I just got back from a great trip down to New Zealand’s South Island. I was down there on a few different photo assignments both fly fishing related. The South Island is my favorite place to trout fish on the planet for a variety of reasons including the challenges of spotting / stalking the fish coupled with the fact that it’s just beautiful there. An added bonus is the Brown Trout can get really big as well despite the fact a great day on the water typically doesn’t mean catching dozens of fish like it can in the States and Patagonia.

This also happens to be a mouse year which, for those of you who don’t know, in short means: The native beech trees historically every seven or so years produce a great deal more (10x to 100x) the number of seeds which is called masting. Non-native mice and rats that feed off of the seeds have such an abundance of food they begin to reproduce at a much greater rate and all of sudden there are far more mouse and rats scurrying around South Island beech forests.

The South Island is known for large and wary brown trout to begin with but on mouse years some fish can add 40% more weight. The mice eventually make it down to the rivers edge on many watersheds where many believe, as I do, that mice actually try to cross the river. I’m sure some accidentally fall in but anecdotal evidence points to the intent to cross and generally mice do this at night and brown trout are known to be nocturnal feeders…

I’ll be posting more images but here are two images of the same fish both above and below the water. We estimate this brown to be in excess of 15lbs but unfortunately didn’t have a net to weigh it.

I’ve tried hard not to post many fish out of the water over the last few years but I’m including the first image below to show the size of the fish as you’ll likely agree that the second image below—which is of the same fish—appears smaller.