One by one, they strode to the lectern Tuesday. One by one, they shared fish stories with lawmakers. And one by one, anglers and conservationists said how important brook trout are to Maine, and how vital it is to protect the speckled beauties.

The bill in question – LD 1131 – calls for recognizing the eastern brook trout as the state’s “heritage fish.”

Getting people to agree with that title will likely be the easy part. The second (and not nearly as simple) piece of the equation will be getting lawmakers to sign off on the other part of LD 1131.

Specifically, it calls for banning the stocking of brook trout, predators or competitors in any pond that hasn’t been stocked since 1937, unless legislative approval is given.

And while nobody stood up to officially oppose LD 1131 at Tuesday’s hearing in front of the Joint Committee on Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, there was a considerable difference of opinion when it came to mandating legislative approval for fish stocking.

On one side was the Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife, which understandably wants to maintain its traditional control of fisheries management.

And on the other were sportsmen and conservationists who pointed out how tenuous brook trout habitat is, and how important it is to protect those few “native” waters – those that have never been stocked.

A key component of the disagreement: The DIF&W has struggled to produce an accurate list of “native” waters, as Madison fly shop owner Bob Mallard pointed out.

Mallard has spent hours poring over that list, and found that 158 of the 454 ponds listed as “native” in 1996 are no longer classified as such by the DIF&W.

Newly discovered stocking lists from past years contributed to that discrepancy, as did the discovery that brooks and streams connected some “native” ponds to stocked ponds, and those stocked fish could have moved into the supposedly unstocked waters.

“How can we protect what we cannot properly identify?” Mallard asked.

DIF&W Director of Fisheries Operations John Boland testified that the department would create a new policy that would prevent stocking any species in a native brook trout water (save one lake that is currently stocked with lake trout and whitefish). The DIF&W said the second piece of the bill might be unnecessary.

But according to Jeff Reardon, Trout Unlimited’s New England conservation director, keeping the entire bill intact is important.

“The [DIF&W] has essentially supported the portion of this bill that would give a new name – the heritage fish – to Maine brook trout. But it has asked you to disregard the substantive portion of the bill,” Reardon said. “That would be a major mistake.”

Reardon admitted he wasn’t “thrilled with the particular mechanism” for protection that was included in the bill. But he said additional protection of some kind was essential.

A problem, many conservationists say, is that without additional protection, the decision to stock – or not to stock – turns into a political one. Residents in a town often lobby local fisheries biologists or legislators to receive more stocked fish, and those public servants sometimes feel pressure to comply.

“The quick and easy fix to [those requests] is to bring in the stocking truck,” Reardon said. “But we need to have policy that makes it easy for biologists to say “no” to that quick and easy fix.”

More on a 50-fish day

On Saturday I told you about Glenburn guide Joe Glowa, who enjoyed a once-in-a-lifetime day at Grand Lake Stream during Friday’s opening day of the open-water fishing season.

Predictably, it didn’t take long for folks to begin questioning Glowa’s ethics, and posing this question: How many fish are enough?

While Glowa doesn’t need me to defend him, I do feel obligated to provide a bit more information.

First, how many fish an angler allows himself to catch (and release) before packing up the rod and calling it a day is a personal choice.

Glowa got out of bed in the middle of the night, drove to Grand Lake Stream, and began fishing at 4:30 a.m. Denying him a half-day of fishing for his trouble (he did, after all, quit fishing at about 1 p.m.) seems a bit severe, no matter how many fish he was able to catch.

Another concern making the rounds on fly fishing message boards is that Glowa may have “hogged” the fish, refusing to rotate from one particularly productive spot and giving other fishermen a chance.

That’s simply not true. In fact, during the time I was at Grand Lake Stream, it seemed that Glowa spent as much time out of the stream as he did in it (34-degree water is Mother Nature’s way of guaranteeing the near-constant rotation of anglers at this time of year).

And when Glowa did return to the water, it didn’t matter where the open spot in Grand Lake Stream was located. I saw him catch fish in several different runs … even in runs that others had abandoned as “fishless.”

I never saw Glowa use his net, and his treatment of those fish was among the most gentle I’ve ever seen by an angler.

Glowa generously shared his “secrets” with other anglers, willingly moved out of productive runs to give others a chance to fish them, and left Grand Lake Stream with much more than a story about a 50-fish day.

Perhaps this is the most important part: He went home with more friends than he had when he arrived.

If that doesn’t say something about the way he conducted himself, I don’t know what does.

John Holyoke can be reached at jholyoke@bangordailynews.net or by calling 990-8214 or 1-800-310-8600.