Granite State Fish

I spent the last several days in New Hampshire (the granite state). I was in "southern" New Hampshire. Many of the streams are marginal for brook trout because they war up quite a bit in the summer, but I found one little brookie stream and caught a bunch of small fish (check NH off the list).

I met with Steve Perry, who is the director of the Eastern Brook Trout Venture. He is also a state fisheries official. One point I want to relay from our conversation is that New Hampshire brookies don't have a lot of competition with brown trout and rainbows (as in most states and which often leads to the disappearance of brook trout) because most of New Hampshire's streams are pretty acidic. New Hampshire is the Granite State after all, thus the smaller streams have very little buffering capacity to reduce acidity, both natural and human influenced from acid rain. In other words, there isn't a lot of soil or geology to intercept or mitigate acidic H2O
as it enters the streams.

Brookies are more tolerant of acidity because they evolved in mountain top areas where acidic conditions are more likely to occur. This doesn't mean they are immune to the effects of acid rain, but they can handle it better than brown or rainbow trout.