Is a Brook Trout a Trout? Absophuckinglutely

I love brook trout. Always have, always will.

I don’t know about you, but I get a bad taste in my mouth when I hear people say our eastern brook trout isn’t technically a trout.  You know the line I’m talking about as we’ve heard it spoken in conversation 100 times.

“You know, a brook trout isn’t technically a trout.  They’re a char.”

The first time I heard it, I took it as sort of a fun fact.  As my infatuation with brook trout grew, it began to irritate me.  Not quite fighting words, but on the same level as someone putting down your dog.  Don’t knock my dog, and don’t belittle my trout.

Even wikipeida was on the brook trout disparagement bandwagon.

Though commonly called a trout, the brook trout is actually a char

Last Summer, my grandma gave me a box of books that belonged to my grandfather.  They’re mostly old field guides, but one is called The Life Story of the Fish by Brian Curtis, published in 1961.  I’m not sure if Mr. Curtis is still with us or not, but the back of the book says he was formerly the Supervising Fisheries Biologist with the California State Division of Fish and Game.  First published in 1938, it brought unanimous acclaim from the nation’s critics for its clarity, its accuracy, and its sheer readability.

From the rear cover-

“Much more is known about the behavior of the fish than most of us realize.   In fact, a majority of the idle questions we have all asked ourselves at one time or another (Do fish sleep?  Can they distinguish color?  Can they hear?) have been answered by modern scientists.  Yet the answers to these and hundreds of other questions were buried in technical journals and consequently unavailable to most of us until Brian Curtis wrote this remarkable book, a comprehensive survey of practically everything worth knowing about fish.”

Being a student of the game, I dug right in and despite the book’s age, I got a lot out of it.  Which leads me back to brook trout.

“The classification of the trouts is a puzzle which I have no intention of inflicting on the reader, but a general idea of their interrelationships can be had without suffering.  The two best-known groups are the genus Salvelinus, to which belong the eastern brook trout and the Dolly Varden, and the genus Salmo, to which belong not only all the trouts of the rainbow and cutthroat series, but also the Atlantic Salmon and the brown trout.  The lake trout is isolated in the genus Cristivomer.

The distinction which anglers make between the Loch Leven and the brown trout has no support among scientists, who now look upon the former as merely a variation of the latter.  And the word “char,” current in England, is little used in the United States.  The English maintain, usually with a note of implied disparagement, that our eastern brook trout is not a trout at all but a char.  Webster’s International Dictionary tells us that a char is “any trout of the genus Salvelinus.”   According to this definition, “char” is a particular word describing one form of a group called by the more general word, “trout.”  A char is a trout although a trout is not always a char.  The brown is a trout but not a char; our eastern brook trout and our Dolly Varden are both chars and trouts.”

I hopped on the interwebs and went to Merriam-Webster, and sure enough, the definition still stands.

TAKE THAT, all you “did you know a brook trout is not a trout” spewers of misinformation!

So, the next time you’re talking about fly fishing for brook trout, and some know-it-all bastage chimes in on the brookie actually being a char and not a trout, do me a favor and speak up for the best trout of all, the brookie.