Sep. 9—The group of anglers at Seven Mile Creek Wednesday weren’t carrying fly rods or fishing poles but a battery-powered backpack and wand that stunned fish that floated to the surface.
Tanner Stevens, assistant supervisor with the Department of Natural Resources Fisheries office in Hutchinson, was joined by colleagues Tony Sindt, Hannah Anema and Chris Foster as they slowly walked through the shallow waters of the creek. One swept the circular electrode through the water, another netted the stunned fish and put them in a bucket carried by another staffer while the fourth recorded data of what they were seeing and finding.
It’s a survey they do every fall on the same four stretches of the creek, creating a long-term record of the number and variety of fish, any abnormalities on fish and water quality data.
“We usually get a couple of trout when we do this,” Stevens said. “Mostly we see small game fish, darters, minnows, shiners and suckers mainly.”
The brown trout are stocked each spring in Seven Mile Creek, one of a few designated trout streams in the region. A few hundred fairly large trout weighing nearly a pound or more are put in the creek each spring, giving anglers some good fishing prospects. The stocking trout come from the DNR Fishery in Lanesboro.
“Whenever we’re out here, we usually see someone fishing,” Stevens said. By this time of the year most of the trout have likely been fished out, while a few remain and some moved into the Minnesota River. Those getting into the muddy Minnesota River likely soon die.
“If they get in the river, they don’t do well,” Stevens said. “That’s why we stock brown trout. They tend to stay put better. Rainbows tend to travel more.”
As the group moved through a stretch of creek near the entrance to the park, Anema netted a few small fish that rose to the surface and put them in a bucket carried by Sindt as Foster started logging information the group was seeing.
“There’s some curly pondweed growing. We don’t usually see that here,” Sindt said.
After finding a few small fish in a 30-yard stretch of very shallow water, a deeper pocket produced dozens of small fish and one trout.
The group stopped to survey the fish they stunned so far before releasing them back to the creek.
They put different species in different stainless steel pans of water and quickly inspected, measured and weighed the trout so the fish could be released. The trout weighed about 12 ounces.
The first sweep of the creek produced 42 Johnny darters, 42 chubs, 83 fathead minnows and dozens of other small bait fish species.
“There’s a higher number (of fish) than normal, but there’s less diversity than usual,” Anema said.
The crew also encountered more fine silt than usual, silt that was stirred up and muddied the creek as they walked.
While a relatively clear-water creek, Seven Mile has been the focus of efforts to improve water quality that is deteriorated by farmland sediment and chemical pollution in its upper reaches.
Stevens said the fish in the creek aren’t harmed so much by chemical pollution but by too much sediment that deteriorates their habitat. He said too high of water temperatures and too high of flows are also hard on aquatic life in the creek. Increased farm drainage and higher precipitation in recent years have added to high-water flows, other than this unique year of drought.
Stevens said that while there are decent fish numbers in the lower stretch of the creek that has a bottom covered with rocks and stones, the upper part of the creek is deteriorated by sediment, and only rough fish are usually found there.
Several agencies and conservation groups have for years been working with landowners in the creek’s watershed to reduce sediment, pollutants and water flow going into the uppers stretches of the creek. Some landowners are using low- or no-till practices and planting groundcovers to hold more water and sediment on the landscape.
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