It appears the Batten Kill's wild trout are bouncing back, at least on the Vermont side of the river.

Electroshocking surveys on the river in the Green Mountain state earlier this summer found "very promising" populations of wild brook and brown trout.

Cynthia Browning, executive director of the Battenkill Watershed Alliance (BKWA), said the numbers seemed to have held steady when compared to last year, and last year's sampling found a significant increase in wild trout.

In particular, Browning said the population of fish from 2007's spawning appeared very strong.

"I'm cautiously optimistic," said Ken Cox, the Vermont fisheries biologist who guided the sampling efforts.

The fish were also found to be using structures volunteers put in place in recent years to improve trout habitat, she said.

A precipitous drop in the river's wild trout populations over the past 20 years has caused state officials and volunteers to take action on both sides of the border. The river has its headwaters near Manchester, Vt., and flows west until it joins the Hudson River near Greenwich.

Aided by river advocacy groups like the BKWA, Vermont fisheries officials have been more aggressive in working to find out what caused the drop in trout numbers, and in working to try to bring them back.

For instance, while Vermont has electrofished the river each of the last two summers, plans to use electrofishing to sample the river's trout population in New York this summer have been scrapped.

Emily Zollweg, a DEC senior aquatic biologist who oversees the Batten Kill in New York, said time constraints resulted in the work being pushed back to next summer. A creel survey that was scheduled for the Batten Kill this summer has also been postponed a year.

Some have had concerns about the speed of efforts by New York's DEC to figure out what's happening on the river, particularly when compared to the work that has been done on the Vermont side of the river.

The DEC has put off various parts of the study of the Batten Kill several times in recent years, at one point scrapping a study now-retired fisheries biologist Bill Miller had begun in the 1990s when Miller's position remained unfilled upon his retirement.

Browning said it is clear that the Batten Kill "doesn't rank as high" with New York's DEC as it does with the state's counterparts in Vermont, since New York has to worry about the Great Lakes, Hudson River and other big waters, she said.

"One of the problems with New York is they are just swamped. They don't have enough personnel," she said. "I know Emily (Zollweg) is very concerned about the river, but they just don't have enough resources."

Greg Cuda, a Saratoga County resident who is a Battenkill Watershed Alliance board member and leader of Trout Unlimited's Clearwater Chapter, said he has been impressed with Zollweg's efforts, in particular her encouragement of habitat improvement to foster wild trout population growth.

But he said there seems to be a "disconnect" within the DEC between fisheries staff and those who guide fishery habitat issues.

"There are little to no funds available for river habitat restoration, and there are no people trained to do the restoration work," Cuda said.

Virtually all of the funding for habitat improvement work in New York has come through private groups, while technical expertise has been guided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency's Partner's for Wildlife program.

Old habitat improvement structures installed by the state decades ago have failed, causing the river to widen and hurting habitat in place. Yet the state has made no effort to fix the structures or repair the problems they caused, he said.

"The river can be brought back to its past glory," Cuda said. "Unfortunately, unless something changes, I don't see NYDEC being a large part of that effort."

Bill Schoch, the DEC's Region 5 fisheries manager, said a lack of funding for stream habitat work has been a statewide issue in New York.

"We haven't done much habitat work in New York statewide in many years," he said.

Don Lehman writes a regular outdoors column in The Post-Star. He may be reached at dlehman@poststar.com.