James Owen - Trout

Leaping seamlessly from the bright stream into the human mind, the trout fascinates like no other fish. Endlessly intriguing in its myriad forms, it possesses a vitality and physical beauty many find irresistible, while its association with pure waters and wild places makes the trout ever more precious.

In his book Trout Bum, a title which defined a dropout subculture within angling, John Gierach gives an insight into the allure of a fish that leads a man to reject such encumbrances as a wife, children, and house payments when he writes:

Trout are so incongruously pretty as to seem otherworldly: that metallic brightness, the pinks and oranges and yellows and the spots. One of the finest things about catching a trout is being able to turn it sideways and just look at it. How can so much color and vibrancy be generated by clear water, gray rocks, and brown bugs? Trout are among those creatures who are one hell of a lot prettier than they need to be. They can get you to wondering about the hidden workings of reality.

This wonder for trout is deep-rooted: fly-fishing trout bums are a contemporary expression of an ancient fascination. In Europe, the fish had a cult status that persisted as a relic of

It is a measure of our continuing attachment to the animal that, since the mid-nineteenth century, the trout has become a global phenomenon. Native to the northern hemisphere, today it inhabits every continent bar Antarctica. European colonialists seldom went anywhere they did not think their homeland trout could improve; completing what they saw as natures unfinished work, they spawned a legacy that has been termed Planet Trout. The trouts transportation from England to Australia in 1864 a story that is testimony to the extraordinary lengths people have gone to in order to establish the fish launched a campaign of introductions that reached its climax in the usa following the Second World War, when trout were rained down in their millions on fishless mountain lakes from surplus military aircraft. The ecological fallout for native fauna has been significant. An instance of mans arrogant and misguided interventions in nature, our desire for trout has come at a cost.

Changes wrought on the fish in order to sate our appetite for it have been no less dramatic. Long a sought-after delicacy the most dainty pallates have allowed precedency to him, The modified, cage-worn specimens that these days often pass for trout in shops and restaurants bear little resemblance to their wild progenitors.

As a by-product of its domestication, we have also appropriated the trout as a laboratory animal. An aquatic counterpart to the lab rat, it is widely used in medical research, while its introduction to the ethically murky waters of transgenic organisms is helping scientists to investigate the possibility of breeding extinction-threatened fishes from surrogate species.

Fishing has been and remains the way we most commonly interact with trout. With some seven million trout anglers in the us alone, this aspirational leisure activity is a multi-billion dollar industry. The sport of fly-fishing for trout even made it to Holly -wood in the 1990s with the hit movie A River Runs Through It. Some idea as to why can be gleaned from the works of big-name American writers, works in which trout are a recurring motif. Ernest Hemingways embattled male characters seek out trout and their clear-flowing rivers to revive their souls and straighten their heads; in Richard Brautigans cult novel Trout Fishing in America (1967), the narrators incredible but thwarted quest fornear-mythical trout is an attempt to rediscover the natural soul of modern America; and in Cormac McCarthys post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006), a mans journey with his son through a charred, lifeless land is haunted by the memory of beautiful trout.

Peering into waters where once there were trout, many have felt this sense of loss. Since the industrial revolution, pollution, habitat loss, groundwater extraction, fish farming and other threats have been driving this icon of the wild from the landscapes it evokes. An indicator species of the health of its environments, and of our stewardship of them, the trout is as symbolic of bright waters as the kingfisher and the otter, as synonymous with an unspoiled landscape as the skylark and the wild rose, says the Wild Trout Trust, a charity dedicated to the fishs conservation in Britain and Ireland. Anglers sense and understand this better than anyone. Of the greatest angler of them all, Izaak Walton, American novelist Thomas McGuane writes, As modern naturalists have come to, Walton relates the lives of various fish to all the things around them: weather, insects, worms, the seasonal habits of townspeople, the tides of the sea, the budding and blossoming of plants.

Those of us for whom the chance of trout is the chance to connect with the natural world through its wild, thrilling presence only hope that future generations will also have the oppourtunity to be enchanted by this magical creature. McGuane again: