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!

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!

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!