I enjoyed a brief visit Tuesday from reader Edward M. Wells, an ardent defender of wild brook trout and critic of the Connecticut River Atlantic salmon program who’s been once featured and occasionally mentioned in this space. The retired educator, enjoying tranquil retirement on a gentle Leyden hillside, brought me a reading assignment in the August edition of Smithsonian magazine, then cleared up a misunderstanding that led to inaccurate information published here.

First the correction.

I have in the past identified Mr. Well as a Buckland native who’s familiar with native brookie streams in our western Franklin hills. Well, it turns out he is not a Buckland native. He grew up in suburban Boston and often visited his Buckland grandparents’ farm. It was during those visits that he learned to love his ancestral landscape.

“I do know the country from those years at Grandma Wells’ farm,” he said, “but I thought you should know I did not grow up there.”

Glad we cleared that up.

The article he wanted me to read, titled “Fish Story,” is about new ways of thinking about trout conservation, particularly in the West, where in many places restoration efforts favor habitat improvement over hatchery stocking.

Western restoration officials have found that they can bring back self-sustaining native trout streams by keeping livestock off the banks and manicuring streamside landscapes composed of lush vegetation and large shade trees which keep the waters cool in the heat of summer. The emphasis is on what the biologists call the “four C’s approach,” that is the creation of clear, cold, clean and connected waters that stimulate native trout reproduction. In areas where this approach was taken and pockets of catch-and-release areas were established, stocking has been stopped and fishing has improved.

The reason Mr. Wells thought of me when reading the Smithsonian piece was that it opens by describing the devastating effect stocking of nonnative species can have on the indigenous fish of streams they’re placed in. This controversy started in the late 19^th century when German brown trout were stocked into North American waters, then raged onward with the introduction of Western rainbows in the East and Eastern brook trout in the West. The critics claimed that these foreign invaders threatened the very survival of indigenous species by competing for the same foods and prime lairs in their aquatic ecosystem.

Now Wells and others complain that the hatchery-raised, Connecticut River-strain Atlantic salmon progeny stocked into our hilltown streams are major contributors to the publicized Eastern brook trout decline. It’s not the first time our brookie population has been seriously threatened. The cold-water species faced big problems when 75 to 80 percent of our wooded hillsides were denuded, warming the cool, shaded mountain streams while bringing in herds of cattle that trampled and polluted the banks. Twentieth-century reforestation solved some of those issues, but now we’re dealing with global warming, acid rain and a stubborn salmon-restoration effort on life-support.

Something’s gotta go.