DOW Out of Fish

(Denver) The Colorado Division of Wildlife has admitted this morning that the agency is fresh out of fish. The shortage, which includes all varieties of trout, salmon, perch, bass and northern pike, is reportedly the result of a failure to reorder a sufficient supply to last through the winter months.

“There are no rainbow, native, brown or cutthroat,” said a DOW release, “ and the next fish delivery day isn’t until next March.”

Normally around 2500 fish are kept in reserve and, as ponds and steams are stocked, the supply is adjusted and sent to the areas most in need. Fish counters expressed surprise at the news since they say there were plenty of cold-blooded clients as recently as December. Even with the popularity of catch-and-release the impact is overwhelming when one considers the milllions of tourists that fish Rocky Mountain waters through the summer and fall.

“We do have some nice catfish today,” smiled Lacey Ditchwater, a recognized fish head for the agency. “We’ll even filet them for you. Tomorrow at 4 am we are sending a crack fly team over the frontier into Wyoming to poach a breeder or two. While in those badlands we hope to secure enough fish to last for the week.”

Summer is the busiest time for vacationing fish and fishermen and DOW sources say that with the economic times more people are fishing to eat and not just fishing for sport. They add that license violations are way up since June. Fishermen have been complaining of chronic bad luck syndrome since early May, which is said to have prompted the embarrassing DOW admission.

This is the first documented client/ward shortage since 1989, when the same agency had run out of elk. As I turned out, rogue agents had lost many of the animals in a poker game with the Department of Energy. Others, it was said, had been in New Mexico for a long weekend “Comete Tus Astas” competition which negatively affected the statistics.

“I don’t want to cast doubts here. This is nothing,” said Ditchwater. “We all realize that it is far easier to catch a mess of trout than a mess of elk. We’ll have everything back to normal before long,” she promised from her desk in the abandoned town of Chivington in fish-challenged Kiowa County.

– Rocky Flats