And on the top end of the path we
have, of course, no flats.
And this whole department area
complex is one of the most
productive all-night marches on the
entire system.
As I just noted, it's actually since
the 1960s and stuff.
That's gonna be cool how they go
back to the really old stuff.
And it's still true to this day.
This march right here for Enters,
which is the property,
understandably, why it's called
that.
We've packed out of all the sites,
there's probably been like 15 to 20
of these sites that have the most
mesh.
And just like, you know, it is
really nice to talk to you about
Yeah, we'll get them all in the
water.
All right.
Good luck. Thank you.
Nice day. I thought it'd be a lot
colder.
Yeah, I thought you were going to
give me the 20s.
When you said that, I'm like, oh no.
Then I looked and I'm, like, what's he talking
about on the app thing?
All right, sorry, quiet on set.
Go ahead.
At least I'll be healthy.
I don't know, I just, I like to get
a big one, so it's just the best
thing for the buck, you know?
Is it? Yeah.
Can you stop talking and I'll do it?
Yeah
Hold on.
I need water.
More so my forte.
If you do that hold another sheet.
If you guys watch you have plenty of
opportunity
Don't stick any parts of your body
in the water for any reason at any
time should be pretty
straightforward
If you drop anything in the water,
and we like drop the net in the
water or your hat, something we need
to pick it up, make sure to ask
Angela to choose this off before we
go for it.
Get up into like some woody areas
and you get your net caught on a
tree limb or a branch or something
like don't like you can just
drop the net like yeah you can try
to get it off but if it's really
stuck in there i've actually snapped
the net myself trying to trying too
hard so i'd rather not snap nets
and just go back and pick it up the
the black handle ones do float so
The biggest thing is trying not to
knock my teeth out with the end of
the pole up there.
That's probably the most dangerous
thing.
Which is also why you will be back
here.
But yeah, other than that, Jason's
gonna open the tank up, we'll get
some water in there, and we're
pretty much ready to go.
We've got 25 feet of water out
here in the main channel.
Hey Jason, did you get the start
time done?
Alright, you guys ready to go?
Okay, you're going on!
You're on!
So we'll start off in the
lower end here, deeper water,
typically a little bit slower of
catching as we work our way up,
we'll probably see more and more
fish.
And probably well-educated
anglers alike will always point
to small diameter
rock, gravel with
water flow either in a river
or a wind-swept shoreline with good
wave action to keep
the eggs free of sediment as well
as provide aeration for development.
The water quality parameter is there
to keep eggs free
of sediment and well-oxygenated is
the same for the Winnebago
system walleye.
However, they spawn on a
different substrate being marsh
grass.
So how that works is you typically
have a upper end of the marsh and
a lower end of marsh.
The marsh will basically have a
directional flow going through it,
overtopping at the top end, and then
the marsh grass will get pushed back
in the current, kind of creating a
mat and that's where the fish will
lay their eggs.
So yeah, kind of unique
to the Winnebago system.
And I would say the Winabago system
is probably the largest
marsh spawning walleye
strain.
Probably that's even out there.
The pike just jumped right there,
thought I'd get a 30-incher.
Yeah, right now the new London
River Gage is at right around 9.7,
we've been out here doing this when
that gage is at 1.5, when
all the marshes are completely dry
and we're shocking the main channel
of the river.
So,
the hydrograph of the Wolf River can
have some pretty impressive
fluctuations.
Able to get some experience netting
the first time you guys went out or?
No, we are just watching
the whole time.
Did you have five people on the boat
then, or?
I don't know.
I've been told it's a pretty strict
of four, but...
We'll go and see exactly who the
other guy we're calling out is, so
we'll get in touch with him. Got it.
I mean, you could probably fit five
people in here. It's just difficult
from the top of the line.
It was already drawn in before,
yeah.
Especially you've got a camera.
Yeah.
Have you guys covered the sturgeon's
fearing?
No, we're just really focusing on
wildlife and all kinds of wildlife,
pretty easy.
Have you seen, uh,
I'm pretty sure it was a PBS
documentary, The Frozen, Frozen.
I think so, yeah, that's
pretty cool.
Yeah, that's basically out of our
office, most of the
coverage, kind of campy and around
brook.
Yeah
Yeah what really gets fish in these
marshes is the
river will have much more thermal
resistance, it'll have much volume
because it's a lot deeper so when
the water over tops the bank on
the upper end and flows through
the marsh it's much shallower.
It's typically a dark bottom so if
it's sunny day the sun will pick
that dark bottom and warm the water
up so then when
The water travels through
the marsh and exits at its
downstream location it
will Basically create
a temperature gradient where it's
meeting the river and that's what's
going to bring those fish into the
marsh They want to go up there and
spawn that being said when
we have a warm-up and
Then things cool down really quickly
You'll actually start to see warmer
temperatures in the river
Comparatively to the marshes and
that kind of shuts things down until
it warms back up
The male fish will basically
start to show up on the marshes as
soon as the ice breaks up and
then the females will start to find
a couple hanging around in the
lower portions of the marsh around
38 to 40 degrees and then things
really start going crazy when you
get to that 42 to 44
degree mark and then go well
into when it's even upwards
of that.
Are low, the spawning marshes
will not have any water in them.
So high water that we have right now
is excellent. It's actually one of
the highest I've seen it in my five
seasons of doing this.
But that being said what you really
need is the water to maintain
its high level status.
One of the worst things that can
happen for a walleye spawn is for
the water to come up really fast all
the fish will enter the upper ends
of the marshes they'll lay all their
eggs and then if the water rapidly
drops after that all of those eggs
are left high and dry so.
What you really want for successful
water spawning on the system here is
high consistent water and
you also like to see a relatively
stable climb in water temperatures
without massive fluctuations.
Some years when we've observed
really rapid warm-up followed by
a long duration of colder
temperatures, we have seen
that cause some
disarray
in the success of any given
year we observed.
And if you guys also have that story
on the trial you did.
The amount of those little guys that
we catch basically tells us how
well the fish did up here any given
spring.
Not sure if you guys or
what kind of marsh visits you
had with walleyes for tomorrow, but
at the upper end of this marsh
there is a project
type, it's pretty common for the
spawning marshes that we call
marshes, as there's been a long
history of roads being built,
there's a big railroad going through
one, private landowners
making roads and trails,
so kind of just restoring that
is the intention there.
We worked it out quite a bit there
at Gettner's people's.
So what? We worked about quite a bed
there at the Gettler's people.
Yeah.
Yeah they're great.
They're well funded they usually
have the financial backing to you
know do all the cool
extracurricular stuff that we want
to do.
Like some of those movement studies
that we've done, like there's no way
we'd be able to afford that just on
the state budget with our groups,
like Walleyes for Tomorrow and many
others on the system.
In the fall of 2021,
we tagged 74 adult
walleye in Lake Winnebago proper,
so tagging them in the fall.
In the lake basically indicating
that those are true Winnebago
resident fish and then we
were with several things we were
looking at there. One of the primary
purposes of that was to see the
proportions of fish that
ran up the Wolf River, the Fox
River, or stayed in the
Lake to spawn and from that
study we saw 91 percent of
fish run up the wolf river.
So the wolf river is most definitely
the most prolific productive
spawning area for the Winnebao
system Alright.
The Winnebago system wildlife
population and its general success
really does pay respect to
the amount of spawning habitat and
the quality of spawing habitat that
we have up here on the wolf.
It's about a hundred miles from
Lake Huygen up to the Shawano Dam
of undamned river.
So a lot of connected floodplain
and wetland between here and there
providing a lot of areas for
fish to spawn successfully.
There's some marshes that will
operate at certain water levels
and other marshes that
require other ones.
So, you know, we have our low water
area marshes that we'll target and
our high water area marshes we
target. But this one right here that
we're in, it's kind of the New
London area complex.
We have Bernagers, Wolf Rats,
Leslie's and Hortonville Flats.
And this has been one of the most
pro-lip-expanding marshes on the
system documented all the way back
to Gordon Friego's work way back in
the 1960s.
The lower ends of the marshes
are typically where the
female fish will stage up before
going into the, oh
that's a big pike, that's probably
35 plus.
The females will stage down in the
lower end before
going up to the upper
end of the marsh to actually drop
their eggs and spawn.
The upper ends are typically shower
where you'll see more of that marsh
grass getting blown back and active
current up there and we
typically like to focus our survey
efforts down in these lower end
to capture pre-spawn
fish and then basically leave the
upper ends alone, let the fish
spawn.
It's long, though.
I think it's the deep water.
We're in six and a half feet right
here. We are not even going to see
everywhere.
It's like, when the water
comes up on the wall, anglers
can also struggle.
The fish just have so much more area
to spread out.
Also, it can just be a little
bit more difficult to fish in the
traditional ways a lot of river
fishermen do when flows are
extremely high.
We can also have struggles with our
survey boat here in the marshes.
If the water exceeds much over five
feet, the electricity doesn't really
penetrate down much further than
that, so we kind of have to go
really slow and then maybe
try to get some more shallow areas.
But yeah, this is just like
interesting to see, honestly, of the
last...
It's gonna be good for us.
Jason had lost a belt on the
truck, it's getting cold.
I love trucks.
I love the trucks.
Oh really? Whatever one of them is
that good?
It's like a 20-25 ain't it?
Yeah, 40 trucks.
I'm probably not going to set the
nets today.
Mostly females out here, it's nice,
I'm not gonna lie.
It's down here, we're not getting
anything, like until we got to that
second finger, we really didn't see
much.
I think it's more so a factor of how
deep it is down here, we got seven
feet in the back of the boat right
now.
I can see fish on graph too if
I'm just not touching them.
We'll have a couple of emails on
that. For us on the other side,
it'll be a first start.
Here as well.
The Winnebago system is very shallow
so it doesn't have nearly as much
thermal resistance as
other inland bodies of
water that you know might be 50, 60,
80 feet deep.
Look at Green Lake, you know it
doesn' really freeze that well
because of how deep it is and how
much volume of water there is there.
Lake Winnebargo is 137,000
acres and has a max depth of 21
feet so we get really good solid
ice. It's usually one of the
first areas to get good solid
nice
Lake Porygon is a pretty well-known
hot spot for walleye fishing on
the ice.
That is the furthest
upstream pool lake
of the system.
You got the Wolf River turning
into Lake Porygan.
Lake Poygon is highly connected to
Lake Winnikani.
The Wolf River then conjoins
with the Fox River meeting
at the confluence where
it enters Lake View-the-more
and then both of those River's
exit B.
Exit Lake Butamore as the
Fox River through Oshkosh before it
enters Lake Winnebago.
Shocking okay
You can maybe turn it up a little
bit.
Zach, how you doing up there?
Is that my success rate?
No, I was wondering if you were
thinking about a career change yet,
if you liked it or not.
I'm a volunteer!
It's usually a pretty popular
thing for our volunteers to enjoy.
You could shock the entire shoreline
of a, you know,
average inland walleye lake and
see a fraction of the amount of
fish that we could capture here in,
you know, under an hour on
certain days. I wouldn't say today
is necessarily a incredibly high
catch day, but.
Or probably handle a couple hundred
fish by the end of the day.
If that sun could stay out, that'd
be nice.
I didn't see anything.
Catch and release!
Do you guys specifically cover,
like, outdoors stuff?
Uh, not necessarily.
That'd be cool though.
I'd really enjoy that, but, you
know, we're doing a lot of politics,
you're just, people, you know,
doing interesting stuff.
Politics suck.
That's what I like.
If you work in fish management
or if you work for the DNR
in general, you're like, oh, I
wanted to work there because it's
fish and wildlife, but you actually
get into quite a bit of politics.
Oh yeah, I can imagine.
But in our reality, the politics
really are what support
and fund our work, so it's
very important.
Jason, I think I'll
have a brief fail effort up here.
But when you think about walleye
spawning, you do not think about
fish swimming around a flooded
forest in most areas.
Very unique.
So if you get a shot of that right
there, that is the Bernerger
Bank Cut. Right now, when the water
is so high, the
water is going to flood the river
regardless, because it's going
to overtop the bank even where that
bank cut does not exist.
But in lower water years, that
really helps to facilitate water
getting into the marsh.
It's actually really impressive how
much water for it's doing.
And then you can see it feeds
directly into the Marsh.
And again, this is one of the
most successful, most productive
walleye spawning marshes on the
entire system. You can see that
little cut right through the woods
there.
Looks like you could even drive the
boat through there on a day like
today.
That one really gets flowing around
6-7 feet, and
right now we're approaching 10 feet.
Got a little bit more rain in the
forecast as well.
In addition to providing
aeration and keeping the eggs
free of sediment and debris
as they develop the
water flow through the marsh, also
back into the Wharf River
and subsequently down into
the pool lakes on the system where
the zooplankton hatches, which is
their primary food source of larval
fish, are much more abundant.
The faster a
larval fish can get a piece of
zooplankton in front of its face,
the more likely it is it's
going to survive.
That also plays into temperature.
Temperature can be correlated
to more
or less productive zooplankton
booms.
If you have a
15-0
Hole tag two one three
six six
Good to go.
Here, uh, logs fell off, I think.
What? Oh, yeah.
There's this thing right there.
Should I get this recap out of the
way?
Record fresh recaps this year,
unless you think they're from that
same day, obviously these aren't
from the same day.
Those are fish we probably tagged a
couple days ago, you see how bright
yellow the tag is still.
Your very common Winnebago
system walleye will look like.
15.6 and the whole tag
number is 208411.
Yeah, that is a recap, right?
No!
14.9!
More!
15-0!
Ma, 16'7
No! 16-1!
No! 15-6!
Female.
Green.
19'2".
Bunch of grass in here.
Lovey green grass 17-2.
Last head on the rock.
Tag track 213675.
Excellent sequence, right?
Correct.
Oh boy!
18.9!
Marow 18.4
14-0
May I have 16-4?
Female!
Green!
Let's go, let's go.
22-0.
Had a 28-incher yesterday.
She was spawned out there, so it
seemed a lot less impressive.
17-0!
There's a male.
17-0
14-2
13.4
Tag Jack 8-5
Female, green.
21-1.
Alright, have a nice time.
14.5
13.9
Female, green, 23,
seven.
Female, green, 22,
six.
Dunk him back in the water
Female green, 22.6.
Tag track 9-1.
No!
13.9!
Now 18-2!
Male, 18,
9.
Now 15.3
May I have a 14.6?
Yeah, 17.6!
Now 15.1
Male 16'7
Now 16.9.
Last night on the rack.
Next fish coming is a recap.
Ready for a recap?
Now 15.1.
Tag is 208.417.
4-1-1
That's 117.
Now 15-3.
Hold tag two one three seven oh
two.
Now 15.6
Now 16-1.
Male, 13'6.
May I have 15 fives?
Mayoral 16-7
Now, 14-4.
Male, 13, 9,
tag check, oh 9,
female, green,
19, 2.
Now, 15.7!
May I have a 14-2?
Mea 15.3
Mayo, 19-0,
got a tag.
May I have a 15-1?
Now 16.3
Female, green, 17-2.
Boy 18-2!
Female, green,
21-2.
May I have 15.1?
May I have 18.1?
May I have 16-7?
Mall,
14-2.
MA 16-2,
last out on the rack, tag track
2-1-3-7-2-5.
Yep.
Female, green, 19,
1.
Okay, check on the next one.
Female, green, 20.0,
tag check, 27.
Boy! 15-1!
Boy, 15-2!
Boy, 15.8.
Boy, 15.1!
Boy 16.5
Boy, 15.5!
Boy, 14.7!
Sprint girl
Nineteen-four!
Tag check 3-5.
Now 16'6
Merrill, 19-3.
Now 14-8.
Now, 14.6.
Now 14-0.
Now, 17.6
Now 14-5.
15-1
18-0.
14-0
15.3
16.1
The shore is on it.
Yeah, I'll get that.
It's called cold water warts or
lymphocystis.
Male 19,
do we need male 19s?
It's way back.
Second!
You need a small number of
fish for an age sample.
Thank you.
That was 19-4.
Thank you.
Marrow, 14-4,
tag check, 4-8.
Now 15-4.
Male, 14-4, last tag
on the rack, tag track 213750.
Male 16-2,
hold tag 2-1-3-7-5-1.
Male, 13, 9.
May I have 16.5?
Now 14.8.
Now 18-4.
Male 16'6
Tag check 56.
18, 18,
0
Hold tag five, oh sorry, hold tag
two, one, three, seven, five,
seven.
Now 15-4!
Mal, 15.4.
Male, 13.7
Marow 18-4
Male, 14, 9.
16.5
16 to
15-2
15.4
Fifteen, four...
15, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
13.6
15.7
15-3 last tag on
the rack tag check 2 1 3 7
5 7 7 5
sorry
It's okay.
We did sack one fish, did that get
you?
No, I was...
You ready? Yep.
Now, 14.5.
Now 14-2,
hole tag 2-1-3,
7-7-7.
Male 13.7
Female, green.
24.3
Tag track two one three seven seven
eight.
What?
2-1-3!
779, I'm sorry.
I was like, I just tag-checked you.
17-2.
8-9
Mal 14.4
We need level 13s.
Nope.
Now, 13-3!
Little guy
Male 16-3
Now, 13-8.
Now, 17-1.
Marrow 15-6.
14-4
Thank you. Thank you, Jack.
15.9
15.8.
14.6
I'm surprised they go hide in there
sometimes.
Alright, probably all she wrote.
There's one more tag on the rack,
right?
Alright, we'll do one more quick run
just in the lower end here, try to
pick off some girls and then
probably get
back on the trailer and let you guys
be on your way.
Give me a sense of where we are,
and it looks a little different than
it might in some years, but what
is this place?
Yeah, so it's April 6th,
2026, the
River while I spawn is definitely
underway. Got some warmer weather
here coming up that will probably
really get things to
get going here.
We're in the New London area marshes
or Hortonville area
marshes.
One of the many marsh complexes that
are found along the Wolf River where
the a bago system while I come to
spawn each spring.
Most people that know anything about
walleye spawning know gravel base,
rocky shores, so how
does this fit in with walleye?
Why do they do this here?
Yeah, so if you talk to biologists
around the Midwest or even
well-educated anglers when you talk
about walleye spawning, you're going
to hear small diameter rock
or even gravel either in a
river or a windswept shoreline
on a lake that provides good
current to keep the eggs free
of sediment as well as well aerated
during the development process.
Those two water quality parameters
here on the Wolf River are the same,
however the substrate on
which the walleye spawn is very
different. So the Winnebago strain
of walleye are actually a marsh
spawning strain of Walleye, likely
the most successful marsh spawing
strain of a walleye anywhere in the
world.
The fish come all the way from
Winnebego and the Pool Lakes
anywhere between 60 and maybe
even pushing a hundred miles on
their journey upstream, so almost a
be a 200-mile round-trip journey
for them.
Basically what happens up here on
the Wolf River as well as the Upper
Fox River, the flooded
wetlands adjacent to
the Wolf river, we refer to them as
walleye spawning marshes.
The way that the water flows through
them can be dynamic with the water
from the river overtopping the bank
throughout several sections of the
entire length of the march, but the
general idea is that the Water
will enter at a upper
end location and then travel
in a directional fashion.
Down through the marsh and exit at
a lower end.
So we typically always enter the
marshes at the lower end, and that
is also what the fish will typically
do. The marshes are a lot shallower
than the main channel of the river
here, so they have a lot less
thermal resistance.
If you get a nice day, nice spring
day, and the sun's coming down,
the dark bottom of the marsh is and
the shallow water will heat up a lot
faster, so.
As the water is making its
way through the marsh, it will
actually heat up and then actually
create a little bit of a temperature
gradient at the lower end where it
meets up with the river.
The fish making their migration
upriver will feel that and enter the
marsh to go spawn.
So when we talk about walleye
habitat, I mean, there's a lot of
stories about climate change and
lake shore development,
and this is pretty unique.
And the amount of people over
decades that have made sure that
this habitat has not been
drained or dredged or put into
farmland or is still available.
Yeah, so in general the Winnebago
system is home to one of the
Midwest premier walleye fisheries.
That being said, it is 100%
sustained through natural
reproduction and the success
of that fishery really
pays due to the amount
and the quality of
habitat up here on the Wolf River
for spawning purposes.
There are different things
to happen up here like there's
different county highways that go
across the floodplain that kind of
create big dams and dikes.
There's private landowners making
trails and roads through their own
property and then there's another
one a little bit south here that has
a big rail road going through it and
due to those kind of reasons the
disruption of that connectivity
through those wetlands that is you
know typically as bad for
the water flow through those marshes
so... Groups like the Wisconsin
Department of Natural Resources,
Walleyes for Tomorrow, Shadows on
the Wolf, and many others that
financially contribute will
essentially conduct projects that
promote the water flow through those
marshes. A really common one is
either the modification or removal
of dams and dikes that may have
been put in from, you
know, maybe potential road projects
or private landowners, you
know, wanting to make their property
more accessible.
There's also
Some culvert projects that, again,
will either be put into a dam or
a high point in a bank to help
facilitate water flow, and then
another common one are bank cuts.
So in certain water level years,
the water may not be high enough at
the upper end of the marsh to
actually overtop the bank and then
get that marsh flowing.
So one of the more successful
projects we have out there is making
a cut. In the upper end
of the marsh to allow water to
flow through at lower water levels.
Right now, here today, I believe
the new London Gage is right around
97.
That is above flood stage.
We have very high water this year.
So we actually did have a bank cut
up there. I tried pointing out to
you guys, but as
of right now, the water is just
totally overtopping the bank.
In a lower water year when that's
the only spot the water can get
through there you can really go out
there and see the water gushing
through that cut there and then you
can see it feed through the entire
marsh creating that desirable flow
that we want.
When we talk about the full life
cycle of walleye they come up here
to spawn and when the fry
hatch like they're eventually gonna
float their way down, right?
Yep, so the fish,
the eggs will develop over a period
of 10 to 14 days on average,
however it can be prolonged from
that if there's colder water temps,
it's directly related to water
temps the colder the longer it will
take. And then after the fish hash
out, they're dependent on that water
flow going through that marsh to
basically facilitate what we call
larval drift.
The fish roll.
Basically, hatch out is swim up fry,
very low ability to have
any kind of locomotion.
They can basically just flip their
tail around and swim up into the
current and get carried down.
And then what they're trying to do
there is let the current take them
back into the Wolf River.
That will eventually take them into
Lake Poygon and the rest of the pool
lakes where there's zooplankton food
source is much more abundant than up
here on the Wolf River."
And when it comes to the tagging
that you're doing, like you've
got the math figured out, like
the number of people that turn that
in to give you that population
estimate.
Yep, so there's kind of two main,
I would say three main purposes of
the survey up here.
One, we're up here checking out all
the marsh conditions, getting ideas
for potential future projects.
So that's just kind of an
overarching general thing we're
doing the whole time.
Another thing is just all of our
basic biometric data.
So we're taking lengths on fish,
sex obviously, and then we do take a
male age sample.
That's a good way to look at how
our year classes documented in the
trawl survey actually get recruited
to the adult spawning stock.
And then lastly, we have our tagging
efforts. So we have a goal of
1,000 female fish every single
year. We'll usually encounter
somewhere between two and 3,000
males along the way.
The tagging on the system here has
been done going back to 1993,
so a very lengthy data set.
And we basically use those numbers.
We have the amount of fish we have
tagged, the number of fish
that are returned by anglers,
and then we also factor in tag loss
and angler tag reporting rate in
order to get a...
Order to get an exploitation
estimate on the system.
So we did have a bag reduction on
the system back in 2020,
went from a five daily bag to a
three daily bag and that
exploitation estimate that we get
there is basically the primary way
that we're evaluating what that bag
reduction does to harvest on
the
bag reduction more a result of
core reproduction or just a lot of
pressure that it gets.
The main motivation
behind the bag reduction of
2020 was a further
evaluation of angler tag
reporting rates.
We had previously estimated that
one in two, or you could say half
of anglers that caught a tagged fish
would actually return their tagged
fish. We conducted a reward
tag study and Basically
put a smaller number of tags
out that are worth $100
if an angler returns it It's
actually the same exact thing Green
Bay is doing I think you guys
covered that as well, but from that
after we basically got a corrected
tag reporting rate You just compare
the number of fish that are
Returned with the hundred dollar
rewards versus the non
reward every single year And
just using that ratio there you can
basically figure out how many people
are actually returning their tags
and we found that to be only one
in three people.
So that dropped our tag reporting
estimate down to 33%
from 50%.
So basically making our exploitation
estimates increase resulting
in the motivation for the bag
change. We like to see harvest stay
below 35% on the system and
ideally it would be below that.
You know below 20 would probably be
better off. But seeing those
very high exploitation values was
the main reason for the bag
reduction.
When you think about all of the
things that go into making this a
successful fishery, how important is
it that you have so many volunteers,
you have so many groups raising
money that people care?
It's not just how many can I catch,
but that the whole system is
thriving.
Yeah, there's a lot of passionate
groups on the system.
We have a larger group that
the DNR puts together.
It's called the Winnebago Fisheries
Advisory Committee and it has
anywhere from 25
to probably closer to 30 now,
different fishing clubs and other
organizations on the systems.
We all get together, we look at the
data, what the population current
status is at and as of right now,
we have had a pretty lucky streak of
production on the System.
That's what the system...
Relies on.
You know we do have very high
harvest but that being said we have
very high exploitation so if we
have a I guess you could say low
or lack of production on the system
for a number of years the amount of
fish getting taken out isn't going
down so you know the combination of
low production and high exploitation
that's the recipe for a crash and
again as of now going back to 2016
we've had almost nothing but average
to above average year classes show
up with many notable near record
year classes showing up in that time
frame.
There hasn't been too much call to
action on
the walleye population as
of right now, but we're always
in communication with all those
different groups out there.
Another big thing with the groups
is they actually help us conduct the
work.
The management crew that covers
Winnebago System walleye management
is a team of typically three people,
so utilizing not
only volunteers, we do have
different DNR staff from different
parts of the state help
us out too.
Those volunteers play a huge role.