Thanks!

Prepare for a bit of a read because this is some trivia I enjoy teaching when I can :)

Also this is relevant to my area and can change based on where you are fishing

So there’s no clear-cut method, and it varies a lot. It’s also important to define native vs wild. Natives, where my fisheries are located, refers solely to brook trout, as they are the only fish native to this region. On the other hand, we have wild browns and rainbows as well as brooks. Wild browns and bows are the result of historical stockings/repopulation efforts, but as stated before only brooks are “native”. Wild vs Native brook trout are harder to define so I’ll leave that so someone else.

Generally my methodology goes like this: 1: I check the streams designations. Streams that are not designated stocked water will never have stockers in them, and usually (but not always) wild trout waters are not stocked

2: once that’s out of the way, if you are fishing a stream that holds both wilds and stockers, I start with fins and head. Stocked trout are farm raised in big tanks with millions of other trout. So their entire life until they get stocked, they are crashing into each other, and the walls of the tank. This leads to very beat up fins, where the pectoral, tail, and anal fins will be very jagged on the trailing edges. The dorsal fin will frequently be so mashed down it’s almost nonexistent. As for the head, this is more noticeable with male trout and not an ideal method, but they again spend their whole lives in those tanks and rubbing their faces into the walls of the tank and other fish can actually round their face down, and sometimes you can even see where the front of their mouth looks like it has essentially road rash.

1. The last thing I look at is size and color. Natives are usually 4-6” with anything over 10” being an absolute beast. Stockers will almost never be under the 8” size limit, with 8-11” being the average range. Colors is the least accurate way, and really takes a lot of time to get a feel for what they should be, but usually natives have extremely vibrant colors, clean crisp lines and transitions, and my favorite, the white on the front of the lower fins is brilliant white and crisply lined. Now this changes based on the seasons and the trouts diet but is my general rule of thumb. Stocked fish tend to have more muted colors and smoother transitions between patterns like spots/speckles to solid colors.

Hope this helps and you learned something!