Since the 1950s, wildlife departments have airdropped fish from planes to repopulate remote lakes. Above is video shot by Kamas State Fish Hatchery.
“They kind of flutter down, so they don’t impact very hard,” said Kamas State Fish Hatchery supervisor Ted Hallows. “They flutter with the water and they do really well.”
From an article Hallows wrote in Wildlife Review (PDF):
Many of the lakes in Utah are excellent places to fish, but you can’t get to them with a truck or a car. The Uinta Mountains alone have more than 650 fishable lakes. The best way to stock many of these valuable fisheries—and sometimes the only way to stock them—is from the air…
What used to take the old-time biologists and their pack trains months to stock can now be stocked in a few hours with an airplane. And using an airplane stresses the fish less. That means more of them will survive their fall to the water.
More at The Kid Should See This: “Aerial stocking: Utah wildlife departments drop fish into lakes from airplanes”
— Pattern (@Pattern) August 29, 2018
