Troubled Waters

The Au Sable River system is the crown jewel in the sparkling diadem of trout streams that lace northern Michigan, a storied river that for more than a hundred years has drawn anglers from around the world. But something has gone seriously wrong. Once-legendary populations of big brown trout have fallen to uncomfortably low levels, and while the river still produces a lot of fish, it is a pale shadow of the glory years of the 1970s.

Is The River Too Clean?
Scientists and anglers suspect that in one of the great ironies of the chemical and industrial age, the Au Sable is suffering the effects of over-zealous environmental cleansing. Man has been so effective in eliminating sewage and other contaminants from our waters that he may have drastically reduced the chemical building blocks of life for the water plants that are home to insects on which the trout live.

In an effort to boost insect production - and trout numbers - the Au Sable River Restoration Committee has recommended re-introducing phosphates, nitrates, and other minerals in the form of leaf litter: whole leaves in the fall and ground-up leaves at other times of year. This experiment would be conducted near Stephan Bridge, which lies within a seven-mile stretch of the Mainstream called the Holy Water where anglers must fish with flies and release every fish caught.

Another study along a four-mile area of the North Branch would see big trees placed strategically in the stream and anchored to determine if the trout are disappearing because bigger fish don't have enough places to hide.

The studies are estimated to cost more than $600,000 and be paid for by the federal government, state Department of Natural Resources, and grants from private interest groups.

"The history of the Au Sable is that it has been going downhill steadily for thirty years," said committee member Gaylord Alexander, a retired DNR fisheries biologist who is one of the world's renowned trout authorities. "The great days of the Au Sable were due to early development. It made the stream much richer, which produced more grasses and the incredible insect life that could feed huge numbers of trout."

"I think we are now suffering from the exceptional job we did of cleaning up the environment," Alexander said. He pointed out that not only was sewage pollution from the towns of Grayling and Roscommon and thousands of septic tanks eliminated, there has also been a drastic reduction in other nutrient sources thanks to phosphate-free cleaning products and an increased awareness of the public about keeping lawn chemicals out of the water.

In 1971, the peak year, the number of eight- to twelve-inch brown trout in the Au Sable River was ten times greater than 1994, the last year for which data was published. And there were nine times as many brown trout over twelve inches in 1971 as in 1994. Even if 1971 was a statistical fluke, throughout the 1960s and 70s there were legal-sized brown trout populations of four to five times greater than today.

The Au Sable's problems may be connected to a general decline in trout populations in streams from Minnesota to Massachusetts over the past couple of decades, a period that coincides with a major reduction in nutrients in the nation's waters.

"We have to teach people that you can't grow anything in distilled water," Alexander said. "We probably could get better results by carefully metering water from a sewage treatment plant into the river, but there's no way people would stand for that. So we will put the nutrients in a form that is acceptable and that the river gets anyway - leaves."

"We set the same general standard (for phosphates and nitrates) for all our waters. That may have been a mistake. What we may want to do is set different standards for different waters, and set upper and lower limits rather than a rigid target," he said.

The declining trout populations have increased demands from riverfront homeowners and anglers to have the DNR plant trout in the Au Sable system. Virtually all of the DNR fisheries biologists and many anglers oppose such plantings, arguing that they won't accomplish much unless the habitat is improved to support the fish. And planting fish would invalidate long-term studies of the local trout populations the DNR has been doing for decades.

Steve Southard, who runs Ray's Canoe Livery and the Fly Factory in Grayling, believes the committee's recommendations may reduce calls for planting trout, a measure he said should only be a last resort if efforts to increase the present survival and growth rates fail. "The problem isn't production. The trout are producing lots of little trout. The problem is that they seem to disappear when they get up to that six- to eight-inch range. We have tons of juvenile trout, but we don't have the big fish we used to," he said. "If the six-inch fish that are produced in the river naturally aren't making it to eight inches, what makes you think that a planted six-inch fish will be any more successful?"

"I'm ambivalent about planting fish. You can bring in diseases and genetic problems that will haunt you later. It would be nice to catch more big fish, but I'm more interested in the long-term health of the river," he said.

Much of the large woody debris that fell into the Au Sable in past decades was cedar trees. The living cedars also spread densely-packed limbs over the stream like giant umbrellas, so dense that many stretches of river that are in the open today virtually never saw sunlight 150 years ago. This kept the rivers much cooler and possibly explains why northern Michigan had no trout but immense numbers of grayling, a fish that demands even colder, purer waters.

Trout were introduced in the 1880s after loggers cut away the forest cover and the resultant water temperature increases, pollution from logging and overfishing exterminated the Michigan grayling.

Ideally, cedars would be allowed to grow back, but another man-made environmental anomaly prevents that. The state's enormous deer herd, 1.5 million animals that love cedar, chew up saplings faster than they can grow, virtually eliminating any prospect of large cedar stands returning to the streambanks. The huge deer herd is carefully managed by the DNR to please 750,000 firearms deer hunters and 360,000 archers who have made deer hunting a major economic factor in the state.

Another problem biologists can't do much about is the growth of natural trout predators in recent decades. Otters, mink, heron, ospreys, kingfishers and a host of other animals have taken advantage of protective legislation, low fur prices, and improved habitat to increase their numbers dramatically. "We have to face the fact that there's not much we can do about the predator problem. It's not practical politically," Alexander said. "But if we can get the productivity of the streams back up to where they were in the late 1960s and early 70s, nobody will complain about predators. There will be enough big trout for everybody."

Rusty Gates, owner of Gates' Au Sable Lodge and a long-time champion of river restoration, said most of the river's problems have cropped up "over a forty- or fifty-year period. Look at the houses built along it now, and look what the roofs do. When spring rains come, instead of settling on the ground and percolating into the underground springs, a lot of the water shoots right off the roofs into the river."

Alexander said Gates' argument is backed up by data that shows while the overall annual flow of the river has not changed for decades, the last twenty years have seen higher water levels in spring and lower in mid-summer, an indication that human activities along the banks have affected the rate at which rainwater enters the system.

Gates noted that while all of the Au Sable's branches have shown a decline in trout populations, the least affected has been the South Branch, which also has the least development. The South Branch flows almost entirely through state-owned land with no cottages or businesses along it, limited access for anglers and canoeists, and few paved roads to send contaminated rainwater runoff into the stream.

Gates is also a critic of the liveries that rent about 650 canoes on the river. Conflicts between canoeists and wading anglers have been chronic, and anglers say that inept canoeists cause damage by banging into man-made trout habitat structures. Southard replied that the liveries have become much more attuned to the anglers' complaints in recent years and have joined in efforts to reduce both friction and damage, "but the anglers have to understand that this is a multi-use river. It's not just for trout fishermen."

Gates said that while the Au Sable has declined from its peak years, it is still one of the Midwest's best trout streams. One study of the mainstream showed the river boasted 117 trout over twelve inches every mile, which means an angler usually had a 12-inch or bigger fish with a forty-five-foot cast. And Southard added, "Everything is relative. The Au Sable trout fishery is hurting compared to where it has been and to where it should be ideally. But the restoration efforts are still starting out with a great product that's in the upper crust of Eastern trout rivers."

Conflicts And Cooperation
While biologists believe that a lack of nutrients is the primary reason for the decline in the trout population in the Au Sable River system over the last two decades, man has done a lot more than merely change the chemistry of the water. Equally damaging may be ecological changes wrought by removing deadfalls from the water to allow canoes to pass and even cutting away greenery to provide a nice view of the water for people in riverfront cottages.

"If you're a big trout, say twelve inches or better, there just aren't as many places in the river for you to hide as there were thirty years ago," said Edward McKeon of Flint, who has fished the Au Sable system since 1951. "A lot of those artificial trout structures that I remember being great trout hides when I was a kid are so full of sand and debris now, or so broken down, that they're virtually useless today. And there are so many more canoes now than in the 1950s that most of the sweepers (downed trees) have been removed."

Every summer brings conflict between fishermen, who mostly wade the river, and canoeists, who mostly rent their craft from a dozen canoe liveries on the Mainstream and South Branch at Grayling and Roscommon. The anglers say many paddlers are so inept and rude that they bump into fishermen and damage structures that provide trout cover. The fishermen also accuse livery operators of cutting away downed trees that should be left in the water to provide trout cover and nutrients that will encourage the growth of water plants.

Canoe liveries reply that the fly fishermen think no one should be allowed on the river except them and that much of the tree cutting is done by riverfront homeowners.

But after years of sniping, the anglers and canoe livery owners have formed a joint committee to address common problems and try to eliminate conflicts. One of the more active members is George Alexander, a fly fishing guide and board member of the Anglers of the Au Sable, a fishermen's group that has been instrumental in speaking up for the Au Sable.

Alexander, who won the Navy cross for heroism as a U.S. Marine Corps second lieutenant during the Korean War, was a District Court judge in Ann Arbor until he retired in 1991 and moved full-time to the Au Sable River cottage where he and his fly fisher wife, Peggy, had spent every free moment. His father was a supervisor with the old Pennsylvania Department of Forests and Waters, and Alexander grew up in a state park "where we didn't have electricity until I was nine, but we had a trout stream 100 yards from the front door and a bass river 200 yards in the other direction."

The law was his profession, but trout fishing was his passion, and he happily traded his judge's bench for the rear seat of a graceful Au Sable river boat in which he guides fly fishermen.

If a tree is reported down by a canoeist or a riverfront homeowner along a twenty-mile stretch downstream from Grayling, Alexander and another river guide, usually Bernie Fowler, Charlie Weaver or Craig Perry, head to the site, often accompanied by a Department of Natural Resources biologist. Alexander says the aim is to try to clear the problem "with an eye to keeping the aesthetics and maintaining trout cover."

"If the downed tree has a good root ball, we try to leave it and cut just what's necessary to let canoes pass. If not, we use cable to stabilize it along the bank. We don't just cut it off and let it float away downstream the way they used to."

Like most trout fishermen, Alexander said he used to believe that most tree cutting was done by the livery workers and canoe racers trying to keep a clear channel, but he says that "my opinion has changed. I think that much of the cutting is done by the property owners trying to clear a view of the river."

The state, property owners, anglers, and livery owners are all supporting a plan to deliberately place whole trees, cut logs, and other "large woody debris" in a couple of sections of the North Branch to see if it helps increase the trout population. That stream is ideal for such a study because it has little canoe traffic.

Much of the trash in the river is also from canoes, and not just things that were jettisoned deliberately. Alexander says capsizes by inept paddlers are so common that they probably account for most of the junk that is hauled out of the rivers during annual cleanups.

The livery owners have developed an education program to teach canoers, especially inexperienced canoers, not just courtesy toward fishermen but the importance of avoiding contact between canoes and trout-hiding structures in the river. And while education and increased law enforcement have alleviated many of the problems caused by drunks, Steve Southard says the previous limit of one six-pack of beer per paddler (and no hard liquor) will be reduced to a six-pack per canoe next summer.

"There's no question canoes damage those structures. If they were just hit once or twice it wouldn't be bad, but a structure in a tricky bend can get hit dozens of times in a season," McKeon said. "After a few years, it breaks up and either fills with crap or floats off in pieces downstream."

Alexander added, "We don't want people to get the idea that the anglers and canoe livery people are agreeing on everything, because they are not. I think if you took a poll of the anglers, you'd find the number one complaint is about canoe traffic - after the decreasing number of fish. But we are trying to work together to solve common problems, and that was something that didn't happen in the past."

John Schneider, a passionate fly fisherman and salesman for Faber Brothers, a big outdoor equipment supplier, said that many people he meets believe it's time to stop studying the river's problems and do something about them, even if that means planting trout, an idea that many other fly anglers abhor. "We no longer have control of what's happening in these streams. Look at the East Branch (an Au Sable tributary). Old timers tell me the water in the East Branch almost never got over sixty degrees forty years ago. Today, because of all of the beaver dams, the water gets to eighty, and it's a major contributor to high temperatures in the Mainstream. But nobody traps beaver any more," he said.

"We're losing people from fishing. Nobody sees that more than me. Big sporting goods stores like Jay's (in Clare) order fly reels in the twosies and threesies where they used to order a dozen," Schneider said. "If people can't catch fish, they aren't going to go fishing, and a lot of guys who used to fly fish the Au Sable play golf now."

Fish And Fertilizer
Upstream from the City of Calgary, Alberta's Bow River supports a sparse population of trout that average eight to ten inches long. Downstream from Calgary the same stream is loaded with brown trout the size of footballs.

The difference is large amounts of water that flow through Calgary's sewage treatment process and return to the river bearing a load of phosphates, nitrates and other nutrients. The nutrients feed a rich aquatic plant community, which in turn supports an immense population of insects and other invertebrates, and this biological abundance continues up the food chain to anglers happily catching trout that are measured in pounds rather than inches.

Something similar existed in the Au Sable River until about twenty-five years ago, when the newly-implemented federal Clean Water Act began reducing sewage contamination from the towns of Grayling and Roscommon and hundreds of substandard septic systems in riverfront homes. Since the mid-1970s, nutrient loading from sewage, high-phosphate detergents and other sources has shown a steep decrease - and so have the numbers of trout eight inches and bigger.

While some people remember fondly the days of big trout and polluted water, experts believe that the Au Sable's glory days can be brought back without resorting to sewage effluent or another expedient that biologists find just as distasteful - stocking hatchery fish. "Anglers tend to think stocking is a cure-all," said Gaylord Alexander. "If there was a lack of recruitment (baby fish), I'd go along with that. But recruitment is almost as good today as it ever was."

"If wild fish that have evolved in that river for fifty years aren't making it, what makes you think that a hatchery fish will make it? Genetics teaches us that fish tend to (evolve) survival mechanisms over a long period in any stream. In my mind, it's habitat that needs fixing."

The Au Sable is suffering from a general decline that has affected trout streams throughout the Midwest. In the Au Sable the most glaring problem is the disappearance of trout after they reach a size of about eight inches. No one is sure why so few fish reach the twelve-inch-plus mark that makes them desirable angling trophies. The decline has affected catch-and-release segments of the stream about the same as segments where anglers are allowed to kill fish, and while the Au Sable is still above-average compared to most trout streams, it has declined drastically from its peak years of the mid-1970s.

The DNR and a group of anglers have agreed on a test program in which trees and artificial trout cover structures will be put in a stretch of the North Branch of the Au Sable to determine if increasing the so-called "large woody debris" will increase the numbers of bigger trout.

More controversial, another experiment will see leaves fed into the Main Stream of the Au Sable near Stephan Bridge in an effort to provide more food for aquatic insects and invertebrates. "We know the channel morphology (stream configuration) has really been screwed up, and that means the leaf litter isn't there," Alexander said. "And a lot of those old trout structures that were put in thirty years ago are full of silt and don't hold leaves and other debris that fed the bugs."

Alexander said that while the leaf-litter experiment was meant more to provide insect food than direct fertilization of the river, "Down the road we must look at total management and maybe direct fertilization."

"Everybody else fertilizes. Look at what we do in agriculture - we couldn't feed ourselves without fertilizers. We have to look hard at what we mean by pollution. You can't grow anything in distilled water. Phosphates and nitrates are only pollution when they drop the dissolved oxygen content of the water below desired levels. Instead of using phosphorus and nitrogen levels as a determination of pollution, I'd use dissolved oxygen," he said.

Andrew Nuhfer, a DNR fisheries biologist who will run the Au Sable experiments, said anglers needn't be concerned about dumping leaves in the river because "the amounts we're putting in aren't anywhere close to what a headwater stream gets (naturally). There's nothing really new here."

Nuhfer said that because of the time required to collect the funds needed to run the study, it may not begin until 1998, a year later than planned. "We need the year before that to do the pre-study data from the stretches where we'll be working. You can't measure changes unless you know what you had in the first place. But after about two years we should be able to see if it's working," he said.

The DNR last year rejected a request by North Branch homeowners who wanted to plant 10,000 brook and brown trout. Rusty Gates, owner of Gates' Au Sable Lodge and a founder of Anglers of the Au Sable, opposes planting trout and said, "It's out of frustration. It's the one thing they can do to supplement the existing fishery. But in the long run it's an onslaught on the fishery."

Gates runs the best-known lodge and trout shop on the river at Stephan Bridge about ten miles downstream from Grayling. And while declining trout numbers are a threat to his livelihood, he is a leader of the faction calling for long-term solutions, even if that means limping along with lower numbers for a few years until things can be turned around through increased natural reproduction and survival.

"If they want to plant 1,000 adult rainbows along a twenty-five mile stretch of the North Branch, that would be okay. We know they won't affect the gene pool of the native brookies and browns. But we have to figure out why the browns and brook trout are disappearing just when they begin to get to the size where they're fun to catch."

Gates believes the probable answer is the disappearance of downed timber in the water where bigger trout can hide. Canoe liveries, racing canoeists, and homeowners used to cut away downed trees as fast as they fell to provide a better channel and views of the river. And it's only in recent years that the second-growth forests along the stream have matured to the point where trees will begin falling in at the rate they did before white-pine loggers cut away the forests that lined the river a hundred years ago.

Ned Funk of Kalamazoo is a thirty-year Au Sable system angler who worries about the declining fishery but, like many anglers, is ambivalent about planting. "The whole concept of `wild' trout in these rivers is a little weird. If it wasn't for plantings in the 1880s, there wouldn't be any trout here. If they really want natural, they should poison out all the trout and bring back grayling," he said.

"But I'm willing to go along with trying to improve things through stream improvements like the large woody debris project or adding nutrients. I think that if we can get adequate natural growth of big trout, we'll end up with healthier fish. One thing that bothers me about planting is that it almost always winds up bringing diseased fish into the system."

"Just look at what happened with salmon and bacterial kidney disease in the Great Lakes, or the whirling disease that's wiping out rainbow trout out west. But if stream improvement doesn't work after a reasonable trial, then we need to plant fish," he said.

The long-term view held by Alexander and Gates is shared by fisheries biologists elsewhere.

In Pennsylvania, legendary streams like the Letort and Little Juniata may get some enrichment from dairy wastes that run off into the water, but the streamside farms cause far more damage than good because of silting and chemical runoff, said Tom Greene, a fisheries biologist for the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.

"Our very best streams are managed solely for wild trout," Greene said. "My experience from electrofishing (shocking the stream to count fish numbers) is that if you don't have good cover from undercut banks, you get a lot of benefit from having large woody debris and plants."

Interfering with an established natural system can be catastrophic. A decade ago some of Pennsylvania's finest trout streams began to suffer a decline. Greene said it coincided with the widespread adoption of no-till farming on agricultural lands around the streams, which enables farmers to do less plowing but requires the application of massive amounts of agricultural chemicals. Greene believes the increased chemical use decreased plant growth and insect populations in several streams. The situation reversed itself, perhaps because it turned out that no-till was not as economic in Pennsylvania as in western states, where wind-blown soil loss is a greater problem.

"We don't know why it turned around, although I have my suspicions. But I think we were very lucky," he said.

A Personal View
Despite a declining trout population in the Au Sable River system, I'm among those who oppose planting trout until we give science a reasonable chance to find a solution that will let the river heal itself. But unless we get some quick results from plans to put fish cover structures in the water and provide more food for aquatic insects, it will be very difficult to defend arguments in favor of wild trout over hatchery fish.

If the experiments don't begin until 1998, as is likely, we won't learn if they worked until the year 2000. Then it would take another couple of years to fund the work on a much larger scale and implement a long-term program. We can figure another three to five years before we see a significant improvement in the fishery, say doubling the numbers of browns over twelve inches. So we're talking about ten years before we see a return for our patience and money. That's not too much to ask of a twenty-five-year-old, but how about someone who was forty when the Au Sable enjoyed its salad days and for the past twenty-five years has watched the river decline? Asking that angler to wait means he might never see the glory return.

And how about the many anglers who say to heck with genetic purity, just stuff in trout that they can catch? Even though Au Sable fish have evolved with minimum stocking for fifty years, can the anti-stocking faction really claim the moral high ground when we all know that the first trout were dumped into that river from buckets when some of our grandfathers were alive?

Fisheries biologists say planting big trout is too expensive. But if you look at what's proposed, the $600,000 cost of the experimental work alone would pay for about 300,000 trout twelve-inches and bigger, and that's based on buying fish in relatively small lots.

The Au Sable still has a good trout population. For the last two years I've done most of my Mainstream fishing at night and have caught some nice browns. But night fishing isn't much fun. I like to cast to fish I see, not hear. And I manage to fall in two times out of three on parts of the river I know well (if you fish at night, wear neoprene waders with a tight waist cinch).

When I do fly fishing seminars at outdoor shows I always stop by the trout pond to watch the kids. The expression on a four-year-old as he lifts a fish out of the water is great. But a lot of adults also try their hand (some use a kid for cover, but the adult usually ends up holding the rod). To me, there's little difference between catching fish from a trout pond in the Pontiac Silverdome and catching a twelve-incher in a river if that twelve-incher was dumped in a couple of weeks before.

There's nothing wrong with creating places where people can follow hatchery trucks to the water and fill a stringer with fish, but our prime trout waters should not be among them. Save the put-and-take fishing for the marginal waters that won't produce good trout by themselves.

A healthy river produces lots of big, strong fish with minimal assistance from man. If the habitat is right the critters take care of themselves. At the same time, I admit my preference for wild trout is based largely on aesthetics. I don't claim any superior status over people who like catching hatchery fish.

Rusty Gates, owner of Gates' Au Sable Lodge, has a good idea. For those who want fish to catch immediately, plant adult rainbows (the non-migratory kind) in selected sections of the river. They won't reproduce well, won't interfere with brown and brook trout gene pools and will give people a shot at catching big fish while we wait for the browns and brookies to come back.

One thing I'm nervous about is whirling disease, which has infected rainbow populations out West and in New York and Pennsylvania. It was thought at first that it didn't affect other trout, but new studies show that some brown trout can develop this usually-fatal disease, and nothing says that it can't mutate quickly to infect all browns and brookies. Remember, scientists believe that human HIV is a pathogen that mutated and jumped from one primate species, the green monkey, to another, Homo Sapiens. The genetic link between rainbows and other trout is a lot closer than that between us and the green monkey.

Occasionally someone remembers fondly the days when sewage from Grayling and Roscommon enriched the Mainstream and South Branch, producing massive weed growth that produced massive fly hatches that produced lots of big trout. That's sad. We've spent the last twenty-five years trying to repair the damage we've done to our rivers since the first water wheel was built here.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced our primary problem in the Au Sable is a lack of "large woody debris," as scientists call the sweepers, snags, deadfalls and other wood that winds up in the rivers. If you read stories about the days when white-pine loggers first arrived, it's obvious that our northern rivers were full of log jams, some hundreds of yards long. But we cut away the northern forests, and for decades there virtually were no trees to fall into the streams, or to drop leaves and enrich the soil on the surrounding hillsides with nutrients that leached down into underground springs and eventually fed the rivers' aquatic plants.

It's not just the number of trees that fall in, either. Decades ago, many of the trees that fell were cedars. They rotted slowly and with their unique branch structure stayed in the river for decades and trapped fantastic quantities of leaves and other vegetation that rotted and provided both food for the bugs and fertilizer for aquatic plants.

Today, the state's enormous deer herd browses away riverside cedars so fast that not only is there no regeneration, we're losing those we have left. The trees that fall in now are elms and birches and oaks that rot away in a few years, and their branch structure doesn't make a good leaf trap.

Face it, the Au Sable and other rivers across this country are in a mess because of what we, industrial man, did to them. We owe them at least one last chance to get well.

RWOL

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