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by Jim Sauter
Greetings from TCTU Streamkeepers. As we gear up our stream monitoring efforts, this article will feature one of our eight targeted streams, give a Streamkeeper monitoring "tip of the month," announce a future training opportunity, and post some observation results.
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The Vermillion River Watershed Joint Powers Organization (VRWJPO) recently released its 2023 annual report, and it's available for review on their website by clicking the link below. 2023 Vermillion River Watershed JPO Annual Report For a quicker review, they also produced a two-page summary with some key highlights, and we've attached that here. 
by Bob Luck
If you’d like to skip the President’s Angle and scroll right down to the Cat Fly, let me cut to the chase. Please attend one or more of the following habitat events scheduled between tomorrow and June 1st: May 16 and May 19: Tree planting on Cedar Valley Creek in Southeast Minnesota. You may remember Jen Biederman talking about this stream during her habitat presentation earlier this year. A very special place! https://mntu.org/event/plant-trees-with-minnesota-trout-unlimited/ May 21: Brush removal on Little Pickwick Creek near Winona. Another beautiful Driftless area stream, where our friends at the WinCres chapter are doing a great job and could use some help. https://mntu.org/event/win-cres-volunteer-workday-little-pickwick-creek-2/ June 1: Invasive species removal and trash pickup on TCTU’s home stream, the Vermillion. A bit closer to drive! We recently submitted our annual activity report to TU National, and here is the bottom line: in our last fiscal year, over 100 TCTU members donated over 2000 hours of their time. by Yves Charron This past April, I went fishing on the Rush with a fellow TCTU member. As we were concluding our day of fishing, he said “I will put on my special fly”. After a few drifts through the rifles, and a couple of nice fish in the net, I asked “what is so special about the fly?” He responded CAT HAIR. I did return home that day thinking I could give this a try myself since I have 4 cats at home. I took the brush and started to groom my cats. The cats enjoyed it, and I got the material needed to tie some flies. That’s what we call a WIN-WIN!  Finally got a chance to get out and try to fish with the cat flies. Conditions were not the best, but the cat flies worked! The tan color flies and the white seems to get more strikes than the gray color.  I ended up losing my trout flies on the bottom or in the trees….so I guess I will have to go back to square one and groom the cats again!
Give it a try yourself…. maybe you will have a new preferred pattern to fish the trout stream this summer. Tight lines! by Jim Sauter
Welcome to the 2024 TCTU Streamkeeper monitoring season. The good news is that our recent April and May showers have been very beneficial to our water levels in area streams. This year we are transitioning to the Save Our Stream protocol from the Izaak Walton League, and the chemical monitoring season began in April and concludes in late September or early October. We may also conduct one or more macroinvertebrate surveys in October. A new edition is out from our friends in SE MN and Iowa, including everything new about Habitat, Conservation, Advocacy, and, of course, a fishing report!
April 26, 2024 Goodhue High School Fishing Club Event
Contact- Please reach out to Dusty Hoffman to let him know you can volunteer to Guide. Email: [email protected] Cell phone: (507) 459-9851 Friday, April 26, 2024- Guided Trout Fishing Location: Creekside Park, Rushford, MN Time: Arrive 8:15 AM. 8:30 AM – 12:00 PM *Lunch provided at park while sharing stories* Guides will take groups of students to streams around the Rushford area to trout fish.
This September, Reel Recovery will be hosting another Midwest retreat for men living with cancer in the Wisconsin Driftless Area. Tom Sather from the WI Clearwaters Chapter, and Bruce Maher and Scott Wagner from the WI Kiap-TU-Wish Chapter are teaming up to host a Reel Recovery Retreat for men living with cancer at the Oxbow Hotel, Eau Claire, WI from September 4-6, 2024. Reel Recovery is a national non-profit organization that conducts fly-fishing retreats for men living with cancer. Reel Recovery's mission is to help men in the recovery process by sharing with them the healing powers of the sport of fly-fishing, while providing a safe, supportive environment to explore their personal experiences with cancer, with others who share their stories. Retreats are offered at no cost to the participants and are led by professional facilitators and expert fly-fishing instructors.  by Jim Sauter
SPRING HAS SPRUNG! TIME FOR THE TCTU STREAM MONITORING SEASON TO BEGIN Greetings from your TCTU Streamkeepers, and welcome to spring! The chemical monitoring season officially begins in April and concludes at the end of September. According to Heather Wilson with the Izaak Walton League, "Spring is here! We all know that April showers bring May flowers. Unfortunately, they also bring nitrogen-rich runoff to streams and lakes." Our monitoring efforts will be helpful in addressing this and other potential problems in our streams. Typically, we conduct a minimum of 10 observations per targeted stream with three of those after a major rain event of one inch or more. We also have many streamkeepers monitoring other streams in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and beyond on a more random basis. A new edition is out from our friends in SE MN and Iowa, including everything new about Habitat, Conservation, Advocacy, and, of course, a fishing report!
Thanks to our guest speaker, Kasey Yallaly of the Wisconsin DNR, who talked about some innovative work on one of Western Wisconsin's most beautiful streams. Cady Creek was traditionally a brook trout stream, but there has been a dramatic increase in brown trout over the past 15 years, at the expense of the brookies. Kasey described a project to remove brown trout, and the effect on the brook trout population. To view the video on YouTube click here (don't forget to subscribe). To download Kasey's slides, click below.
 Carl Nelson, Mitch Abbett, and Jim Sauter Rush River Macroinvertebrate Study, October 2023 by Jim Sauter
Greetings from TCTU Streamkeepers. Recently we formed a TCTU Streamkeeper Task Force to develop plans for our stream monitoring efforts during the 2024 season. The recommendations were presented and approved by our Board of Directors at our February meeting. An overview of our recommendations are as follows: Free Secchi Tubes are available for measuring water quality from the MPCA. You’ll need to create an account on the MPCA e-Services page, and there’s a PDF instruction guide on this website to walk you through the enrollment process. Here’s the link to the program enrollment page: https://www.pca.state.mn.us/get-engaged/find-a-site-and-sign-up.
A new edition is out from our friends in SE MN and Iowa, including everything new about Habitat, Conservation, Advocacy, and, of course, a fishing report!
If you have subscribed to our emails, you've probably already read our monthly newsletter. If not, you can find it here.
by Doug Moran The MPCA recently reported some very good news: the amount of antibiotics detected in MN waters has declined! See the article and charts below. And don't flush your old meds, drop them off at locations noted on the map here: https://mpca.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=f6e2ca44e7594dd29ff015a97aaee259 Antibiotics in Minnesota’s Lakes, Rivers, and Streams by Mark Ferrey, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency For over 15 years, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and our partners have been monitoring the presence of pharmaceuticals in surface water. While these chemicals are typically associated with the effluent of wastewater treatment plants, we have discovered that they are often present in waters across the state – sometimes in very remote lakes or rivers. This effort has included monitoring for antibiotics. Of the 32 total that we have tested, 19 have been found at least once in rivers, lakes, and streams. While some of these antibiotics are associated only with veterinary medicine, others are used in human health care. Sulfa drugs, such as sulfamethoxazole, sulfamethazine, and sulfadimethoxine, are among the most frequently detected antibiotics. Carbazole, an antibiotic used exclusively in treating swine, and erythromycin, are also detected in water.  These antibiotics, like many other chemicals of emerging concern, are found at very, very low concentrations. However, some studies have shown that even at concentrations in the part per trillion range (a few drops in 20 swimming pools!), some chemicals can adversely affect the reproduction and development of fish and wildlife. It is also possible that antibiotics in the environment can promote antibiotic resistance in bacteria – a serious and growing global health problem. The good news is that we may be seeing fewer antibiotics in our surface water in the last few years. This may be due to the growing use of pharmaceutical drop off locations in Minnesota, where residents can dispose of any unused medications – keeping them out of wastewater and our surface water. While we need more study to determine the long-term trend, it is possible that we are all making a difference in the antibiotics that end up in Minnesota’s lakes, rivers, and streams.  By Jim Sauter
Greetings from TCTU Streamkeepers! There is only one way to describe the winter of 2023-24 so far- WIERD. According to some local meteorologists, this is not a "real" Minnesota winter. This is going down as the mildest winter on record. The big question will be how this warm weather and lack of moisture carries over to the summer months and how it impacts streams and trout. A new edition is out from our friends in SE MN and Iowa, including everything new about Habitat, Conservation, Advocacy, and, of course, a fishing report!
By Jim Sauter “We are salting the Earth where it shouldn’t be salted,” - Bill Hintz, a professor at the University of Toledo Salt Watch Welcome to the New Year! As we begin the new year, I am challenging our members to think more about how we use salt in our communities. If you accept the challenge, please take the "Salt Watch" quiz from the Izaak Walton League. Better yet, order a free kit, take some samples, and enter this information into the national database. The instructions for entering the data are simple and straightforward. You can learn more about the program here. In fact, our first official entry from our TCTU chapter that I am aware of was made on July 2, 2023, at the South Branch of the Vermillion River. THANK YOU to Rowe Winecoff for his effort! Here are his results:  Name of observer: Rowe Winecoff
Date: 7/2/2023 Salt reading: 25.00 ppm (parts per million). A good low reading... Comments: I'm a stream keeper for the South Branch of the Vermillion River in Minnesota. We monitor the river each week from April to October and I am responsible for the 1st week of each month. I added the Salt Watch this year to my monitoring. This is the 1st month I’ve been able to include the photo of my salt monitoring.  by Paul Johnson
One of my favorite all-time flies is the Lage Stop & Go Soft Hackle. This pattern was developed by one of the real treasures in our little corner of the fly fishing world, Randy Lage. Over the next month, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources will be accepting applications for over 200 paid summer internships. DNR interns gain resume-building, hands-on expertise and build professional contacts while earning $19 per hour. Internships are available in a variety of specialties across the state of Minnesota.
Click "Read More" for a link to a brochure on the Internship Program including application instructions, and a list of internships. A new edition is out from our friends in SE MN and Iowa, including everything new about Habitat, Conservation, Advocacy, and, of course, a fishing report!
At our annual meeting on January 22nd, we will elect five members to the TCTU Board of Directors. The nomination period has closed, and we have exactly five candidates. Four of these candidates are current directors who are running for another term. They are: Evan Griggs, Mike Hodgens, Rick Phetsavong and Jim Sauter.
You can find their profiles by clicking on their names. Our fifth candidate, Mike Rebischke, is running for the first time. Mike is a long-time TCTU member who has been an active volunteer with Education and Habitat Projects. He has managed the Silent Auction for the last two Oktoberfish events. He is a CPA, and is particularly interested in helping our board with Financial Management, Strategic Planning and Fundraising. Thanks to all who tuned in by Zoom or showed up in person to hear Brian Nerbonne of the Minnesota DNR talk about Managing for Larger Trout. Congratulations to our Fly Box winner, Matt Obermeyer! You can find a copy of Brian's presentation, including a list of streams where Sculpin have been transplanted (slide 15), by clicking the download button below. Due to a technical issue, we did not capture a recording of last night's meeting. Oops. As a consolation prize, we'd like to refer you to one of our greatest hits videos: Melissa Wagner of the MN DNR telling the story of Heritage Brook Trout in Southeast Minnesota. 
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December 2024
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