Syracuse.com - Hatchery help: SUNY ESF students pitch in to keep Carpenter's Brook Fish Hatchery open

[HuntingNY-News]

The small county staff at the hatchery concentrates on fish rearing, while the SUNY ESF students, along with volunteers from the small Friends of Carpenter's Brook group, are picking up the slack on the rest of the day-to-day duties, including feeding the fish, cleaning their runways and ponds and assisting with stocking. (See the Friends group accomplishments at end of this story.)

Michelle Gabel/The Post-StandardRoss Mazur(center), a freshman at SUNY ESF, places a wooden support on the net covering a pond full of brown trout at the Carpenter’s Brook Fish Hatchery. Matt Leong (left) and Alexia Zambalas (middle left) are also SUNY ESF freshmen. Travis Stanek (right) is an operations supervisor at the hatchery.

Sunday morning, SUNY ESF freshman Kimberly Poulin, of Long Island, edged her way out on the narrow walkway of one of the circular cement trout ponds at the Carpenter’s Brook Fish Hatchery.

Holding a pail of fish pellets, she reached in, grabbed a handful and threw them in the water.

“I’m looking to see if there’s a good response by the fish,” she said. “If there is, I’ll know it’s clean and then I’ll put the remainder in (the automatic food dispenser). If there’s a bad feed response, it probably means the pond is dirty and needs to be cleaned.”

Inside the nearby fish-rearing building, 24 above-ground, water-filled aluminum runways held thousands of 1½- to 2-inch brook and rainbow trout fry. In one of the runways, Alexia Zambalas, of France, another freshman, was carefully using a hand-held strainer to remove dead fish. That’s after she had swept the bottom with a large paint brush to clean out the thin layer of fish feces and uneaten food.

“I haven’t fished before and I don’t know much about fishing,” she said. “I’m just happy to learn what they do here.”

Michelle Gabel/The Post-StandardKimberly Poulin, a SUNY ESF freshmen, holds a brown trout that got caught in a net at the Carpenter’s Brook Fish Hatchery.

Poulin and Zambalas were among six SUNY ESF students who were driven Sunday morning to the hatchery by Erika Stoddard, a teaching assistant. The students were part of a public service project, which they’re doing for extra credit in their general education chemistry class at the college.

The time spent by nearly two dozen students who’ve signed up to work throughout the week at the hatchery for credit, coupled with the numerous volunteer hours put in by the “Trout Bums,” another SUNY ESF student club, account for hundreds of manhours. Their work is a prime reason the hatchery, which has been threatened with closure, remains open today.

“They’ve done a tremendous job,” said Bill Lansley, commissioner for Onondaga County Parks. “Since 2010 when this started, the students have put in a total of 1,807 hours — 885 the first year, 922 the second.”

Lansley said the arrangement started as a verbal agreement and has just continued to attract student interest and participation as the college formalized things. The unexpected participation of the Trout Bums, who also help out with the hatchery’s community programs, has been a welcome bonus.

The genesis of the college’s involvement was the Onondaga County budget discussions in the fall of 2009, which sparked outrage and concern among local sportsmen. County executive Joanie Mahoney proposed closing the hatchery to cut the county’s deficit.

Onondaga County is one of the few places in the state that stocks its own trout streams and ponds. The idea was to close the hatchery and let the state Department of Environmental Conservation take over stocking in the county.

Mahoney and county lawmakers who favored closure soon found out the idea was highly unpopular. They were advised by hatchery supporters that the county stocks its streams with more and bigger trout than the DEC does in the streams it stocks. Supporters also emphasized that the county had become a magnet for trout anglers across the state, resulting in economic impacts that more than cover the hatchery’s expenses.

Mahoney and the Legislature backed down, hopeful that an agreement with SUNY ESF could substantially cut costs. It did.

Lansley said that in 2008 the hatchery had a paid full-time staff of five and an annual budget of $287,506.

Today, there are three full-time staff (two workers and a receptionist) and a budget of $162,953. Last spring, the hatchery was able to complete another successful year of stocking some 80,000 brook, brown and rainbow trout in the county.

“Our staff is now concentrating on the fish rearing,” Lansley said, adding that the SUNY ESF students, along with volunteers from the small Friends of Carpenter’s Brook group, are picking up the slack on the rest of the day-to-day duties, including feeding the fish, cleaning their runways and ponds and assisting with stocking.

“These ESF students have just been incredible,” said John Hluchyj, president of Friends of Carpenter’s Brook, which has a long history of financial and in-kind support to the hatchery, including building the hatchery’s fishing pond, picnic shelter and more recently informational kiosks. His group and the students are also pretty much running all the community programs at the hatchery, he said.

Poulin, a wildlife science major, said all her fishing experiences growing up on Long Island were salt-water experiences where she had to pay.

“This is amazing,” she said. “People should know about the resources they have at their disposal because other places don’t have something like this.”

Want to help?

Friends of Carpenter’s Brook is always looking for volunteers, in addition to monetary and in-kind donations to help out at the hatchery. For more information, see the group's Web site.

The following is a list of accomplishments and duties handled by the group:

Supplied volunteers for:

Stocking

- NE Sportsmen Show Trout Pool

- Honeywell Sportsmen Days at CBFH

- Weekend "Time Out To Fish" family fishing program during the summer

- Landscaping (Flower garden) at the hatchery

- Regular Pond clean up (e.g. algae, weeds, etc.)

Purchases made/ work done:

- Purchased 100 Metal Fence Posts

- Purchased new Trout Pool Liner

- Developed and installed new Signage / Information Kiosks

- Purchased equipment (refrigerator) for kitchen at hatchery

- 8 Foot carved wooden Trout (to replace old one that has been very popular with school groups)

- Hired summer intern to work at the hatchery during the summer

- Manage and pay for the pheasant rearing/interpretation program at hatchery

Additional Events:

- Recognition event for volunteers

- Fall Recognition event for “Trout Bums” (ESF volunteers)

- Donated $10,000 to help keep hatchery open (during past county budget crisis)

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog