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Item Overview
Title: “Jack’s Cutt”
One of a kind original Pecos Strain Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout painting. The acrylic paint used was thinned with water collected from Jack’s Creek in Northern New Mexico. Painted by fish artist and native trout enthusiast, Nathan Brown. Nathan uses water collected from rivers and creeks to paint fish with a unique style and approach.
The painting is 12″x24″ acrylic on oak panel with a custom made oak floating frame. The painting is sealed with an archival semi-gloss clear coat.
Estimated shipping costs to addresses in the continental United States are $35-50.
Painted By: Nathan Brown
Thank you for bidding and supporting our native Rio Grande Cutthroat trout. We are verifying the auction results and will confirm the final high bid on Monday.
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About the Artist
Nathan Brown has been a designer and illustrator for the past 18 years. He uses water collected from rivers and creeks to paint fish in various media. His work is inspired directly from fly fishing and time spent outdoors. “My goal with art is not to just create a painting of a fish, but to capture a feeling that the fish leaves in my memory. The places I’ve been, and experiences I’ve had fly fishing are all a part of my art. Fly fishing for me is the constant pursuit of a time and place where things fall in line at just the right moment, and painting mirrors that same experience for me in so many ways. It’s my prayer that people will look at my artwork and be reminded of God’s creation and awesome beauty, and hopefully relate it to the same experiences they’ve had on the water.” – Nathan Brown
Item Specifics
Proceeds from the sale of this painting will support WNTI’s fundraising campaign for Jack’s Creek Fish Barrier Improvement (New Mexico). Jack’s Creek, a tributary to the Pecos River about 20 miles upstream of the town of Pecos, NM, is a priority project for the Western Native Trout Initiative and New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. The project goal is to ensure the long-term persistence of an important core population of Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout (RGCT) by preventing the invasion of non-native fish. The Jack’s Creek RGCT population is a core conservation population that has been a mainstay for recreational angling in the Pecos basin given its good accessibility from the road. This population is very important to the conservation status of RGCT in the Pecos basin, which only contains 12 RGCT populations. Since the 1990s, biologists believed that a waterfall was a complete barrier to migration of non native fish into the RGCT habitat. In 2017, one brown trout was detected above the waterfall, and another large brown trout was collected in 2018. These recent discoveries and a subsequent engineer analysis indicate that this waterfall is not a complete fish barrier. To secure this important RGCT population, the barrier will either need to be improved or replaced as soon as possible. WNTI funding will be used to support mobilization/demobilization, clearing, dewatering, construction, and revegetation of the project area. We are fundraising $120,000 for this project. Total project cost is $200,000.
History of Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout
The first European documentation of the Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout (RGCT) was in 1541 when the Spanish Conquistadors under the direction of Francisco Vazquez de Coronado made note of it on their journey looking for the lost seven cities of gold. European eyes would not document another RGCT again until 1853, when railroad surveyors collected a specimen. Today, Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout, Oncorhynchus clarkii virginalis, can be found in high elevation streams and lakes of the Rio Grande, Canadian, and Pecos River drainages in Colorado and New Mexico, giving it the southern-most distribution of any cutthroat trout.
A conservation team established in 2003, composed of Colorado Parks and Wildlife, New Mexico Dept. of Game and Fish, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Jicarilla-Apache Nation, the Mescalero-Apache Nation, and the Taos Pueblo tribe and conservation organizations, such as the Western Native Trout Initiative and Trout Unlimited, has collaborated to work on range-wide protection plans and complete numerous conservation projects for the species. An updated conservation agreement and 10-year plan to protect RGCT was signed in 2013 with the goal of assuring the long-term viability of the sub species throughout its historic range and setting a conservation strategy for the near future.
The historic range of RGCT has been reduced over the last 150 years due to many landscape changes, including drought, water infrastructure, habitat changes, hybridization with rainbow trout and other species of cutthroat trout, and competition from brown trout and brook trout.
As a result of these changes in environmental conditions, many historical populations were lost, and those that remain are restricted primarily to headwater streams, with conservation populations now concentrated in streams with elevations from 9,000-10,000 feet. The species now only occupies just 12 percent of its historic habitat in about 800 miles of streams.