of miles, thrashing all the way from the ocean to upstate New York and the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.The kids were intrigued, and glad to learn that Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania are breaching and bypassing dozens of dams in hopes of restoring the historic runs.

UNICORN LAKE - The fish with bright bluish-green stripes down their backs stream through the rushing water in droves, headed for an aluminum tube at the base of the dam that created this Queen Anne's County lake. They pause a few seconds in the calm pools at the top, then dart out into the lake, answering nature's imperative to reproduce. This is the largest spawning run of blueback herring since the tube was built in 1998 to help fish get past the dam, says Sid Compton, who manages a state-run fish hatchery here.

It is,by this time, 3 p.m. and my companion is wondering whether I wish to endure the impending thunderstorms so that we might spend another hour or so afterward further attuning our senses to the gurgling of the creek, the whisper of the wind in the trees and the complete indifference of the smallmouth bass.We are on Deer Creek in Harford County, and by this time, some six hours after we left Annapolis, we have managed to grope our way across highway and byway from a quiet stretch of water near the bridge on Furnace Hill Road to a popular stretch near the pumping station in Susquehanna State Park.

Take a passable boat fisherman, turn him loose along certai stretches of any of Maryland's trout streams and it may soon become clear that the fly rod, that curious wand, is a humbling weapon and the river-bred trout is a formidable opponent.On Thursday, along the Gunpowder River while the temperatures were climbing well into the 60s and the water was clear and perhaps moderately fast, a couple of dozen fishermen were encountered wading or walking the shoreline. Among them, all but perhaps 10 were fishing some type of spinning or casting outfit.

Conowingo. -- It's no secret that the water of the Susquehanna below the big hydroelectric dam here is full of fish this spring. The bald eagles know it, the gulls and herons know it, and the wader-clad people with spinning rods lining the riverbank know it too.Among the fish down in that fast-moving water, trying to make their way upstream, are American shad -- or automotive shad, as they should perhaps be called. Some will reach their destination, as 27,000 did last year, after completing their journey by truck.

The hen and the drake mallard banked low around the point, dropped their feet as if to land and, before the specter of an unusual intruder, flogged away over the marshy backwater a mile or so upstream from the dam at Tuckahoe Lake.Red-winged blackbirds chattered nosily. Great blue herons stalked the shallows patiently. Frogs called from deep cover. Northern water snakes swam the edges of the spatterdock.And another largemouth bass had hit a crank bait and was taking line.Tuckahoe Lake is one of those curious places in Maryland, off the beaten path in Caroline County and at first glance a basin to control water runoff from surrounding farmland.

"I have stocked 10-pound trout out of this hatchery and, in fact, the state records for cut-throat and brown trout were caught just a bit downstream from the site shown on this slide."Mike Dean, a Department of Natural Resources project manager, was showing the pictures at last Thursday's gathering of the Patapsco Valley Trout Unlimited chapter.Dean is in charge of the increasingly famous North Branch of the Potomac River. A few years ago, this part of the Potomac, which stretches from Jennings Randolph Lake in Garrett County to the Cumberland vicinity, was essentially sterile -- lifeless.