This film seeks to tell the story of the introduction of brown trout to New Zealand as well as provide the social and cultural background and motivation for the introduction.
This film seeks to tell the story of the introduction of brown trout to New Zealand as well as provide the social and cultural background and motivation for the introduction.
Google “River Wye, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England” or similar.
This small stream, a Thames tributary rising in the Chiltern hills, runs just a few miles from where I am sat writing this, and is “The Source” for many of those great Kiwi browns. I used to “guerrilla” fish parts of the Wye (or “Wyc”) in the 1970s and 1980s when most people locally had long forgotten about its 19th Century fame as a fine little chalkstream and trout fishery.
The Wye still holds trout, but has had to be helped in recent years to recover a true, wild, breeding brown trout population, having been the victim of many years of neglect, of environmental and riverine degradation and its closeness to an ever-growing centre of urban population, High Wycombe town.
Oh, but just look at the stream’s present day, far-flung trouty descendants! Do look after them.
That’s a really interesting environmental angle, Paul. I think there’s scope for a small comparative piece there to showcase the need to look after our rivers – that the first NZ browns originated from there amongst other places just ties it back in nicely.