New group forms to put an end to stocking over wild fish in Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh — James Neely has no problem with stocked trout. He just doesn’t want them in wild trout streams.

A lifelong outdoorsman who lives in McKean County, Neely said it’s time for Pennsylvania to rethink its hatchery culture and let self-sustaining salmonids thrive.

Now 70, he recently launched the Pennsylvania Wild Trout Coalition to gain support for his mission.

“I want the great white fleet off our wild trout streams,” he said. “Let nature raise the fish.”

Neely has assembled a leadership team that includes retired Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission executive director John Arway, commission board member Eric Hussar, and a past Trout Unlimited PA Council president Ken Undercoffer.

Neely is himself a past president of Trout Unlimited’s PA Council. He is also a retired game warden for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska, and served as a regional director of Ducks Unlimited.

He taught himself to fly-fish as a kid, he said, using equipment he inherited from his father, who died when he was 4.

“I grew up with stocked trout streams because we didn’t have the water quality in Clarion to produce wild trout. But once I could drive, I moved toward wild trout.”

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It evolved into a passion.

Along with the challenge of catching stream-bred fish, particularly natives, comes a desire to protect the resource and its coldwater habitat, Neely said.

It is the antithesis of a hatchery system founded 130 years ago to fill streams where wild trout populations were decimated by logging and other industries.

Water quality has improved to the point where stocking is no longer needed in many streams, noted Arway, who said the state needs to move beyond “a 1950s mentality.”

Pennsylvania has long been one of the top trout-stocking states in the country, with Fish & Boat putting about 3.2 million rainbow, brook and brown trout annually into 684 streams and 130 lakes. Its cooperative nurseries contribute another 1.1 million trout throughout the year.

At roughly $3 a fish, the commission reports spending $12.7 million annually to rear trout in its eight hatcheries, and another $7.4 million on related personnel costs.

As evidence of its commitment to its stocking program, the commission in 2024 embarked on a four-year $93 million hatchery capital improvement project.

“Bucket biology is unsound fisheries management,” Neely said. “It’s also bad business – highly inefficient and not cost-effective.”

During his years with the commission, Arway saw how stocking over wild fish harms the naturally reproducing resource but also recognized that “trying to quit stocking hatchery trout over wild trout would have been political suicide.”

In an early attempt to reconcile the issue, he identified which Class A Wild Trout streams were being stocked and removed all but 13 from the stocking program. Those 13 were given what was intended as a rare exemption, he said, based on criteria established by commission staff, including proximity to a populated area.

Controversy erupted last year over the commission’s decision to put one of the state’s original Class A waters, Freeman Run, in Potter County, back on the stocking schedule after a local sportsmen’s group – which also runs a coop nursery – successfully lobbied the commission board for approval.

The commission said it would monitor for impacts even though past studies showed stocking reduced the number of wild fish.

Neely said the Freeman Run “debacle,” as he put it, pushed him to launch the Coalition, calling it “the final straw.”

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He and others are drumming up publicity for their mission, intent on raising awareness with the public and legislators, and reaching out to officials of Fish & Boat and other state agencies, like the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

He admits that politics will be one of the group’s greatest challenges and he is eager to see how anglers will respond.

A survey of more than 3,300 anglers by the Fish & Boat commission in 2023 indicated that the majority (69%) of both wild and stocked trout enthusiasts were equally satisfied with their fishing.

It also revealed that 58% of anglers queried were in favor of delisting stocked waters that support quality wild trout populations and putting the fish instead in nearby waters with few or no wild trout.

Neely said there’s room for all kinds of anglers and stocking “has its place,” but it isn’t on streams that can sustain wild trout.

“Wilds cannot compete with bucket after bucket of ‘piranhas,’ which are raised in a highly competitive trough,” he said.

And with more stream miles than any state except Alaska, stocking over wild fish is unnecessary, he said, because there are many more suitable places to put them.

Len Lichvar, a former Fish & Boat commissioner and immediate past president of PA Council of Trout Unlimited, thinks the coalition can achieve its goal, but it will happen slowly and incrementally.

“It would be delusional to think you’ll get rid of hatcheries in Pennsylvania, so the focus needs to be on what’s possible,” said Lichvar.

“Make a small change in a region and use it as a stepping stone for your next move. Get sportsmen’s groups on board. Go to the angling public and legislators.”

Lichvar added: “Educate and inform. Build momentum.”

Fish & Boat Commission spokesman Mike Parker declined to comment on the formation of the coalition and its objectives, and instead referred Outdoor News to the agency’s trout management plan.

“It included a wide array of angler input at the time of its drafting,” he said.