Let us now praise Forrest Bonney, the author of an instantly indispensable book about Maine’s beloved but beleaguered native trout, Salvelinus fontinalus, the brook trout, also known as the squaretail. For my money the brookie is the handsomest fish that swims, with its sunset-orange flanks, silver belly and ruby-red blue-haloed spots. The brookie is a fighter, too, more a brawler like Marciano than a Fancy Dan stylist like Sugar Ray or Ali. The brookie takes you deep into a corner and slugs it out, while the show-off landlocked salmon leaps and dances, as much in the air as in the water. The salmon is a visitor from away, a seagoing tourist who got stranded during a visit a few thousand years ago and couldn’t get home; the brookie is a native.

Bonney, the brook trout specialist of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, has rendered excellent service to all fans of the brookie with his book, Squaretails, and to anyone concerned with Maine’s natural resources in general. He answers questions many of us have pondered from time to time about the trout’s habits and habitat, and he also paints a distressing picture of what we have done to that habitat in the centuries since Europeans first arrived in Maine. Almost immediately after the arrival of the Europeans, deforestation began with no thought of the consequences to the rivers and streams and their populations of trout, or the consequences to the human populations downriver. With clearcutting came runoff, flooding and stream warming, all devastating to the brook trout, who likes his water clear and cold. Concurrent with the timbering came the dams to impound the water for the Spring log drives, and more dams to power gristmills and sawmills, and in the blink of an eye Nature’s work of many millennia was trashed, maybe irrevocably in some cases. Before the loggers arrived in great numbers, Benedict Arnold’s expedition to attack Quebec found brook trout aplenty in the Kennebec watershed. Bonney cites the journals of the expedition, which he borrowed from Kenneth Roberts’s March to Quebec: “...nothing being more common than a man’s taking 8 or 10 dozen in one hour’s time which generally weigh a half a pound a piece.” (Italics mine)

A century later, the “sports” who arrived in the North Woods to fish for the big brookies caught nearly as many, and killed every last one they caught. Habitat degradation, alien species introduced by amateur “biologists” and unregulated slaughter nearly did to the brook trout population what the buffalo hunters did to the American bison, until management and regulations saved what was left. Today, Bonney says, brookies are found in more than a thousand Maine lakes, though they’re scarce in many of those lakes; and in over 22,000 miles of streams. The brook trout is a precious Maine resource, but its value has come to be appreciated relatively recently, and it will require vigilance, cooperation, hard work and good science to keep the brookie swimming happily in Maine waters. If you want to help, you might start by reading Forrest Bonney’s fine book.