Wolf River Sturgeon and Walleye Report, Thursday April 5, 2012
Wolf River Sturgeon and Walleye Report, Thursday April 5, 2012
Lake Sturgeon Spawning Activity
The 1st phase of the earliest spawning run of lake sturgeon in the Wolf River on record wrapped up last Friday March 30 after ten days of spawning activity at various sites along 53 river miles from New London upstream to the southern border of Shawano County near Hwy 156. Over the last 10 days or so, air temps have dropped and so have the water temps preventing the second and perhaps final phase of the 2012 sturgeon spawn to begin. As I've mentioned in my last update, the grand finale nearly every year occurs at the Shawano Dam spawning site. So we continue to wait as the water temps creep up slowly, with projections of reaching the 54 to 56 degrees F needed to make this thing happen by perhaps Easter Sunday. You can all watch for the arrival of sturgeon at the dam on the Shawano Sturgeon Cam on the web at: http://www.wolfrivercam.com/Shawano%20Dam.html. Once the thousands of fish left to spawn yet begin making it happen below Shawano dam we also expect to see some spawning activity at a few other northern sites on the Wolf and the Embarrass Rivers in Shawano County. With any luck we'll get to eat Easter ham with our families before we are back tagging sturgeon - we'll see if Mother nature is in a good mood over the next 4 days.
Walleye Post-Spawn Fishing on the Wolf
Fishing for post spawn walleye has been fantastic the past few days on the Wolf from Shiocton on down river. Although there are still some egg-laden females being reported in the catch, it appears the males have said enough is enough and decided to begin heading back to the lakes providing excellent opportunities for anglers to intercept them on their way downstream. Last year walleye spawning was 3-4 weeks later than it was this year and it took the males till May 1 to get back to the lakes downstream. This year if the same timeline hold the fish should be back to the lakes by mid April, meaning the move is going on now - hence the good fishing the anglers are experiencing in the river right now.
Please watch for walleye with our sonic telemetry tags…………Anglers catching walleye this spring have turned in 3 sonic tags that they found inside the body cavity of fish they were cleaning that they caught during this spring's run. I've attached a couple of flyers about this project four your information and as a reminder of what you might see on or in fish that have these special tags. The sonic tags themselves look like the black cylindrical tag in the photo below……..
In the spring of 2011 we surgically implanted tags like this into 100 adult male and female walleye on the Winnebago-Fox-Wolf System. This study, funded primarily by fishing and conservation clubs up and down the system, is designed to give us important knowledge and insight about the migrational patterns and critical habitat use areas of the walleye spawning stocks of the Wolf and upper Fox Rivers, and the Winnebago Lakes. The tags are designed to last almost three years and we have 32 stationary sonic receivers at bridges and docks from Shawano to Winneconne on the Wolf River and from Montello to Appleton on the Fox River. We download these receivers once a year in July and the results we have collected thus far are fascinating. Read all about the project and our results to date in the attached flyers…….and please watch for these specially marked fish and we ask you please release it if you catch one that you can identify from the double streamer tags as a sonic tagged fish. What we have seen this year with the fish reported harvested thus far is that one of the two streamer tags in the back is missing not allowing the angler to see that it was a sonic tagged fish until they cleaned the fish and the black tag fell out of the body cavity. If this happens to you, please call Kendall Kamke at 920-427-9830 or e-mail Kendall at kendall.kamke@wisconsin.gov.
I'll be sending my next report when the sturgeon begin to show up at Shawano.
Till then…….
Ron