Something’s fishy in Kensington

BERLIN – The third Saturday of April is fast approaching – and to fishing enthusiasts in Connecticut, that means trout season is on the horizon.
Tucked away down the winding Old Hatchery Road off Chamberlain Highway in the Kensington section of town, and closed to the public, the 46-acre Kensington Fish Hatchery was hard at work last week – as it always is, 365 days a year – incubating and growing tens of thousands of brown trout and Atlantic salmon for stock and release into the Salmon and Farmington rivers.

The fish released into the rivers and tributaries are small, no bigger than three inches in the case of the trout, and are considered in their fry stage of life, which is approximately the first six months after hatching. After release into the water, the trout won’t be legal for catching for more than a year, when they will have developed into adults and reached the nine-inch minimum requirement for anglers.
“Here in Kensington we raise little fish,” said the hatchery manager, Al Sonski. “That’s our job. It’s our biggest push this time of the year. Three to four trucks a day from March First through the beginning of the season.”
The little fish are a better financial deal for the state-funded hatchery, which can raise small fry for about 3 cents per fish, whereas the cost of raising and stocking an adult trout ready for catching would be about three dollars, according to Mike Humphreys, a biologist with the state Department of Environmental Protection.
More than 800,000 Atlantic salmon and 300,000 brown trout are being grown at the Kensington facility.
The upside for anglers is that the fry being released will have natural and unrestricted development in the streams, where they will grow bigger and healthier than they would have in the confinement of a culture pond.
“If a fish grows from a one- or two-inch fry in a natural stream, it looks more like a wild fish,” Humphreys said. “Its colors are brighter, its flesh is firmer and it has more color to it. When we grow adult fish in the hatchery, oftentimes they have very few red spots; their fins are worn off.”
Humphreys was on hand Wednesday morning with oxygenized containers ready to transport 40,000 trout fry to the streams and tributaries of the Farmington River. The purpose of his stocking fry was not to give anglers a bonus but to supplement healthy streams that normally could support a large trout population, but because of various environmental factors no longer produce a healthy population on their own.
“This program that I’m involved with here today is fry stocking, which is still done on an experimental basis,” said Humphreys. “When I started with the state, it was with the statewide stream survey, and we started about eight years ago, sampling around a thousand streams. We were able to identify several streams that had the most intact biota, the best water quality, only a lot of those streams didn’t have the population of trout and were hurting due to either overharvest or lack of trout reproduction in the stream.”
After the survey, the DEP recognized that filling the streams with large quantities of small trout would be the most cost-effective way to improve the trout population and get it back to a self sustaining level. Aiding this is a catch-and-release mandate by the Wild Trout Management Program for many streams, which will prevent anglers from harvesting fish from suffering populations.
Sonski, who has worked at the Kensington facility for 17 years, has primarily dealt with the Atlantic salmon, which is regarded as a species of special emphasis by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He has been involved with the Atlantic Salmon Restoration Project since 1984.
“The restoration project is an effort by the New England states to restore the number of Atlantic salmon in the Connecticut River basin,” Sonski said. The species once thrived in the New England streams, with the major populations found on the Merrimack and Penobscot Rivers, but by the mid-1800s it had been almost wiped out from its native habitat. The primary cause for the disappearance was the construction of dams for industry, which prevent the anadromous salmon from making their way from the freshwater rivers to the ocean and back.
Raising the salmon brood stock at the hatchery means the species will stand a chance of making a comeback.
The process starts with the eggs, which are produced either at a federal hatchery in Massachusetts or at the Kensington facility. The eggs are placed into overflow incubators on trays holding up to 10,000 salmon eggs or 20,000 trout eggs. These young eggs are called “green eggs” until about six weeks, when they develop eyes, and are then called “eyed eggs.”
The eyed eggs are placed in gravel incubators to simulate the natural spawning environment of a riverbed, and the fish are allowed to swim up and out of the gravel once they finally hatch and become fry. The fish are then kept in a variety of 75 pond units, according to their life stages. There is a mix of earthen and concrete ponds, about six feet deep.
The majority of fish are eventually released into the wild to be monitored by the DEP.

By Ryan J. Phelan, Record-Journal staff