Correction Appended
DORCHESTER, Iowa - Iowa brings to mind pork, a grand state fair, presidential caucuses and Meredith Willson in "The Music Man." Four wild brown trout in 20 minutes were quite unexpected.
Despite my good luck on Waterloo Creek, fly fishing for trout is not a major element in Iowa recreation. A state Web site lists bait dealers by county, and recommends using "chicken liver and stinkbaits" for walleyes.
But in the northeast corner of the state, in the driftless area that the glaciers never reached, there are some coldwater creeks where stocking and stream-bank restoration has produced lively trout ready to take dry flies.
John van Vliet and I fished in one of the most ambitious restoration areas, the 98-acre Prairie Song Farm. Mike Osterholm, with help from federal and state agencies, Trout Unlimited and other groups, is seeking to restore the area to the prairie grass and oak savannah vegetation that greeted the first settlers in the 1830's.
With cultivation, and the end to the annual burns the American Indians practiced, the land changed. By last year, when restoration began, the field held cornstalks, some beans, many scrub-invasive plants and box elders. Plantings of prairie grasses, whose roots go down 10 feet, hold moisture and bind the soil.
Along with some work with bulldozers and biodegradable netting on stream banks, the grasses have produced colder water, less erosion and more redds -- pits for spawning trout.
The work continues. Despite last fall's burn, there are still plenty of non-native species. While we were there, Jessica Nanke and Elizabeth Ward, college students holding summer jobs with the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation, were pulling out wild garlic, a highly annoying invasive species that can cause a rash like poison ivy's.
We fished during an early-summer heat wave, with the water very clear from an absence of rain, and the trout were spooky wherever we went on Waterloo and other streams in the region. But the action on Osterholm's section was much better than on Waterloo's upper reaches, which have muddier bottoms from steep, collapsing banks.
Not that there are no big fish there; I saw a five-inch vole (a creature like a mouse), swimming earnestly downstream pushing nesting materials, vanish as a huge trout gulped him underwater. After a meal like that, the big fish had no interest in my size 14 caddis.
The fish we caught on Osterholm's stretch (and van Vliet took several bigger browns on a hopper pattern one morning even though there were no grasshoppers in the fields yet) were wild descendants of browns stocked upstream, where we also caught some rainbows.
I caught my four trout casting elk-hair caddis flies upstream into a riffle as naturals hatched. This stretch, a mud bank last year, now went down to bedrock. The burn, removal of the box elders with their shallow roots, and cordgrass planting made the banks firmer. Natural stream flow had cleared the silt off the rocks, which sheltered insects before they hatched.
Osterholm has a no-trespassing sign posted at a gate to the property, but allows friends to fish as the restoration goes on. And he fished quite a bit himself, taking browns longer than 20 inches this year. But fishing, even the catch-and-release variety he and his guests practice, is not the be-all and end-all of this project.
His pièce de résistance at Prairie Song Farm will be a stream for brook trout. Around 1951, a small limestone stream was ditched to provide more farmland. Its course has been recreated with bulldozers with the help of old aerial photos by the Department of Agriculture.
The stream runs into Duck Creek, also on Osterholm's property, and then to Waterloo. Fed by two 50-degree springs from a limestone bluff, it holds small fish like dace and clack-nosed sculpin, but the browns seem to find it too cold and have not entered it.
Osterholm, an epidemiologist who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, fished some of these streams as a boy, but not this one. It did not exist then.
The Iowa Department of Natural Resources plans to stock it with the state's only surviving native brook trout, the South Pine heritage strain. Osterholm has graded the reinvented stream to match South Pine Creek (about nine miles southwest) and create a similar habitat. But if the trout thrive, he will not allow any fishing in what he has already named for its future tenants: Brook Creek.
"This should be an ideal sanctuary for these brook trout," he said. "We hope to use this stream to help sustain the population, and let D.N.R. use it to stock other streams. Anything that can survive what we did to decimate the prairies of the Midwest over the last 150 years deserves all we can do."
OUTDOORS Correction: August 28, 2005, Sunday The Outdoors column last Sunday, about fishing for trout in Iowa, misstated the kinds of bait recommended by the state Web site for catching walleyes. They are crankbaits, night crawlers and leeches. (Stinkbaits and chicken livers are used for catching catfish.)