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Regular readers of our newsletter may recall that TCTU has adopted Neonic-treated seeds as its key advocacy issue for 2026. To learn more about these dangerous insecticides, and what we plan to do about them, please read the document below. If you would like to join our efforts, please click here to fill out a brief survey.
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Thanks to all those who attended our chapter gathering last night. Special thanks to our guest speakers including Randy Arnold, Kevin Wier, Zander Cummins and Kasey Yallaly. If you want to get to work with Randy on Habitat Projects in Wisconsin, email him: [email protected] If you want to get involved with Foster the Outdoors, email them: [email protected] If you want to attend Neonics Lobby Day at the Capitol, you can find details and registration here You can find a pdf version of the presentations below. If you'd like to watch a video of Kasey's presentation, you can find it on our YouTube channel here. Don't forget to like and subscribe. See you next month! by Yves Charron
Good day fellow TCTU members, Finally got some warm weather so we can all head outside and do some fishing. I had the chance to fish with some TCTU friends. Hope you were able to get out too and enjoy this warmer weather. Here is a 1-page primer on Neonics for hunters and anglers, prepared by the TCTU Neonics Advocacy Team by Jim Sauter If you are like me, you enjoy watching the birds almost as much as catching trout when wading our streams. According to Andrew Halberg in his "Stop the Thud" bird study at the U of M, one of the most susceptible birds for colliding into windows can often be seen by many of our streams- the Warbler. We should start seeing them reappear in Minnesota in April and May. Quote of the Month: "Approximately 365 million to over 1 billion birds are killed by colliding with windows in the United States every year... The total decrease in bird populations over the last 50 years is about 2.9 billion birds." His study also looks at ways to help mitigate this issue. Andrew Halberg, Ph.D. Candidate, U of M. Stop the Thud Study For more information about Andrew's study, click here. Our days are getting longer, and we seem to have passed the coldest days of the year. I have not yet ventured to any streams yet, but I'm hoping to get out there in the coming weeks as our air temperatures start hitting the 40 and even 50 degree mark. Catch and release season is open for trout in many Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa streams. This is also the time of year when we begin gearing up for the upcoming TCTU Streamkeeper season. STREAM MONITORING IN 2026 As we begin the 2026 stream monitoring season, this is a good opportunity for you to get involved. We have two categories of stream monitors. 1. Targeted Streamkeepers- TCTU has stream monitoring teams that are taking chemical tests on nine streams around the metro area. The TCTU streams include Belle Creek, Brown's Creek, Eagle Creek, Hay Creek, Ike's/ MOA Creek, Little Cannon River, South Branch Vermillion, South Branch Whitewater River, and Trout Brook. Our targeted teams for 2026 are complete. 2. General Streamkeepers. These are members that are randomly monitoring streams during the season at times and locations of their choosing. We invite and encourage any TCTU member to join our general streamkeeper group. The chemical monitoring season begins in April and concludes at the end of October. If you have an interest in becoming a General Streamkeeper in the upcoming season, please contact me at: [email protected] We plan on conducting on-stream training in April. Be sure to check the events page on our website in the coming month to sign up. More information will also be in the March newsletter. TCTU STREAMKEEPER TRAINING We will do on-stream water quality chemical training for new Streamkeepers, current Streamkeepers that need some refresher training, and anyone that has interest in learning more about taking chemical water tests. We will follow the Izaak Walton League Save Our Stream (i.e. SOS) protocol and learn about taking measurements including water temperature, clarity, nitrates, nitrites, pH, alkalinity, hardness, phosphate, and salt. We will also discuss the updated Google Form that we will use to record the data. Date: Saturday, April 18, 2026 Time: 10:00 am Location: TBD. An event link with the location will be available soon. If you want to see some of our monitoring results from prior years, you can create an account and log into the Clean Water Hub at: https://www.cleanwaterhub.org/account/login 1. Log in with email address and password 2. Scroll down and click “Search Sites” and enter TCTU 3. Scroll down and click “My Organizations" 4. Select either “Non Target Waters TCTU” or “TCTU-Target Streams” 5. Please note that we have two pages of streams for Targeted Streams 6. Click SOS Chemical to find our data from prior years. We also have the biological test results that we gathered at Eagle Creek and the Whitewater River on the Clean Water Hub. SALT WATCH, JANUARY 2026 Special thank you to Abby Hileman from the Izaak Walton League of America for her contributions as we recently completed the Salt Watch at the end of January. Results and a more detailed report from our partner organization, the Izaak Walton League, will be forthcoming in future newsletters. Source: Abby Hileman, Salt Watch Coordinator, Izaak Walton League of America "Did you know that one teaspoon of salt has the potential to permanently pollute five gallons of water? Once salt enters the environment, there is no feasible way to remove it. As it does not break down, salt continually builds up in our soils, groundwater, and surface waterways. Most water utilities also do not have the funding or infrastructure to remove salt from drinking water. Readings like Harold Swalik's (i.e., see results below) at the Mall of America stream are over the chloride threshold (230mg/L) of what the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers to be chronically toxic to freshwater aquatic life. These concentrations are expected to rise as increasing temperatures cause snowmelt and rainfall to wash even more salt into our streams, putting further strain on aquatic life. Monitoring our waterways and sharing results are both crucial steps to starting the conversation about smart salting practices, as we can always do better when it comes to balancing the scale on environmental protection and public safety." Thank you to all our Streamkeepers for your great work in helping to monitor our streams! SALT/ CHLORIDE READING 2026 OBSERVER: Harold Slawik OBSERVER NOTES: The habitat work from last summer on MOA Creek is progressing well. LOCATION: MOA/ IKE'S CREEK DATE: February 6, 2026 Chloride Reading: 283 mg/l, Better than usual but still very high Water temperature was 46.2 degrees C Chloride (Cl), mg/L readings
Streamkeeper Harold Slawik did an AI query about our chloride testing, and this is what he discovered: "I am using a Quantab brand chloride test strip kit provided by the Izaak Walton League of America to measure the chloride levels in a local stream. What chloride compounds will the test strip detect in addition to sodium chloride (salt)? AI Response: Great question — and the chemistry behind the Quantab strip is key to answering it. The strips work by reacting with chloride ions (Cl⁻) in solution. The strip is impregnated with silver dichromate (Ag₂Cr₂O₇). When dipped in water, chloride ions react with silver ions from the silver dichromate to precipitate insoluble silver chloride, turning the strip from brown to white. The length of the white region indicates chloride concentration. The critical point is that the strip detects the chloride ion itself, not any specific chloride compound. This means it will respond to the dissolved Cl⁻ ions released by any soluble chloride salt in the water, regardless of what cation (positive ion) is paired with it. Common chloride sources in streams that would be detected include:
That's all for now. Tight lines. Jim Sauter TCTU Streamkeeper Coordinator PHOTOS MOA/ IKE'S CREEK HABITAT WORK, May 12, 2025 Relocating Brook Trout During Habitat Work Photos by Jim Sauter by Bob Luck
Regular readers of this column may be aware that I am a snowbird, spending a couple of months each year in Asia where the weather is warmer and the food is better, unless you are a fan of green Jello hot dish garnished with tater tots. This year I thought I was pretty smart, getting out of town just ahead of a polar vortex that sent temperatures way below freezing and caused shelf ice to form on spring fed creeks. It didn’t last long; I understand that temps have been climbing into the 40s and even the 50s. I now get taunted just about every day by friends who are letting me know how much fun they are having on area streams while I am sweating in the tropics. There is no way I can hold a grudge against friends enjoying a day on the stream, but a 50-degree day in February is a guilty pleasure if there ever was one: more evidence of a changing climate that promises to bring more hot weather, more droughts and more intense summer rain events to put stress on our streams. I have heard often that “these are the good old days” in the Driftless Area. Due to less intensive farming, better agricultural practices and legislation such as stream buffer laws, fish populations have never been higher, and the fishing has never been better since European settlers first showed up with their wheat seeds and steel plows. That has been my experience, too. I catch more fish now than I did growing up in Madison the 1970s, or when I first moved to the Twin Cities in the late ‘80s, and when I look at the DNR maps of trout streams, there are more blue and green highlighted streams than there were twenty or thirty years ago. QUOTE OF THE MONTH
Bob Luck, Woolly Buggers Don't Count "A friend told me that fish caught on Woolly Buggers don't count, but that is sour grapes." Spoiler alert. I agree with Bob. Catching trout with streamers do count and are a key strategy for catching big fish. I discovered when reading Bob's book that the title is a bit misleading since he caught a 20 incher using this classic fly. Personally, I have caught some of my largest trout using a fancy variation of the classic Woolly Bugger called the JQ Streamer (i.e., formerly the CQ Streamer). When taking the Orvis fly tying class in St. Louis Park, guess what fly was the first one on the list? WB! A classic. I have included fly tying instructions for these flies in the photo section. Thanks to Paul Johnson for his contribution. INTRODUCTION Greetings from the TCTU Streamkeepers. Welcome to 2026! As always, we are anxiously anticipating the upcoming season. I have found this to be a good time to restock my fly boxes. Perhaps some more Woolly Buggers? One of my fishing friends braved the 25 degree temps recently in Wisconsin and caught a lot of fish. He was finding success with some egg patterns. I personally usually wait until the temps reach the 40's. I visited Waseca yesterday, and got a Minnesota geography lesson from a friendly farmer who told me his family has a “medium-sized” 1700-acre corn and soybean operation in Faribault County. The county seat of Faribault County is Blue Earth. Faribault County is just south of Blue Earth County, whose county seat is Mankato. Faribault is the county seat of Rice County which is Northeast of Blue Earth County. In between Blue Earth and Rice Counties is Waseca County, whose county seat is, thankfully for a poor cheesehead like me, Waseca.
If you have bothered to read this far, you may be wondering what I was doing in Waseca. I was attending a singularly important event for trout anglers: the 2026 Minnesota Neonic Forum.
Twin Cities TU will hold elections for its Board of Directors at the annual meeting on January 26, 2026. We have seven open board seats and six qualified candidates. Voting will be done by show of hands for the following slate:
Current Board members running for a 3-year term (click on name to learn about them) Brian Bredenberg Tommy Bonner Mike Rude Doug Moran New Candidates Brad Poff (running for a 3-year term) Brad has been a volunteer for a number of organizations, including University of Wisconsin, School of Veterinary Medicine Alumni Association and Alumni Advisory Board, and UpEnding Parkinson’s. He was co-founder and GM of Augmentix, Inc. a medical device company that was sold to Boston Scientific. Brad has recently become active with TCTU and wants to do more to help with day-to-day activities toward accomplishing overall organizational goals.In particular, as a scientist/veterinarian, he hopes to help network with environmental leaders, understand publications and learn from other chapter efforts. Joe Slavec (running for a 2-year term to replace James White) Joe is an avid trout angler and "ecologist at heart" who feels a calling to pass on the resource and help in the conservation of trout streams. He is the owner of Minneapolis Garage Builders and a volunteer with Sigma Chi and the Lake Sarah association. Joe hopes to add energy and enthusiasm to support and develop current goals, and provide creative thinking for future goals related to our cause. Our State Council, MNTU, is recruiting a Communications Director. For details on the position, please see the PDF document below. If you feel you may be a good fit, please apply (details on how to apply are in the PDF). If you know somebody who might be a good fit, please share! Thanks to all those who attended our chapter gathering last night, and special thanks to Carrie Jennings and Lucas Rhoads for a couple of great presentations.
You can find pdf versions of the presentations below. If you'd like to watch a video of the presentations, you can find it on our YouTube channel here. Don't forget to like and subscribe! Our friends at our sister chapter in Wisconsin are gearing up for their annual fundraiser. They have raffle tickets available, and are looking for donations to their silent auction. Read below to see how you can help. The Annual Meeting of Twin Cities TU will be held on Monday, January 26th 2026 at 7 pm at the Gnome Craft Pub in St. Paul and via Zoom. Agenda and Registration information follow:
Register here Agenda: 5:30 Social time (food and beverage available for a fee) 7:00 Kickoff and President's Report 7:10 Treasurers' Report 7:15 Introduction to Board Candidates and Election of Board Members 7:30 Discussion and Vote on Proposed Bylaw Changes 7:45 "The State of the State"--Presentation by John Lenczewski, Executive Director, MNTU 8:30 Finish Anybody is welcome to attend this meeting, but only members with dues paid will be allowed to vote. Check out the latest newsletter from our friends at the Driftless Area Restoration Effort! TCTU is happy to announce that we will be offering scholarships for youth to attend a Trout Unlimited sponsored summer camp. These camps are a great way to introduce a teen or to help a teen further their appreciation for the need to protect our cold-water fisheries. They will also have an opportunity to fish in some of the local waters.
To find out what kinds of camps are available, click on this link, TU Summer Camps, to see the camps each state offers. The 2026 summer camp listing will be available soon. Once your youth has secured a spot in one of those amazing camps, you can submit an application to the TCTU board for consideration for one of our scholarships. TCTU will be offering up to five $1,000 scholarships for 2026. We will also consider offering scholarships to camps that are not sponsored by TU if they are related to cold water conservation. To download a program description and application form, click here. If you have questions, please contact [email protected] by Bob Luck
After spending yet another season missing almost all of the fish that were pointed out to me by my angling buddies, I decided that enough is enough: I have to learn how to spot them. It is pretty embarrassing that I can’t even find them as well as my wife, who has zero interest in fishing, and an eyeglass prescription that is so strong she can’t see the barn without glasses, let alone the door. My first stop was YouTube. Search “sight fishing” and you will find plenty of videos of hotshot anglers explaining their top tips for spotting trout, followed by a demonstration where they point to the river, enhance the scene for clueless viewers with an arrow pointing to a shadowy figure which may or may not look like a trout, then wade in and catch the fish which is usually enormous, especially if the narrator has a Kiwi accent. I did pick up some useful, if obvious, tips such as “stand on higher ground”, “put the sun at your back” and “look for movement”. After watching a half-dozen videos that all held pretty much the same half-dozen tips, I decided that YouTube had taken me as far as I was going to get. I needed field practice. by Jim Sauter, Streamkeepers Coordinator
Welcome TCTU members, Streamkeepers Volunteers, and Friends. We are about midway through December, and we are almost ready to close the books on 2025. This has been a great year for TCTU Streamkeepers. Thank you to all our volunteers and TCTU for your support. We appreciate all you have done for cold water streams in Minnesota and helping to ensure clean water for future generations. Our TCTU Streamkeeper teams wrapped up the bulk of our work for 2025 at the end of October. Monitoring of salt levels, temperatures, clarity, and water temperatures during the off season will continue at a much more limited basis. Early in 2006, we plan to confirm our teams for the upcoming season, take an inventory and order supplies as needed. We will also conduct an on stream training session for new Streamkeepers and as a refresher for our veteran stream monitors. On our agenda for 2026 is to continue our chemical monitoring efforts on our nine "metro" streams including Belle Creek, Brown's Creek, Eagle Creek, Hay Creek, Ike's/ Mall of America Creek, Little Cannon River, South Branch Vermillion, South Branch Whitewater, and Trout Brook, We may be asked to conduct a macro invertebrate study on some area streams such as South Creek or Little Rock Creek, probably in August or September. Another focus is to better coordinate our activities with other agencies so that our monitoring efforts help fill in gaps in the data collections. More information about our 2026 Streamkeeper monitoring season will follow in upcoming newsletters. At a recent online meeting sponsored by TU about the Clean Water Act, we were updated about some recent attacks on clean water. The TCTU Board has proposed some changes to our chapter bylaws that will be voted on at our Annual Meeting on January 26, 2026. These changes are related to the composition of the nominations committee, and the appointment of directors. To download the full text of the proposed revisions and/or a copy of our existing bylaws, please see below.
It is never too early to introduce children to the outdoors and conservation. The children’s book “Stories of Grandma Trout: Tell me a Story Grandma” describes the historic struggle for survival of native brook trout in the Driftless region in the face of beaver trapping, logging, agriculture, overfishing, and non-native species told as an oral history by a grandmother trout to her fingerling granddaughter. Set on Wisconsin’s Lowery Creek, the pair of trout are observed by two children fishing with their grandfather, who explains projects to improve trout habitat. “Stories of Grandma Trout” was written by Trout Unlimited member Bill Lamberson and illustrated by Krystal Welter, wife of Driftless legend Duke Welter, and will be available from Green Writers Press summer 2026. Author royalties will be donated to Trout Unlimited.
Distribution of the books to second grade classrooms in the Driftless region is the objective of an Embrace-a-Stream grant by the Mid-Missouri chapter of TU in partnership with Driftless region chapters. Though the book project was deemed meritorious and received partial funding, a financial shortfall in the EAS program this year left us well short of our goal of distributing two books to each of 300 classrooms in the region. With several other EAS projects facing similar shortfalls, Trout Unlimited has developed the “Give Where You Fish” program, which allows donors to target contributions to a specific EAS project from during a short window from December 1-7, 2025 (https://go.tulocalevents.org/easchallenge25/t/midmissouri). Each $20 donation to “Stories of Grandma Trout” will provide two books, one for a teacher and one for the classroom, plus access to education materials on native brook trout, aquatic insects, aquatic mammals, and geology of the Driftless, designed to accompany topics addressed in this children’s story. In addition, each donation will enter the donor into a drawing for an Abel TR native trout fly reel valued at $1,075. Help us educate the next generation about trout conservation: donate December 1-7 in support of this Mid-Missouri Chapter EAS project! Thanks to all those who attended our chapter gathering at the Gnome Craft Pub and special thanks to Eagle Scout candidate Skyler Bahr and Wisconsin DNR researcher Matt Mitro for a couple of great presentations. You can find pdf versions of Skyler's presentation on "Adopt a Drain" and Matt's presentation on "Beaver Impacts on Midwestern Trout Streams" below. If you'd like to watch a video of Matt's presentation, you can find it on our YouTube channel here. Don't forget to like and subscribe! Welcome to November! Tis the season of spawning trout and REDDS, gales and gusty winds, cooler temperatures, icing of lakes, bird migrations, and lots of leaves.
We extend a thank you to our 37 Streamkeeper volunteers for their efforts during this past monitoring season! We had a record total of 119 chemical water readings during the season on nine streams. The streams were: Belle, Brown, Eagle, Hay, Ike’s/ MOA, Little Cannon, South Branch Vermillion, South Branch Whitewater, and Trout Brook Creek. We also conducted "Repeater" Macro invertebrate testing on some sites on the South Branch of the Whitewater River last spring. Our stream water temperatures are cooling down, water levels are dropping, and spawning Redds are beginning to be seen. During this time of year, I also enjoy watching the videos and pictures from the North Shore. The waves are both beautiful, awe inspiring, and treacherous. Visitors to this year's Oktoberfish Silent Auction may have noticed the large number of bamboo rods available. Six of these rods, plus two graphite rods, are from the John Bush Collection. John has been a passionate fly angler and conservationist for many decades. He, his brother, and a group of their friends from across the Midwest were aficionados of fine bamboo rods, and got together every year to fish them. With the inevitable passage of time, their rods wound up in John's possession. John recently moved into an assisted living facility in Cedar Rapids, and was looking for a home for these rods. Hopefully a home where they would be fished frequently, and could contribute to cold water conservation. John's daughter Kendra got in touch with TCTU Chapter Member Paul Algren, who organized for them to be donated to TCTU. Thank you, John, Kendra and Paul!
Bid generously, and, if you are the lucky winner of one or more of these special rods, tight lines! by Jim Sauter
Greetings from TCTU Streamkeepers. Welcome to October. "Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with people who are doing something you don't believe is right." Jane Goodall, English Primatologist and Anthropologist, April 3, 1934- October 1, 2025 Let the dialogue continue as we strive to make a difference preserving our cold water resources and fisheries. The TCTU Streamkeepers are winding down our season as we monitor streams until the end of October. Once the temperatures start creeping below 0 degrees C, the accuracy of some of our tests diminish. We continue taking water temperatures, salt tests, and water clarity testing, but this is done on a much more random basis through late fall, winter, and early spring months. Our "official" 2026 monitoring season will start up again next April. Our Streamkeepers are ending the season with a "SPLASH." We have already set a new single season record of 111 monitoring observations for 2025, and we still have the rest of October. Last year we had a total of 75 observations, so we have already exceeded that number by 36 observations. This data is added to the Izaak Walton League Clean Water Hub and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency databases. This gives us the bigger picture about what is happening in our streams in Minnesota and beyond. To add a bit of excitement to our monitoring efforts as we conclude the 2025 season, we have launched the September/ October Splash. During this time, we are challenging all Streamkeepers and TCTU members to get out there and make some observations. You can help TCTU characterize the water quality conditions and identify stream disturbances throughout the 8 targeted TCTU streams and beyond. |
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February 2026
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