What is your objective for stream enhancement? Is it possible in the Driftless Area?

If you get 10-15 inches of rain over a watershed in the Driftless Area there is no way to contain the flooding when the farmers no longer do strip farming. ( Check Google Earth and you can plainly see many farmers on the ridge and valley no longer strip farm.)

The best stream enhancement would be to make the stream a bunch of "S" curves all the way down the valley with willows, cottonwoods and other river trees lining portions of the stream banks. (Trees with their leaves and seeds falling into the stream provide 80 % of the food for invertebrates.) The river trees have the root system that will hold the tree from being washed down the stream by the flooding waters. Also, the river trees would catch most of the debris in the flood and keep the debris from washing onto the farmers field and from getting caught on and under the bridges. The river trees also have the ability to neutralize the poisons that are in the stream that come from homeowners lawns and farmers fields. The "S" curve stream also slows down the force of the flood.

Biodiversity in the stream is something that should be left to Mother Nature. I enjoy brown trout and brook trout which are both exotic to the Driftless Area but I do not believe in removing all the native fish, amphibians, crayfish, etc from their native stream. Also, beaver dams should be allowed in the wilderness areas of a stream. Also dirt banks should be allowed by the stream which are the home for bank swallows and kingfishers and many forms of insects.

If you can find an old encyclopedia you will find out that brook trout were not native to the Mississippi River watershed. The brook trout are native to streams running into Lake Superior and Lake Michigan.

I would still like to read the results of DNA sampling of brook trout in the Driftless Area.

tannin wrote on Jul 12^th, 2019 at 7:31pm:


As a nod to the White Admiral, there are some biologists who question whether the driftless streams held brook trout pre-European.  But in my mind, the streams that are part of the Lake Superior/Michigan watersheds were buried under glacial ice 10,000 years ago and where were the brook trout at that time that would eventually move into the streams carved out by glacial meltwater?  So it only makes sense there had to be brook trout in the driftless region.

There is a very small brook trout stream near me that is part of the St. Croix River watershed that acording to the MN DNR, there was never any recorded stocking.  They did genetic sampling of the brook trout from that stream in 2018 and testing indicates the genetics of the brookies in that stream were more similar to brook trout found along Lake Superior than that in SE MN. 

Perry mentioned a couple times in the past that upstream of the barrier falls of the North Shore rivers, historically there were no brook trout until they were stocked by folks dumping milk cans full of young trout into the streams. 

Too bad there aren't better historical records of trout streams before everything was altered.

Whiskers Yellowbanks wrote on Jul 13^th, 2019 at 12:08pm:


Yes, I've always thought that argument is flawed. First off, how many in-tact trash piles have been excavated in the driftless and what is the longevity of trout bones in those trash heaps? Second, recent genetic studies indicate a possible unique brook trout strain in the region. Finally, where did the brook trout that colonized Lake Superior and Michigan come from ~10K years ago?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.