If you happened to be hiking along the banks of one of Utah’s remote lakes this summer, you might have been able to look up and see a rainbow … trout. Thousands of them, actually.
It’s a highlight of the summer: the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources’s aerial fish drop.
“The fish are between 1-3 inches long, so they flutter down slowly to the water. Aerial fish stocking in Utah is an effective method of stocking and has been since the mid 1950s. Post-stocking netting surveys show that survival of aerial-stocked fish is incredibly high,” the department posted on Facebook, along with a video of the restocking.
Hundreds of Utah’s lakes are accessible only to hikers or dirt bikes. So how else to stock them?
Utah’s small bush planes fly over the lakes, periodically opening their bomb bay doors and releasing the fish into the lakes below.
The planes can carry a payload of 35,000 pounds of the small rainbow trout, swimming in hundreds of pounds of water.
Before the widespread use of the bush planes, the state would send horses and other pack animals carrying metal milk cans filled with the fish to restock the lakes, according to a release from the division.
Some inaccessible streams in Utah’s high-elevation regions are too small for aircraft to drop the fish into them and must be replenished using all-terrain vehicles, dirt bikes, or hikers on foot.
The division also gained popularity in 2020 for posting videos of its aerial restocking during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Other municipalities have taken to using a “salmon cannon,” which uses rushing water and suction to transport larger fish from one body of water to another to restore migratory patterns for the species.
