Spawning rainbows

I wish I had a picture of this. I was fishing on the North Platte River near Casper, WY on 4/3 & 4/4 and saw the most amazing spectacle ever. There were literally thousands and thousands of rainbows spawning and making redds. In 1 area the size of a living room, I saw what had to be 300 to 400 trout. This was repeated at every shallow riffle, tailout over a 9 mile float. It was something right out of a nature show. The future looks very good for the N Platte in the years to come. Oh BTW I caught a bunch of fish.

That's great news for the North Platte.

Could you tell whether the spawning fish were hitting a fly? I had a similar experience on a local high gradient mountain trout stream here in Virginia during the Brook Trout spawning season last fall. The pools there were mostly smaller than my kitchen table so I didn't see hundreds of fish, but I did see dozens. My observations were: a) the spawning fish were very difficult to spook, which is extremely unusual in this type of environment, and b) the spawning fish were not hitting flies, only fish not visibly participating in the ritual woud strike.

I got several pictures, including this one of an apparent love triangle.

Attachment 12869

We did not target visibly spawning fish but we did catch fish that had spawning colors. also many fish staged below the redds eating eggs. However I did see several people using streamers targeting the spawners and they were reeling in fish. don't know if the hooked or snagged them though.