I think that's a good topic to have, we have a portfolio class.
At this whole new working area complex, we want to keep us productive while I'm working on the entire system,
but you know we've addressed it in the 1960s.
We asked them to go out and they go back to it, and they won't stop me,
and still treat us with this market right here for an increase,
which is the property understanding, why it's all packed.
Out of all the sites, we're probably going to be 15 to 20,
and this site, that's a lot of space.
I think we're going to pack here long.
And just like, you know, get a drink and drink,
and you'll be able to do more time.
Yeah, look at the multiple waters.
Okay.
Yeah.
Nice day.
I thought it'd be a lot colder.
Yeah, I thought it'd be a little giving me the 20s.
When you said that, I'm like, oh no.
They're looking like, what's he talking about?
I'm the athlete.
All right, sorry, I'm glad I'm set.
All right.
Excuse me.
No.
Sorry.
Is that nice?
That's all there is now through the past.
Ok.
Don't wait.
I'll be prepared.
See you next time.
Let's go.
Easy.
Hey, Luis.
I like to get a big one, so it's just about to be in for the bus, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, you have to send it as well.
If you do that, hold on to their 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, your hat, something
we need to pick it up, make sure to ask Angela if the juice is off before we go for it.
If we 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 try
it too hard.
So I'd rather not snap nets and just go back and pick it up the black handle once you float.
The biggest thing is trying not to knock my teeth out with the end of the pulp.
Well, there it's probably the most dangerous thing, which is also why you will be back
here.
But yeah, other than that, Jason will open the tank up with some water in there and we're
pretty much ready to go.
25 feet of water out here on the main channel.
All right, Jason, you're going to start time down.
All right, you guys ready to go?
One.
Nine.
One.
Nine.
One.
So 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
parameters there to keep the eggs free of sediment and while oxygenated is the same for when
a bigger system will arrive 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
the marsh, the marsh will basically have a directional flow going through it over toppling
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 they are kind of unique to the wind and bagel system and I would say the wind and
bagel system is probably the largest marsh spawning walleye strain, probably that's even up there.
A little pike just jumped right there, that'll get 30 inches.
Yeah right now the new London river gate is at around 9.7, we've been out here doing
this and that gate is at 1.5, when all the barges are completely dry and they're shocking
the main channel of the river so hydro graph of the Wolf River can have some pretty impressive
but you have five people on the boat down here, I've been told it's a pretty strict
before but I got the target, I mean you could probably fit five people in here it's just
at the boat.
It was already drawn in before yeah, especially you got a camera.
Yeah.
Are you guys covered with stardins peering?
No, we're just really focusing on walleye, pretty.
Have you seen a, I'm pretty sure it's a PBS documentary, The Frozen Frozen?
I think so yeah, that's pretty cool.
Well that's basically out of our office, most of the coverage kind of camping around breath.
Yeah that really gets fish in these marshes is the river will have much more thermal resistance,
much more volume because it's a lot deeper.
So when the water overtops the bank on the upper end and flows through the marsh it's
much shallower, typically a dark bottom so if it's a sunny day or the sun will hit 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.
This is our low the spawning marshes will not have any water in them so high water that
we have right now is excellent direction on the highest I've seen it in my five seasons
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 while our spawn is for the water to come
up really fast all the fish will enter the upper ends of the marshes so let all their
eggs run up the water rapidly drops after that all of those eggs are left high and dry so
what you really want for a successful all our spawn 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 observed really rapid warm up followed by a long duration
of colder temperatures we have seen that cause some disorder in the success of any given
year class we observe 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 and
you give them spring
so
not sure if you guys are what kind of marsh visits you had with walls for tomorrow but at the upper
end of this marsh there's a project type it's pretty common for the spawning 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
yeah they're great
they're well funded they usually have the financial backing to do all the cool extra
curricular 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
on the state budget without groups like walleyes for tomorrow and many others on the system
and the fall of 2021 we tagged 74 adult walleye in Lake Winnebago proper so
tagging them in the fall in the lake basically you know indicating that those are true when a
bagel resident fish and then we were with several things we were looking at that 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% of fish run up the wolf river
so the wolf river is most definitely the most prolific productive spawning area for the Winnebago
system law the Winnebago system law population and its general success really does pay
respect to the amount of spawning habitat and the quality of spawning habitat that we have
up here on the wall it's about 100 miles from Lake Pergin up to the Shano dam of
undammed rivers so a lot of connected flood train 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
water area marshes that will target and our high water area marshes that we target
but this one right here that we're in it's kind of the new London area complex we have
vinegars wolf rafts Leslie's and Hortonville flats and this has been one of the most prolific
spawning marshes on the system documented all the way back to Gordon Prego'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 part that's about 35 bucks
the females will stage down in the lower end before going up to the upper end of the marsh
you actually drop their eggs and spawn the upper ends are typically shower you'll see more
that marsh trash getting blown back and active current up there and we typically like to
focus our survey efforts down in the lower end to capture pre-spawn first and then basically
leave the upper ends alone like the first spawn
so
I think it's the deep water we're in six and a half feet right here we're not even gonna see everything
well it's like when the water comes up on the low angles 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 the river fishing can do and flows are extremely high
we can also have struggles with our survey back here in the marshes
the water exceeds much over five feet the electricity
it doesn't really penetrate down much further than that so I kind of have to go really small
and then maybe try to get some more shallow areas
so yeah this is just like interesting to see honestly it leaves a lot
so
so if you get a shot of that right there that is the
right now when the water is so high the water is going to flood the river
regardless because you know it's going to over top 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 water it's doing and then you can see it feeds directly
into the marsh and again this is one of the most
most productive while I'm spawning marshes on the entire system you can see that little cut
right through the woods there
so
you could even drive the boat through there on a day like today
So yeah that one really gets flowing around six seven feet and right
now we're approaching ten feet so
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 I'm back into the wolf river and some
secretly 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 eight
six
five
eight
I'm going to take a look at this one.
I'm going to take a look at this.
I'm going to take a look at this one.
I'm going to take a look at this one look.
I'm going to take a look at this one.
I am going to take a look at this one.
Don't forget this thing.
No, don't forget this thing.
No, no, no, no.
15-0.
Hold tight.
2-1-3-6-6-8.
Good go.
You're out.
Log fell off.
I don't have a motor right here.
There's a thin glass right out of it.
Good.
Now I get this recap out of the way.
Record fresh recaps this year, unless you didn't get them the same day.
Obviously these aren't from the same day.
This is a fisher probably tagged a couple days ago.
You see how bright yellow the tag is still.
You're very common.
One of the biggest system walleye here.
15.6 and the whole tag number is 208-411, yeah that was a recap right?
Yeah.
No!
14-9.
No!
15-0.
No!
15-0!
No! 16-7!
No! 16-1!
No!
female green 19-2 a bunch of grass in here
have a green grass 17-2 last time on the rock
drag track 2-1-3-6-7-5
salar sequence
okay
Oh boy, 18-9.
May I 18-4?
Let me take you home.
May I 14-0?
May I 16-4?
BMO!
Green!
22-0?
I had a 28 entry yesterday.
She was spawned out there, so I've seen a lot less impressive.
17-0?
13-2?
13-4?
13-5?
15-0?
Green!
21-1?
Nice one.
13-5?
13-9?
Green! 23-7?
Green!
22-6?
Green!
22-6?
13-9?
May I 18-2?
May I 18-9?
May I 15-3?
May I 14-6?
May I 17-6?
May I 15-1?
May I 16-7?
May I 16-9?
Last time on the rack, next fish coming as a recap?
May I 15-1?
Tag is 208417?
Oh, gotcha.
May I 15-3?
Hold tag, 2-1-3-7-0-2?
May I 15-6?
May I 16-1?
May I 15-6?
May I 15-5?
May I 16-7?
May I 14-4?
May I 13-9?
Tag check, oh, 9?
Green, 19-2?
May I 15-7?
May I 14-2?
May I 15-3?
May I 19-0?
Got a tag?
May I 15-1?
May I 16-3?
May I 17-2?
May I 18-2?
Green, 21-2?
May I 15-1?
May I 18-1?
May I 16-7?
May I 16-3?
May I 14-2?
May I 16-2?
Last time on the rack, tag check, 21-3-7-2-5?
Yeah?
Fimo green, 19-1?
May I get a tag check on the next time?
Fimo green, 20-0?
Tag check, 27?
15-1.
15-2.
15-8.
15-1.
15-5.
Boy, 15-5.
Boy, 14-7.
Spent girl.
19-4.
10-check 3-5.
No, 16-6.
No, 19-3.
No, 14-8.
No, 14-6.
No, 14-0.
No, 17-6.
No, 14-5.
15-1.
18-0.
14-0.
15-3.
16-1.
Yeah, we'll get that.
It's called cold water works or lymphocystis.
No, 19.
We need low 19s.
It's way back.
Back it.
We need a small number of fish for an age sample.
That was 19-4.
No, 14-4.
Tag-check 4-8.
No, 15-4.
No, 14-4.
Last tag on the rack.
Tag-check 2-1-3-7-5-0.
No, 16-2.
Hold tag 2-1-3-7-5-1.
No, 13-9.
No, 16-5.
No, 14-8.
No, 18-4.
No, 16-6.
Tag-check 56.
15-8-10.
Hold tag 2-1-3-7-5-7.
No, 15-4.
No, 15-7.
No, 18-4.
No, 14-9.
16-5.
16-2.
15-2.
15-4.
15-8.
13-6.
15-7.
15-3.
Last tag on the rack.
Tag-check 2-1-3-7-5-7-5-0.
That was so good.
We didn't sack one fish, did I get you up?
No, I was-
You ready?
No, 14-5.
No, 14-2.
Hold tag 2-1-3-7-7-7-7.
No, 13-7.
Good girl.
You may have green.
24-3.
Tag-check 2-1-3-7-7-8.
2-1-3-7-7-9, I'm sorry.
I was like, I just tag-check 2-1-7-2-7-2-8-9.
Yep.
No, 14-4.
We need 12-13s.
No.
No, 13-3.
Little guy.
No, 16-3.
No, 13-8.
No, 17-1.
No, 15-6.
14-4.
Tag-check 9-6.
15-9.
15-8.
14-6.
I'll be surprised they can hide in there sometimes.
All right, probably all she wrote.
There's one more tag on the rack, right?
All right, 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
if you guys be on your way.
I guess 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 6, 2026.
The Wolf River Wall I spawn is definitely underway.
Got some warmer weather here coming up that will probably really get things
to get going here.
It's one of the most important, Hortonville area marshes.
One of the many marsh complexes that are found along the Wolf River
where the Winnebago system all I come to spawn each spring.
Most people that know anything about walleye spawning know gravel-based,
rocky shores, so how does this fit into with walleye?
What 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,
a wild diameter rock or even gravel either in a river or a wind-swept shoreline
on a lake that provides good current to keep the
eggs free of sediment as well as well aerated during the development
process, and 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 spawning strain
of walleye anywhere in the world. The fish come all the way
from Winnebago and the pool lake, anywhere between 60 and maybe even
pushing 100 miles on their journey upstream, so almost a
could be a 200 mile round-trip journey forum. 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
over topping the bank throughout several sections of the entire
length of the marsh, 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 marshes and the shallow water will heat up a lot faster,
so as the water is making its way through the marsh,
it'll 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 up river will feel that
and enter the marsh to go spawn. So when we talk about
habitat, 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 for this. 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 that happen up here, like there's different county highways
that go across the floodplain that kind of create big dams and dykes. There's private land
owners making trails and roads through their own property and then there's another one
and a little bit south of here that has a big railroad going through it.
Due to those kind of reasons, the disruption of that connectivity
through those wetlands, that is typically viewed 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 dykes that may have been put in from
maybe potential road projects or private land owners
wanting to make their property more accessible.
There's also covert 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 over top 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 gauge is right around 9.7. 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 over topping the bank. So 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 whole life cycle of wall,
they come up here to spawn and when the fry hatch, like they're eventually
going to 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 is colder water times, it's directly
related to water times. The colder the longer it will take. And then
after the fish hatch out, they're dependent on that water flow going through that
marsh to basically facilitate what we call larval drift. The fish will
basically hatch out and swim up fry. Very low ability to have
any kind of locomotion. They can basically just flip their towel 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 back into Lake Puygan and
the rest of the pool lakes where there's no plankton 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 mass figured out, like the number of people
I turned that in to give you that population estimates, right? 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
Langson 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 trail survey actually get recruited
to the adult spawning stock. And then lastly we have
our tagging effort. So we have a goal of 1,000 female fish
every single year. We'll usually encounter somewhere between 2 and 3,000
miles along the way. The tagging on the system here has been done going back
to 1993. So we have 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
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
an exploitation estimate that we get there is basically the primary way that we're evaluating
what that bag reduction does to harvest on the system.
Is the bag reduction more a result of poor reproduction or
just so out of the 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 1 in 2 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 effort we basically got a corrected
tag reporting rate. You just compare the number of fish that are
returned with the $100 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
1 in 3 people. So that dropped our tag reporting estimate down to 33%
to 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. 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 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 and 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 system 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 so that hasn't been too
much call to action on the walleye population
as of right now but you know 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 you know the management crew that covers one of bagels system
all I management is a team of typically three people so you know utilizing
not only volunteers we do have different DNR staff
from different parts of the state help us out too
but those volunteers play a huge role
Thank you