Leadville National Fish Hatchery, Leadville, CO Videos
Videos by Leadville National Fish Hatchery in Leadville. Leadville National Fish Hatchery (LNFH), established in 1889, is the second oldest Federally operated fish hatchery in existence today.
Every now and then you really have to bite the bullet and bear down on work, it can be extremely rough to get up knowing you have to hike 5 miles in the mountains (flowers almost in full bloom) carrying a bag of water containing threatened greenback cutthroat trout to release in a pristine mountain lake. Someone has to do it so we volunteered! Evan and I had the opportunity with over 50 other volunteers to stock two small lakes that had been preparing for their new residents for over ten years. This was one of the first steps to create a wild breeding population in a new drainage. There is currently only one wild breeding population with another that has a single year of reproduction, fingers crossed these lakes prove suitable and we see some offspring in the next few years! There is little suitable habitat to stock these delicate and rare fish but with the efforts of U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Trout Unlimited, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, National Park Service, and many other valuable volunteers, this project and a few others are just some of the small steps that have been carried out in efforts to recover the greenback cutthroat!
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Every now and then you really have to bite the bullet and bear down on work, it can be extremely rough to get up knowing you have to hike 5 miles in the mountains (flowers almost in full bloom) carrying a bag of water containing threatened greenback cutthroat trout to release in a pristine mountain lake. Someone has to do it so we volunteered! Evan and I had the opportunity with over 50 other volunteers to stock two small lakes that had been preparing for their new residents for over ten years. This was one of the first steps to create a wild breeding population in a new drainage. There is currently only one wild breeding population with another that has a single year of reproduction, fingers crossed these lakes prove suitable and we see some offspring in the next few years! There is little suitable habitat to stock these delicate and rare fish but with the efforts of U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Trout Unlimited, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, National Park Service, and many other valuable volunteers, this project and a few others are just some of the small steps that have been carried out in efforts to recover the greenback cutthroat!
Fish need a balanced diet too! Fish nutrition is important at a hatchery. Fish food pellets are made to provide the needed amounts of vitamins, proteins, and etc for specific types of fish. At the Leadville fish hatchery, we have been adding a top coating of vitamins to fish food that we will feed to our greenback cutthroat trout broodstock (breeding fish). The hope is that this extra vitamin boost will have a positive effect for the survival rate of our greenback cutthroat eggs. In this video, Biologist Paige Moran pours the vitamin topcoat mix into the food mixer.