To the Editor:
A highlight of my week is getting to read the latest edition of The Smoky Mountain News. I find the well-written articles to be informative, insightful, and thought-provoking. Your paper is a valuable resource for this region. Thank you for making it available to us and congratulations for having a great staff of excellent writers.
With great interest I read the article “Trout in Crisis” in the October 28 edition of the paper. I am a fisherman who has enjoyed fishing in our beautiful mountains for most of my life. A dinner that includes freshly caught trout, with a few good fishing stories tossed in, is a wonderful bonus for an enjoyable excursion. I have cast a lure in many of our mountain streams, hoping for a strike.
Alex Perri did an excellent job with the article. The information presented helps me to understand reasons why so few trout seem to be in the waters that, for me, were once productive.
In addition to the contributing causes for the trout deficit highlighted in the article, I would add the presence of river otters. I have watched them enter “fishing holes” and completely destroy the trout and salamanders in those holes. In fact, I have seen them in the higher elevations of our mountains just working the hole over, leaving nothing behind. While they are beautiful and fun to watch, they are a menace to trout and destructive to life forms in freshwater streams.
As a follow up to the “Trout in Crisis” article, I would love to see an article regarding the positives and negatives to the fishing scene that result from the presence of river otters. I am glad they were reintroduced by the National Park Service, but they can be a real nuisance. An additional observation (regrettably); from time to time, the presence of river otters is a cause for alarm when they migrate to the farm-pond where I live and begin attacking the stocked fish there. Instead of coming to this pond, I wish they would go the “otter” way.
Larry Reeves
Clyde