Lights...Camera...Wildlife! Helicopter Stocking and the making of Wyoming Wildlife Television

The morning dawned bright and clear, with no winds and near cloudless skies. It was August, but in the mountains, the temperature barely eeked above 40 degrees. Men in red shirts and green vests busily organized buckets and clipboards, stopping every few minutes to puff in their hands, fingers cold from splashing water and a crisp mountain morning.

"I hear him!"

Ten heads suddenly snapped to attention, eyes searching the skies. A hush fell over us as we strained to see the star of the day's show. No, we weren''t waiting on an elk or a moose. We were eagerly awaiting a red and white whirly bird - a small helicopter that would help the Wyoming Game and Fish Department's fish culture section stock the high elevation lakes of the Big Horn Mountains.

Wyoming Wildlife Television, the Game and Fish Department''s new television show, debuts Sept. 7 on Casper's KCWY Channel 13. The series is just one of the many new tools Game and Fish is using to reach out to our customers and Wyoming's citizens to tell the story of what's going on with wildlife in our state.

I had the opportunity to tag along with the film crew on two occasions - a bird banding in Laramie and helicopter fish stocking in the Big Horn mountains. While I hope my less-than-stunning visage appears nowhere on Wyoming Wildlife Television, I am excited to see the final cut of those two episodes and share with our viewers the great work being done by Game and Fish and our partners on behalf of your wildlife.

Now I have to admit that I'm biased, but helicopter stocking was one of the coolest things I've done this year. The morning began with a pre-dawn trip up Ten Sleep Canyon and over Powder River Pass. Elk, deer, moose, marmots, porcupines, golden eagles and hawks greeted me along the way, testing my high-speed wildlife identification skills. When I pulled into Circle Park, the site of the staging area for the day, the fish culture section crew and our cameraman were already there, waiting for the excitement to begin.

I busied myself setting up a tripod and getting last minute instructions from Jim Barner, the Assistant Fish Culture Section Supervisor and boss of the day. I wanted to make sure I stayed out of the way of the guys who were working and far, far away from the danger zone of the helicopter. The last thing I wanted to do was hinder the project or lose a limb.

We heard the helicopter before we saw it. Soon it appeared, first just a fleck on the far horizon. As the noise got louder, the bird began to take shape. So it was almost directly overhead, the blades whirring, a swath of blown grass several dozen feet in diameter below it. I felt like I was in an episode of M*A*S*H, as I was reminded of the show's opening sequence when all the doctors are waiting for the helicopter to come in, transporting injured military personnel. Actually the vision was so clear, I had the show's theme song stuck in my head the entire day. Catchy, but annoying after an entire morning.

The helicopter hovered just a few feet above ground, while Jim ran out to meet it stabilize the bucket as the big bird touched down. The noise from the helicopter's blades, the wind blowing in my face, the beautiful sunrise...¦it all made for a spectacular beginning to a great day.

As glamorous as the thumping helicopter was, the true genius of the helicopter stocking was the tedious organization that went into the morning. As the chopper waited, the fish culture guys started the process of loading the fish onto the helicopter using buckets. Fish were loaded from the hatcheries' stocking trucks into a bucket on a scale attached to the truck. Each bucket contained a pre-determined poundage and species of fish bound for a specific water. The buckets were then poured into a numbered tank in a big buggy-like apparatus that was would dangle below the helicopter, connected via cables and some sort of pneumatic release device.

The stocked fish I saw were all trout, including the native Yellowstone cutthroat trout, generally about 3-5 inches in length, or what are known as fingerlings. To make sure the fish are healthy when they reach the water, fish culture personnel closely monitor the oxygen level and water temperature of the transportation tanks. The temperature of the tanks are matched as closely as possible with the temperature of the lake or stream where the fish will be planted. This helps reduce the thermal shock to the fish. Fish are also taken off feed a day or two before planting to reduce their demand for oxygen. Very few fish die during planting operations.

Once all the fish were loaded, Jim would hand the pilot his order for this specific run. Up to eight waters could be stocked on each separate flight. State rules prevented me from going up in the helicopter (that and a serious fear of death by crashing), but Jim explained what happened after we lost sight of the helicopter.

The pilot was armed with a notebook with GPS coordinates and an aerial photo or drawing of each drop sight. The pilot would locate the site, hover the chopper anywhere from two to twenty feet above the water, then flip a switch on a numbered panel to release that tank and dump the fish. Once all his tanks were empty, the pilot would return to our staging site and the fish guys would start the process again, reloading to stock eight new waters. The crew would coordinate five separate runs from Circle Park that morning, then stock out of Dubois and Laramie the next two days.

As if keeping track of fish were bad enough, these guys also had a video camera in their face and a pesky information and education supervisor tagging along. Matt, the camera man, shot the action. I peppered the crew with questions and snapped photos right and left. Not exactly a comfortable situation for personnel who spend most of their days at a quiet fish hatchery or logging road miles in a stocking truck. But they pretty much just ignored us, focused on loading the right fish in the right tank and getting the little fingerlings into the air safely.

Paying for a helicopter for three days may seem expensive, but according to Barner, it's actually an incredibly efficient way to stock high alpine lakes. The drop sites are rugged, remote areas not easily accessed on foot or even horseback, let alone a fully loaded fish stocking truck. It would take several weeks or more stocking these ponds using traditional methods, tying up manpower and equipment and stressing the fish for a long period of time. It only took the fish guys about ten minutes to load the helicopter, and another 30 minutes for the chopper to stock the fish. Over the three days the crew aerial stocked more than 80 different waterbodies.

As I watched the whole process five separate times, I had a new found admiration for our fish division. If you watch this episode onWyoming Wildlife Television, chances are the helicopter stocking segment will only be five or six minutes long. The whole morning of stocking lasted only a few hours. But the planning of those three days takes place almost a year in advance.

Fisheries biologists from each Game and Fish region determine the species, volume and location they would like stocked each year and submit their requests to the fish culture personnel. Wyoming's ten fish hatcheries and rearing stations then spend the next year working together to raise the types and number of fish to be stocked to meet angler needs. In the case of high alpine lakes that require stocking by helicopter, it's an even longer wait, because those lakes are only stocked every two years.

Raising and stocking fish has played an important role in Wyoming's fisheries management, especially in areas with high fishing pressure or where habitat limits sufficient natural reproduction to meet angler demand. The Game and Fish raises and stocks more than 311,000 thousand pounds of fish each year for Wyoming anglers.

As I drove out of the Big Horns and headed home to Cheyenne, I contemplated my recent television induced road trip. I'd been on the run or on the road with the camera crew for about four days solid and I was exhausted. Images of passerine birds, BLM interviewees, mule deer habitat and flying fish were all whirring around in my head like the blades of the helicopter. I wanted nothing more than to get home and fall into my bed for a week. Then I imagined the tiny Yellowstone cutthroat trout fingerling I'd held on my palm that morning.

He'd been snagged in a net from his home at the Wigwam Fish Rearing Station, loaded in a stocking truck, netted again into a big orange bucket, dumped into a metal tube with a few thousand of his friends, iced, then flown thousands of feet in the air only to be dumped into a brand-new home 30 minutes later. Now he would have to find food, avoid predators and eventually learn not be tempted by an angler's offering. And I thought I had it rough!

So keep your eye on the skies next summer. That helicopter you hear in the distance just may be carrying a future trophy fish to your favorite honey-hole, courtesy of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. And don't forget to watch Wyoming Wildlife Television this fall and see your favorite wildlife species make their small screen debut. Ready for your close up?