Gems are hidden in forest ponds
BIRCHWOOD – An inch of snow had fallen overnight, creating a fresh, clean slate across the Washburn County Forest on this December morning.
As our group – Bill Smith and Dave Zeug, both of Shell Lake, and I – hiked over a meandering trail on the public property, the only signs of other animal life were the tracks of a raven, a gray squirrel and a white-tailed deer.
“Must be the last (deer) in the North Woods,” Zeug said with a chuckle.
Zeug, who finds a way to fill at least one deer tag each year in northern Wisconsin even when many hunters claim it’s a deer desert, likes to have some fun with the difference between perception and reality.
We weren’t there to debate deer issues, however.
The Washburn County Forest had drawn us for a unique fishing opportunity.
After we shuffled over about 500 more yards of undulating terrain a white expanse emerged in a depression among the oaks and pines.
“We’ve got ice,” Smith said, nodding at the crystal- and snow-covered water body ahead.
A recent warm spell had us questioning what we’d find.
But Smith, a U.S. Air Force veteran who now is even trimmer than he was during his military service, walked on with a spud and determined we had about 4 inches of ice.
The first essential was in place for my first ice fishing outing of the season.
I’d joined Smith and Zeug, both natives and nearly lifelong residents of northern Wisconsin, on a sojourn to the brook trout ponds of the Washburn County Forest. It’s not wilderness, but it is remote. And it’s a rare fishing opportunity created by an innovative state fisheries biologist.
The story goes back to 1990 when Larry Damman, a Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist, transferred to the agency’s Spooner office.
Damman was met with a professional challenge by Jim Varro, a Washburn County forester.
It’s no secret that timber production and hunting are the two primary values associated with county forests.
Varro maintained state fisheries staff needed to step up their game and help draw more people to the public properties. Well, that got Damman’s goat. “I figured I’d see what I could do to change his tune,” Damman, now retired, told me in a recent interview.
Damman had an idea. He knew some water bodies in the county forest were fishless due to various reasons. But science had proven stocking could, in certain cases, create a fishery where there had been none.
For example, Damman knew trout had been successfully planted in prairie lakes in the Dakotas and alpine lakes in the Rockies.
How about a trout stocking program in the Washburn County Forest?
He began a study water data assembled in the forest from the 1960s through the 1980s.
It featured surveys of each of the 200 lakes and ponds in the public property, including water chemistry, depths, contours, even aerial photographs.
Damman narrowed the list to a couple of dozen. He selected waters that had depths of about 15 feet maximum and had no fish community or only minnows.
The ponds he targeted were “freeze out” lakes that each winter were too low in oxygen to support naturally reproducing fish populations.
The waters had abundant insect life and zooplankton to provide food for fish.
But would it be enough to allow them to survive and grow? And could the trout make it through a winter?
To test his idea, Damman collected a couple buckets of leftover fingerling trout from the state hatchery system and dumped them in a 4-acre pond in spring.
That fall the trout were still alive and showed good growth rates.
Even more encouraging, the next spring Damman found many of the brookies made it through the winter.
It showed him brook trout had what it took to get through the coldest months, even in low oxygen conditions.
Damman also tried stocking rainbow and brown trout, but they were outperformed by the brookies.
So the concept was proven and by 1999 the Washburn County Forest trout pond program expanded to more than a dozen ponds.
Damman developed a protocol to stock the fish in spring as fingerlings (about 1.5 to 2 inches in length).
If placed in a pond with no fish community, not even minnows, the trout grow to 11 inches by October, so large they reach sexual maturity and spawn in their first year of life.
Those that live through the winter reach 15 inches in the next year and the few that attain the age of 3 can be as long as 18 or even 20 inches.
If stocked into a lake with fatheads or other minnows, the trout grow more slowly, to about 8 inches in the first fall, then larger sizes in subsequent years.
The strain of brook trout used in the Wisconsin hatchery system spawns twice and dies, Damman said, and typically doesn’t live longer than three years.
And it’s among the lowest cost stocking programs in the state. In the early years, there was essentially no expense, since the fish were excess. Now the DNR puts in a stocking quota each year.
The fish are raised at the St. Croix State Fish Hatchery and transferred by ATVs to the remote ponds in buckets.
The county began publicizing the new opportunity. Anglers began hiking and driving to the waters to take advantage of the put-and-take fishery.
“It turned out pretty well,” Damman said. “I think it at least got the forester’s attention.”
The program is now managed by DNR fisheries biologist Craig Roberts.
This spring the DNR stocked approximately 10,200 fingerling brookies in 15 ponds in the Washburn County Forest, or about 680 fish per pond, Roberts said.
No natural reproduction of the trout has been documented in the ponds, so annual stocking is required to maintain the fishery.
Washburn County Forests maintains a list and map of the stocked waters. Some are close to parking spots and roads and others are from 1 to 2 miles from the nearest vehicle access point.
The ponds have special regulations, including a longer than normal trout fishing season (it runs from the first Saturday in May through the first Sunday in March).
The daily bag limit is five trout of any size. To help preserve the trout fisheries, anglers are asked to not bring in live minnows for bait.
I’ve made the trek north to fish the ponds in two previous winters. Smith and Zeug have developed a tradition of fishing them at first ice; this year I joined them again.
We each carried our supplies in a bucket and spudded through old holes in the ice near shore. We fished near woody structure in water that was from 2 to 5 feet deep.
After five minutes, I had a 7-inch brookie hit a small ice jig tipped with a wax worm.
I released it and was rewarded 20 minutes later when a 13-inch trout hit the same presentation. That fish was put in the creel.
Smith and Zeug also iced trout in the first hour.
With not even a breath of wind and a fresh cover of snow, the pond had a soothing hush over it.
The main sounds were groans and snaps of the ice.
Over four hours of fishing we kept five brookies; the biggest was a 14 1⁄2 incher caught by Zeug. The most productive bait was a small jig with a wax worm, but a half a nightcrawler also caught some fish.
All the trout were more beautiful than any holiday decoration I’ve seen.
They would be the centerpiece of a delicious Christmas dinner in the days ahead.
As the three of us walked out on the trail, with the only sign of other humans our tracks from the hike in, we gave thanks for the opportunity created by an innovative fisheries biologist on the county forest where they plant more than trees.