Upland Trout

Also Known As: also called the tree trout or tree-nesting trout in later retellings; the earliest printed form is simply “Upland Trout”
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore, Cryptids
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A fish that nests in the branches of trees, flies well, refuses water entirely, and is exceptionally hard to catch.
Role in Mythos: It is the quarry of a fool’s errand, the thing a new logger is sent into the woods to find so the old hands can watch him go.
Relation to Humans: The record makes it food and nothing else, a fine pan fish worth the walk, which is precisely why the walk was worth arranging. No telling has it harm anybody, and the only injured party in the whole tradition is the greenhorn who comes back empty-handed.

There is a particular kind of quiet in a cutover pine woods in February, the sound swallowed by snow, and into that quiet a young man is walking with a landing net over his shoulder and his neck cranked back, looking up. He has been told the nests are high, in the crotches where the big branches leave the trunk. He has been told the fish are worth the trouble because they fry up beautifully. He has been walking for two hours. Behind him, in a bunkhouse smelling of wet wool and kerosene, a dozen men are waiting to see what time he gets back.

The upland trout is the fish at the far end of that joke, and the honest account of it is short. It reaches print in 1935, in a slim pamphlet called *Paul Bunyan Natural History* compiled by the Wisconsin folklorist Charles E. Brown from the talk of veteran Great Lakes loggers, and Brown gives it four sentences. The fish built its nests in trees. It was very difficult to take. It flew well but never entered the water. It was a fine pan fish, and tenderfeet were sent out into the woods to catch them. That is the whole creature. Every other version now in circulation is an expansion of those lines.

What makes it worth a page is not the fish but the machinery around it. Brown filed the upland trout in a chapter of comic ichthyology, alongside the goofang that swam backward to keep water out of its eyes, the giddy fish that could be bounced out of an ice hole with a paddle, the whirligig fish that swam in circles until it spun itself onto the ice, and the log gar whose saw-toothed snout could cut straight through a pine log to reach a lumberjack. These were not beliefs. They were a repertoire, kept up in the dark months when the camps had no radio and nothing to do after fourteen hours in the cold but talk, and a new man was the best entertainment the season offered. Henry Tryon, who collected the same tradition four years later, described the technique with the pleasure of a man who had watched it work: one narrator supplies the colour, a second supplies the personal experience, both keep their faces straight, and the occasional question is tossed to a third party in the audience, who nods gravely and corroborates.

The upland trout was built for that routine. A fish afraid of water is a complete absurdity delivered in three words, and yet the follow-up detail is domestic and plausible in a way the absurdity is not. They fry up well. Bring back enough for the crew. The trick works because the reward is ordinary. A snipe hunt sends a man after a bird that at least exists; the upland trout sends him after something that cannot, and it still worked, because he had come north from a city or off a boat and did not yet know which of these men were lying.

Where the fish came from, nobody recorded. There is no origin story, no first nest, no account of how a trout came to be frightened of rivers. Its geography is vaguer still. The Great Lakes camps are the setting Brown worked in, but the lumberjacks moved constantly between camps and carried their beasts with them, so the creature’s range is wherever the story travelled rather than anywhere on a map. William Cox, Minnesota’s first state forester, published the earliest and most influential of these collections in 1910 and left the upland trout out of it altogether; so did Tryon in 1939. When the folklorist Marjorie Edgar went up the North Shore of Lake Superior in 1927 and 1928 and wrote down everything the rangers and trappers and lighthouse keepers would tell her, she came back with snow snakes, a wild teakettle, an agropelter and a creature half moose and half beaver called the bog hop, and no trout in any tree. The fish survives in Brown, and after him in Walker Wyman’s 1978 survey of North American mythical creatures, and in the reference literature on fearsome critters, where it turns up reliably as the standard example of the errand a greenhorn gets sent on. Its absence from the two famous books is not a gap in the record. It is the record telling you how local these things were.

Its powers are the ones the joke requires and no others: it nests where fish cannot, it flies, and it is adroit enough that nobody has ever produced one. Its single weakness is the same as its single strength. The upland trout cannot survive contact with a person who has spent one winter in the woods. It exists only for as long as the listener is new, and the moment he works it out the fish is finished, which is why no specimen, no photograph and no taxidermy fake was ever needed. The hodag got a cage and a county fair. The jackalope got a thousand mounted heads. The upland trout got two hours of somebody’s afternoon, and that was always the entire point.

There is a footnote the loggers could not have known about. In the mangrove swamps of Florida and the Caribbean lives a small fish called the mangrove rivulus, which leaves the water when its pools dry, shelters in damp leaf litter and rotting logs and land-crab burrows for as long as sixty days, breathes through its skin while it waits, flips itself head-over-tail across open ground to reach better water, and has been watched jumping clear of the surface to take termites. It is two inches long and it has no interest in trees. Still, somewhere in the wet dark under a fallen log, there is a fish that got out.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the upland trout?

The upland trout is a joke creature from North American logging-camp folklore, a fish said to build its nests in trees, fly well, and never go into water. It was invented so that experienced loggers could send new recruits into the woods to hunt for it. The earliest printed account is four sentences long, in Charles E. Brown’s *Paul Bunyan Natural History* of 1935.

Where does the upland trout live?

According to the tradition, in the high branches of forest trees, never in rivers or lakes. The stories come from the logging camps of the Great Lakes region and the northern woods of the United States and Canada, but loggers moved between camps constantly and carried their tales with them, so no telling fixes the upland trout to a particular place.

Is the upland trout a cryptid?

Not in the strict sense. Cryptids are animals that some people genuinely believe exist but science has not recognised, whereas the upland trout belongs to the class of American tall-tale animals called fearsome critters, which nobody was meant to believe in for more than an afternoon. Reference works on the subject draw the distinction explicitly.

How do you catch an upland trout?

You do not, and that is the joke. The early account says only that the fish was very difficult to take and that tenderfeet were sent out to catch them, and the errand was designed to end with the new man returning to camp cold and empty-handed while the crew enjoyed itself.

Is there a real fish that lives out of water?

Yes. The mangrove rivulus of Florida and the Caribbean leaves the water when its pools dry up, sheltering in wet leaves, rotting logs and land-crab burrows for up to sixty days while breathing through its skin, and it travels across open ground by flipping head-over-tail. It grows to about two inches and does not nest in trees, but it is a genuine fish that spends part of its life on land.