It was her favourite trout-fishing hole.
“There were some big trout in here,” she said.
On Wednesday Fennessey admitted she’s in no hurry to go fishing in the pond again, not after discovering dead trout near her worksite Tuesday morning.
At first, the supervisor of the Huntley-Montrose-Kildare Watershed Association’s steam enhancement crew thought the dead fish she spied while helping to install brush mats in the stream might have originated from an angler disposing of part of his catch.
It was when she and her crew started seeing more fish that she knew something even more serious had happened.
The crew stopped what they were doing and started patrolling the stream.
“That’s when I found that four-pound trout,” Fennessey said.
The Environment Department has confirmed the stream, which has its headwaters in St. Louis before spilling into the Marchbank Pond and onward to the Montrose River, was victim of a fish kill.
“It’s discouraging,” said John Sentner, president of the watershed group on the loss of brood stock.
“We’ll continue doing what we’re doing,” he said, trusting the stream enhancement work will help with rehabilitation.
While the extent of the kill is still unknown, Rosanne MacFarlane, a fresh water fisheries biologist with the Province, said fish mortality seemed to be restricted to a two-kilometer stretch of one stream above the pond.
MacFarlane said the kill could have been triggered by run-off from heavy rainfall in the area Saturday and Sunday.
“In the past, in other fish kills, it has been a factor and that’s all we can go by, the past, and look at this individually,” she said.
Department officials collected water and soil samples from in and around the stream on Tuesday.
“General water chemistry, water quality in the stream itself and any sites of possible land wash are sampled for chemicals in the soil and standing water,” she noted.
The samples are sent to Environment Canada for analysis. Results won’t be known for at least a week.
The enhancement crew collected about 70 dead trout Tuesday and Wednesday, many of them already badly decomposed. It was anticipated many more fish, possibly even in the thousands, died. Small ones could go undetected and other ones might have floated out of the stream.
MacFarlane was back at the stream Wednesday.
“Today we’re going to try to get an estimate on the population of fish in the section of the stream which is unaffected, where there’s still live fish,” she said. “We’ll just do some electro-fishing. We’ll find the density of fish in typical habitat above and it will give us an idea on the number of fish that would have been throughout the section that was affected. “
