Wild Trout

These days the Potomac burbles around boulders and spills over ledges, and the hubbub of tourist traffic in popular Harpers Ferry carries clearly over the river, where in other years only the commotion of passing trains overcame the sounds of fast water moving through Mad Dog Rapids.But, then, this is not other years.Flows on the Potomac are at 70-year lows, and its Western Maryland tributaries, normally fast flowing mountain streams, have been reduced by drought to a series of pools connected by trickles working slowly down slope.

In the clear, shallow water, the wiggling fish are easy to pick out. These are not just any small fry, though. These are the first brook trout in at least a decade to hatch in the right fork of the Jabez Branch.State biologists and conservationists traipsing along the snow-covered stream banks Friday could not contain their excitement. They found an estimated 60 fish -- a week or 2 old -- in this nearly 1,900-foot-long section of the meandering creek near Gambrills in Anne Arundel County.

Jubilant biologists found a record number of brook trout yesterday in Jabez Branch, a sign of success in their efforts to bring back a fish population wiped out by road construction.Forty-nine of the fish had been born in the shallow meandering stream this year. Only 41 trout were found in 1986, before roadwork threatened the stream.The Jabez was the last natural brook trout stream in the Maryland coastal plain and the state's southernmost wild native trout creek until runoff from highway construction and new houses killed off the fish by 1990.

Jubilant biologists found a record number of brook trout yesterday in Jabez Branch, a sign of success in their efforts to bring back a fish population wiped out by road construction.Forty-nine of the fish had been born in the shallow, meandering stream this year. Only 41 trout were found in 1986, before roadwork threatened the stream.The Jabez was the last natural brook trout stream in the Maryland coastal plain and the state's southernmost wild native trout creek until runoff from highway construction and new houses killed off the fish by 1990.

Yesterday's trek along the Jabez Branch left state officials cold but ecstatic at finding more trout in one small section of the stream than they found in a three-mile section last year.Environmentalists pointed to the change as further reason for the state to move quickly to protect the sensitive habitat."What people want to hear is whether the Jabez Branch has any hope, is it worth saving. What I saw today -- this is hope," said fish biologist Charlie R. Gougeon, a regional fisheries manager with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

As the late-winter sun warmed the woods lining Gunpowder Falls, a truck pulled up with a delivery of 3,000 feisty rainbow trout -- and Victor Broy got to thinking about lazy days and The Big One That Got Away."

I can hear him now: "All that for that?" I can pretty much see him, too, in his khaki trousers and white T-shirt, over in the small clearing by the honeysuckle thicket on the little river I love. My father is watching me fish in the way I have chosen to fish in the years since his death: With a fly rod and tiny lures fashioned of feathers to look like the bugs that finicky trout eat. I can hear him now, as I stand knee-deep in the river and extend a small, delicate net for a trout that's all green, yellow and white with brown spots, about 10 inches of God's glory.

The message arrived last month with something like the urgency of a gold strike: Native brook trout, lots of them, discovered in the twin ditch creeks of an old farm in Hereford, in northern Baltimore County. Environmental scientists get pretty excited about this sort of thing. They found brown trout, too, and other smaller fish that a kid splashing around in summer might call minnows: sculpins, black-nosed dace and rosy-sided dace. Signs of life, to be sure, but more than that — signs of a delicate species' survival in a stream degraded for decades by the practices of men trying to earn a living off the land.

The earthy growl of the big tank truck that creeps along back roads beckons Maryland's 56,000 trout fishermen the way the cheery jingle of an ice cream truck calls to kids. Sloshing around in the tank's cold recesses are springtime treats: dark, glistening brown trout; silver, speckled rainbows; and a sunflower-yellow variety that makes the surrounding water glitter. In an annual ritual that precedes the opening of trout season March 25, hundreds of thousands of plump, wiggling fish raised in hatcheries are being trucked to streams and lakes around the state and turned loose.

Based on projections by wildlife managers who tally the hunt, Maryland deer hunters appear to be well on their way this year to a record harvest in the state for firearms season.On opening day Saturday, hunters in Maryland took 15,485 white-tailed and sika deer statewide, said Josh Sandt, supervisor of forest wildlife management for the Department of Natural Resources Forest, Park and Wildlife Service."That was off some 2,400 from last year, when there was snow on the ground statewide opening day and you couldn't ask for better conditions," Sandt said.