Trout Streams

>

Wisconsin

> Eddy Creek

A couple Canada geese take off from the scenic but nasty, swampy, and apparently troutless headwaters of a small, beaver-ravaged stream.

A beaver swims around the swampy corpse of a trout stream his species destroyed, with a little help from ours.

What was once an excellent trout stream now meanders through a swamp as a shallow, silty beaver pond. The ground is anything but firm, and I was insane to try to navigate it on foot.

This stickleback lost fear of the camera after I held it still long enough in the icy water.

Here a stickleback investigates a little piece of grass in the slack water of a beaver pond on a remote stream rumored to have been great for brook trout at one time. It's now a swampy hellhole ruined by silt-trapping beaver dams, and I found no trout. Wading it in early April, when the ground was only half-frozen, was a nightmare.