A Brief History of Mexican Trout --  1 2 3 

In May of l946, R.G. Miller and Proxidio Gonzalez collected trout from three localities of the Rio del Presidio near El Salto:  one from Rio Hondo (about 15 miles west of El Salto), and two collections from Arroyo la Rosilla, to the south and west of El Salto. Miller's guide was Walter Bishop, son of Walter C. Bishop.  Miller and Gonzalez used seines, collecting mostly small trout.  Their collections remain the oldest extant specimens of trout from the Rio del Presidio. 

Aldo Leopold made two visits to the Sierra Madre Occidental between l936 and l938.  The trips had a profound influence on Leopold, who was one of the most influential thinkers in conservation history.  While visiting the Rio Gavilan, Leopold remarked that all his life he "...had seen only sick land, whereas here was a biota still in perfect aboriginal health.  Leopold was so inspired by the workings of the Gavilan watershed that he mentioned it in many essays, and proposed the area as a "control" in studies of the pine-oak ecosystem of the southwest.  He mentioned in his 1936 journal that one day his Mormon guide, Clarence Lunt, caught 17 native trout ranging from 7 - 11 inches in length. In a l937 paper Leopold wrote: 

To my mind these live-oak dotted hills fat with side oats grama, these pine-clad mesas spangled with flowers, these lazy trout streams burbling along under great sycamores and cottonwoods, come near to being the cream of creation.  But on our side of the line the grama is mostly gone, the mesas are spangled with snakeweed, the trout streams are now cobble-bars.  

Starker Leopold, son of Aldo, who is known for his treatise "Mexican Wildlife: Birds and Mammals," also spent time in Mexico's Sierra Madre, retracing his father's footsteps in l948.  Starker remarked that the Gavilan of his father was no more:

"Apparently the logging in the headwaters, followed by hot slash fires, had destroyed in part the "watershed sponge," and the Gavilan was experiencing flash floods -- the inevitable result of watershed abuse."

Starker Leopold did collect two trout from the headwaters of the Rio Gavilan on his l948 trip, and his specimens remain the oldest museum collection of trout from the Rio Yaqui. 

A 1952 trip to Mexico by Paul Needham and Richard Gard was a groundbreaking attempt at collecting Durango's Sierra Madre.  Needham and Gard found trout in the Rio del Presidio watershed at Rio Hondo and Rio Tabacatiado; and with great effort were able to slog 2 1/2 days through mud and rain to reach the Rio San Lorenzo watershed, some 70 miles north of El Salto.  High water forced the pair to abandon their collecting gear in favor of some frozen trout specimens that had recently been collected by Senor Fermin Nuñez.    Several sons of Sr. Nuñez also helped by catching several more specimens on hook-and-line.  Two graduate students with Needham, Stan Weitzman and Jack Lattin,  were sent further north on their return trip, with instructions to head for the Rio Verde, to check out vague reports of native trout in this region.  There Weitzman and Lattin discovered the Mexican golden trout in "Arroyo a la Rana," a tributary of the Rio Fuerte.  In 2002 Dr. Weitzman told us about that discovery:

"Essentially our instructions were to head for the Rio Verde, and we were headed towards that river when we met a young Mexican man returning from Parral who was looking for a ride to his home...that turned out to be near the crest of the ridges more or less east of the Arroyo Caeca Lobitas to which the Arroyo a la Rana is a tributary.  We asked this man if he knew of any trout in the region.  He responded in the positive and offered to have members of his family take us to the Arroyo a la Rana where he knew trout existed.  We drove in as far as we could, then hike in with him to what was actually his father's small ranch in the Cerro Agua Caliente.  We were greeted warmly and give a 'room' to stay in for a few days.  They took us by horse back to the Arroyo a la Rana (yes, there were frogs there) and that is where I took the color photos of the live trout.  These were the photos from which Plate 1 in Needham and Gard (1959) was made.  Part of the trail to Arroyo a la Rana was on a pack trail headed to Guadalupe y Calvo, and we were passed by more than one mule pack train carrying mostly bottles of soft drinks.

In l953, two more students went south in Mexico at Needham's suggestion.  Art Flechsig and Charlie Moller, equipped with little more than a pickup truck and bad maps, collected Mexican golden trout from 6 localities in the Fuerte, 2 in the Sinaloa, and one in the Culiacan.  

The work of Needham and Gard culminated in two publications:  Rainbow Trout in Mexico and California (University of California Press, l959, 123pp.) [the single most important piece of literature published about Mexican Trout] and  "A New Trout from central Mexico, Salmo chrysogaster, the Mexican golden trout" [Copeia (1), 169-173].