Greetings from your TCTU Streamkeepers. We are looking forward to continuing our stream monitoring efforts, and this will be our third year working with the WISEH2O app.
We are beginning to gear up for the 2023 stream monitoring season that begins in April and concludes in October. With moderate winter temperatures and almost record snowfall so far this winter, this should bode well for our area streams!
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TU's National Magazine featured an article on the Kinni in its Summer 2022 Edition. In case you missed it, you can download and read it here.
This just crossed our desk. If you are interested or know a college-bound senior who may be, please apply!
Randy Stevens was a professional fishing guide and owned River Rat Guide Service. He loved to fish walleye tournaments, hunt water fowl and train dogs to hunt. He loved the river life and the people he met that lived it with him. Randy passed away December 17th, 2020. As a family we decided to have a tournament to honor “RRR” and do an annual silent auction in his name and start a memorial scholarship in his name. Thanks to everybody who showed up in-person and on Zoom to approve our bylaws, elect directors, and learn about Trout in the Classroom from Amber Taylor. If you missed the meeting, or would like to take another look at Amber's presentation, you can download it by clicking on the link below. If you'd like to see the segment of "Minnesota Bound" featuring Trout in the Classrom on YouTube, click here.
A new edition is out from our friends in the Southeast, including great articles on Trout in the Classroom, Nitrate Pollution, and how to plan a fishing trip. If you are interested in fishing or volunteering in Southeast Minnesota, this is required reading!
The Twin Cities Chapter of Trout Unlimited (TCTU) is committed to increasing youth involvement in cold water conservation. That is why we are excited about the TU Teen Summit, and we are offering a $450 scholarship to defray the costs.
The TU Teen Summit recruits young leaders (8th to 11th Grades) that are committed to conservation and have demonstrated leadership in their schools and communities. If you’re a teen (in 8th to 11th Grades) and interested in learning how to become a TU Youth leader in your community, build team and leadership skills, restore habitat on a service project, explore career paths in the outdoors and conservation, and – oh yeah! – FISH, then the Teen Summit is the place for you. Read all the latest news from our friends in the Southeast, including events, chapter meeting summaries, and winter fishing tips.
by Bob Luck
With a path toward dam removal and restoration becoming clear, 2022 will likely go down as one of the most important years in the history of the Kinnickinnic River since the Ice Age! The Kinnickinnic is an iconic river, boasting more than 20 miles of Class I trout water within an hour's drive of a metropolitan area that bustles with over 3 million people. And it is the only Exceptional Resource Water in the State of Wisconsin to flow through a city of over 10,000. The Kinni is home water for many TCTU members, including me.
The November Hotline from our friends in the Hiawatha and WinCres chapters is here, and once again it has some great reading. I particularly enjoyed reading about the extended fishing season in towns and state parks, and the profile of habitat champion Paul Krolak.
In case you missed our chapter meeting (or if you want to see it again), you can find a video of John van Vliet's presentation on our YouTube channel here. Don't forget to subscribe!
During the meeting, John showed another video that he and his partner Cathy created. You can find that here. John has also shared his presentation materials as a PDF. Click here to download the presentation. Greetings from TCTU Streamkeepers.
As we approach the winter season with some occasional swaths of snow and freezing temperatures, our Streamkeeper group is wrapping up our monitoring activities until next spring. This year we expanded our monitoring efforts from three to six streams. We doubled the number of volunteers that are monitoring streams in these targeted areas, and we have a nice contingent of general Streamkeepers that are monitoring some other streams. by Steve Kaukola, Habitat Committee Chair
TCTU volunteers accomplished a phenomenal amount of work in the few years up to the end of 2019. There was major brush clearing along the South Branch of the Vermillion River, as well as on Hay Creek south of Red Wing. The COVID pandemic stopped everything in early 2020 as DNR policies prohibited organized activities on its Aquatic Management Areas (AMAs) for the next 18 months. As TCTU Board elections brought in several new members in January 2020, I was appointed as the new Habitat Restoration Coordinator. The former coordinator, Tony Nelson, has still been active assisting in this area. The October edition is here, with articles on Late Fall and Winter Fishing, Bristol Bay, and the Rush Creek Fish Kill situation.
Greetings from TCTU Streamkeepers. Welcome to October!
In my last outing I noticed the water levels on the Kinnickinnic River were very low. While sight fishing, I spotted several very large trout. One almost jumped in my net! I was unable to lure them to a dry fly or nymph but was successful in netting many very nice size browns. I also managed to catch a few leaves both on the water and on the branches as the trees start showing their fall colors and brilliance. In this month’s report, I am sharing a Streamkeeper tip and observations from targeted and general Streamkeepers. Our targeted streamkeepers will wrap up our scheduled monitoring efforts during October as our air temperatures flirt with freezing levels. The accuracy of our tests decreases when the air temperature is below freezing. We encourage our general and targeted Streamkeepers to visit our streams during the off season. Water temperatures and general observations of stream health can still be made and are valuable. We do have the ability to make more limited observations, such as water temperatures, water levels, water quality, etc., during the winter months. And of course, the winter season is the preferred time to be doing some habitat work. On September 15th, we posted a letter explaining recent developments with the Kinni, and the potential involvement of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE).
The River Falls City Council will be meeting on Tuesday, September 27th at 6:30 pm, and the agenda includes an update on the Kinni as well as, we expect, a discussion of the ACOE proposal. A few members of KinniCC and its partners will attend the meeting in person, and we will be delivering statements supporting the ACOE proposal on behalf of Trout Unlimited and KinniCC. Bob Luck, TCTU President, will be at the meeting, along with Duke Welter and KIAP-TU-WISH board member Gary Horvath. We do not feel a large in-person presence is called for at this meeting, but if you would like to see the meeting virtually, you can click here for instructions. As of now, we expect the actual vote on the ACOE proposal to take place on October 25th. We’ll keep you posted! The September edition of the Hotline is here, and it has some great information! Some of the articles I found particularly interesting were:
by Jim Sauter, Streamkeepers Coordinator
Greetings from the TCTU Streamkeepers! Welcome to the fall season of 2022. Our stream temperatures are beginning to moderate due to our shorter days and cooler evenings. On a recent visit to the Kinni, the sun set at about 7:24 pm! We recorded stream temperatures in the 52 degrees to 75 degrees range over the last month. Some additional precipitation in some locations would be helpful, although many streams have recovered nicely from the drought conditions of 2021. Download the August Edition of the Newsletter from our Friends at the Hiawatha and WinCres Chapters!
TCTU President Bob Luck recently sent out the following note to donors who have contributed to Free the Kinni
There have been some important recent developments in our effort to Free the Kinni that I would like to share with you. To date, TCTU and KIAP-TU-WISH members have donated $26,000 against a goal of $30,000. Total donor commitments as of now exceed $280,000. Thank you! Recently, the City of River Falls (CRF) received an offer from the Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) to take over the removal of both the Powell Dam and the (upper) Junction Falls Dam, and to conduct a full ecological restoration of the river in the area affected by the dams. The WinCres and Hiawatha chapters have started to distribute an excellent monthly newsletter called "Southeast MN TU Hotline". Watch this space for the next edition. Meanwhile, here is an article from Hotline Editor Carl Berberich that does an excellent job summarizing where we stand with Trout in the Classroom:
The end of Trout-In-the-Classroom (TIC) program for Minnesota??? What??? Say it isn’t so. I sure was surprised when reading an email from John Lenczewski of MNTU this spring (May 12) asking for TU members to call their state legislature Senate members for support of the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR) projects. This was because, the Republican controlled Senate was passing its own version of the LCCMR appropriation bill. As we enter the season of hoppers and terrestrials, we received some sad news about a major fish kill in southeastern Minnesota. The exact cause is still under investigation, but we have a pretty good idea of the cause. Toxic chemicals. By the time officials found out about the kill, the chemicals were most likely in the Mississippi River.
What can we as Streamkeepers and TCTU members do? My friend biologist Kent Johnson has a few ideas. Below are some of his thoughts about buffer zones helping preventing fish kill. As previously announced, the MN State Legislature, in an 11th-hour move, rejected a funding request for the MNTU Trout in the Classroom (TIC) program, an award-winning science education program that teaches students in over sixty (60) Minnesota K-12 schools about coldwater conservation.
After we learned of the cancellation of TIC funding, all of MNTU statewide chapters, together with the State Council, pledged enough money to keep the program going at a basic level for another year, and agreed that we will work together in the coming year to find more sustainable, long-term support. Rumor has it that Minnesota has the 3rd-largest TIC program in the country, only behind California and New York. In order to boost support across Minnesota for MNTU Education Program Supervisor, Amber Taylor, we are looking at developing a field support effort for the enrolled schools, which for this coming year is approximately 70 K-12 schools. This field support would be achieved by MNTU Chapter volunteers supporting 1 to 5 schools in each of the volunteer’s local community. By Tom Roddis, Oktoberfish Volunteer Join the TCTU community at the Summit Brewing Rathskeller for our year-end celebration and silent auction to benefit TU education and outreach programs. Swap fish tales over beer and food trucks fare. Learn the finer points of fly lines and their performance from guest speaker Josh Jenkins of Scientific Anglers. Catch up on the latest TCTU news with a chapter update from Bob Luck. Tickets are $25 per person and include one free beer. And...we have an early bird special! If you register for the event by September 1st, you can select one of the following gifts: a ceramic mug, a Silipint cup, or a box of flies tied by one of our volunteers (approx. 30 flies). We have limited supplies of the fly boxes and Silipints, so act now to get your first choice! To register, click below. You can also visit our Facebook page for updates on the event (don’t forget to like the page and share it). Please read this important message from our State Council Chair, Brent Notbohm. Getting on the Board of MNTU is one of the best ways you can contribute to TU's Mission in Minnesota, and it is a lot of fun as well!
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