Good Turnout for the Corps of Engineers open house discussing Kinnickinnic River Ecosystem Restoration in River Falls, Wisconsin.
It was good to see many familiar faces at last Tuesday’s Kinnickinnic River open house held at the public library. This was an informal event with a number of informational stations manned by officials from the City of River Falls and the CORP of Engineers. Many River advocates lobbied on removal of both dams. A timeline can be found here
Please take some time to give written comments. These are due by September 15th. This fillable PDF may be printed and mailed as instructed or you may email your support for the removal of both dams to Trevor Cyphers at: Trevor.W.Cyphers@usace.army.mil
Two new Kiap-TU-Wish monitoring reports are now available in our Coldwater Science Library
“The Thermal Impacts of Kinnickinnic River Hydropower Dams and Impoundments in River Falls, WI, and Recent Thermal Benefits of the Lake Louise Drawdown”
Author: Kent Johnson, Kiap-TU-Wish Chapter
Summary: This report summarizes 29 years of Kinnickinnic River temperature monitoring by Kiap-TU-Wish, describing the temperature monitoring network, the thermal impacts of Kinni dams and impoundments (1994-2020), recent (2021-2022) Kinni temperature improvements after the Lake Louise drawdown in 2020, the ongoing thermal impact of the Junction Falls Dam and Lake George, and plans for future temperature monitoring, as a part of the Kinnickinnic River Monitoring Plan, created in 2021 and implemented in 2022. Kiap-TU-Wish has graciously supported this critical temperature monitoring network, as we seek to understand the thermal impacts of stormwater, dams, and long-term climate change on the Kinni in River Falls.
Kiap-TU-Wish temperature monitoring sites on the Kinnickinnic River and tributariesin River Falls, WI
“Kinnickinnic River Macroinvertebrate Monitoring: Past, Present, and Future”
Authors: Kent Johnson, Kiap-TU-Wish Chapter, Clarke Garry, Professor Emeritus, UW-River Falls
Summary: In Wisconsin, the use of aquatic macroinvertebrates for evaluating stream health was initiated by Dr. William L. Hilsenhoff at UW-Madison in 1977, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has long employed macroinvertebrate monitoring to characterize stream condition. This report summarizes the results of recent (2022) macroinvertebrate monitoring conducted at 6 sites on the Kinnickinnic River (Upper, Lower, and the new Kinni through Lake Louise), with a comparison to the river-wide macroinvertebrate monitoring conducted by Dr. Clarke Garry in 2002. After a gap of 20 years, Kinni bugs and bug-whisperers provide an update on Kinni health, then and now. Plans for future (2023-2025) macroinvertebrate monitoring at additional Kinni sites are also described. As with all Kiap-TU-Wish projects, volunteer support was critical for this one. Kiap-TU-Wish, KinniCC, and UW-River Falls volunteer time was a key to success, and Kiap-TU-Wish and KinniCC provided funding for detailed bug identification (in Latin, nonetheless!).
Kent Johnson (L) and Reid Dawald, KinniCC Stream Team member (R) at the “new Kinni” monitoring site in the former Lake Louise (2022 photo by Dr. John Wheeler, UW-River Falls)
Greenwood Elementary Service Day 2023: Randy Arnold
What started back in October of last year with six workdays of volunteers cutting buckthorn, honeysuckle, and box elders at a site on Quarry Rd, wrapped up last Friday when 75 students, 15 parent volunteers and the teaching staff of those 3rd graders at Greenwood Elementary School in River Falls showed up at 9:30 in the morning. Their aim was to drag all of the slash from those workdays and place it on three bonfires that had been started about 30 minutes before their arrival.
The volunteers present helping to start the fires and watch over the kids to maintain safety were Jim Tatzel, Dave Gregg, Tom Anderson, David Brockway, Tom Schnadt, Pat Sexton, Dave Kozlovsky and myself. Soon two busloads of students arrived. I gave a brief talk to the Greenwood entourage about safety precautions we asked them to follow.
Half of the students returned to the bus and headed further upstream for a nature walk led by one of their teachers while the other half put on safety glasses and began hauling brush to the two bonfires. I had a gas driven water pump ready as a safety precaution and, on several occasions, I did fire up the pump and pour a little water on one of the bonfires to keep the flames from getting too high. The weather on the days leading up to the event could not have been better, with several days of rain and below average temperatures keeping the fire danger relatively low. This event had been originally scheduled for back in December and then again in early January but was postponed due to bitterly cold temps and a following blizzard. After an hour of moving brush to the bonfires, kids who had been on the nature walk returned and switched places with their classmates. A third bonfire was started just prior to the changeover and, the second wave of kids made short work of the brush which remained.
This is the third time that this event has been held. Chapter member and Greenwood 3rd grade teacher Steve Papp was the driving force behind the creation of this event and the 3rd graders at his school are also participants in the TIC program. This event provides a wonderful opportunity for the kids to connect with and realize how a healthy stream corridor is so important to the survival of trout. In past years Kasey Yallaly and Marty Engel have assisted by leading the kids on the nature walk portion. Both were unavailable this year so the teaching staff took it upon themselves to fill that void. Thank you to all who participated and I look forward to many more years of this very successful program.
This is a specialty fly. I wish I could tell you it works all the time. It simply doesn’t, however………
In the months from March to May, when the mornings are overcast, the blue wing olive mayflies are hatching, the fish are tail slapping the surface and you know they are taking emergers, then this is the fly you want. Don’t give up on your dry fly fishing just yet. This pattern will entice many of them to take an emerger and then grab your fly in the surface film. Tied in many colors and sizes I have chosen an early season dark BWO pattern in size 16 on a sprout hook. Matching the size of the fly is more important than dialing in the perfect color.
Materials:
I use heavy or standard hooks size 16 to 20 with olive thread. The under body on larger flies can be thin sticky back foam for more buoyancy covered with dubbing, smaller flies use only olive dubbing. The tail is horse hair or natural turkey biot short fibers. The magic wing material comes from the foam sheets that line the inside of mail envelopes and are found in colors grey, white, and clear. A thicker foam works better in the riffles.
Tie a dubbing bump at the bend of the hook.
Splay the tail fibers over the bump, tie in and dub over the top. Add more dubbing to finish the body.
Cut a wing foam strip 1/8th inch by 2 inches and secure with a few figure 8’s, then cover with light dubbing.
Use one or more post turns to secure the open wing shape.
Dub a small black head and superglue the thread one inch to whip finish.
Cut the wings to shape.
This is my go-to fly pattern for BWO hatches. It outperforms all others.
The Kiap-TU-Wish “work season” aligns with our fiscal year which spans April 1st to March 31st. Our work consisted of tree planting, seeding/mulching, stream shocking, and tree and brush removal. Additional tasks for which I recorded volunteer hours included installation of bluebird nest boxes, opening and cleaning them in the fall, and closing them up again in the spring. Time spent watering trees and shrubs that were planted on the new Cady Creek restoration was also logged. A total of 31 volunteer workdays this past year consisted of, 25 brush/tree removal days, 3 seeding/mulching days, 2 stream shocking days, and 1 day dedicated to tree planting. As you might imagine, the bulk of our time was spent removing trees and brush from stream corridors and accounted for just over 1,400 of the total 1,573 habitat volunteer hours.
Total habitat volunteer hours are down from several years ago when totals reached or exceeded 3,000 hours. My biggest disappointment as our volunteer coordinator is the low turnout for brush and tree removal workdays. Of the 283 individuals who are currently on the MailChimp list for receiving workday notices, only 56 turned out at any one time over the season to help with our work.
Our clearing operations began in October at the close of the inland fishing season. We cleared box elders, buckthorn, and honeysuckle from the Quarry Road site just upstream of the Hwy 35 bridge and had plans to involve the Greenwood Elementary 3rd graders as a part of their service learning project by providing an opportunity to help burn all of the slash. A blizzard on the scheduled burn day resulted in deep snow cover which lasted throughout the winter and forced us to postpone the event until April 21st of this year.
Starting in early December, we moved our workdays to Cady Creek and at the direction of Kasey Yallaly (WDNR) began clearing box elders and other invasives from the stream corridor between the upper two parking lots on 50th Street. This will help facilitate periodic mowing and allow for easier stream access. Between December 2022 and March 2023, we spent 17 days at this site logging in over 1,100 hours during that period. This particular stretch of Cady had undergone streambank restoration back in the late 1990s and some of the box elder trees along that stretch had trunks over 20” in diameter plus we cleared and removed a number of trees that had fallen into the creek.
I would like to recognize the efforts of a number of volunteers who turned out time and time again to help with the workdays, these include: John Skelton 21 workdays, Dave Gregg 18 workdays, Jim Tatzel 17 workdays, Loren Haas and Trish Hannah 13 workdays, Jeff Dahl 11 workdays, Jim Sackrison 8 workdays, James Patterson and Steve Cox 7 workdays, Matt Janquart and Greg Olson 6 workdays, and John Kaplan, Ted Higman, Don Fritz, Dave Kozlovsky and Jeff Himes 5 workdays. I dare say that most of those listed above have more than a few grey hairs on their heads and I hope that in looking to future projects an influx of youth would certainly enhance our habitat efforts.
Box elders, buckthorn and honeysuckle are growing on our easements faster than we can cut them down. The WDNR no longer has the funds or manpower to handle any of this work and it depends on our chapter to step up to the plate each year to do what we can to keep the easements and restorations within our chapter area from becoming overgrown and unfishable.
I took on the job of volunteer coordinator some 12-15 years ago when I was still in my 50’s and my body was easily up to the task. Despite turning 70 in January, I still hope to continue leading workdays for another 10 years. I would, however, appreciate some more participation from more of the individuals who are listed in our pool of volunteers.
This fall we will continue to hold workdays throughout the brushing season from Oct. 15th when the fishing season closes, until such time in the spring when we can no longer burn the slash from the removed trees and brush. It’s my hope that we can return to earlier times when 25 or more volunteers turned out on a regular basis with occasional workdays consisting of 30 or more.
I intend to start a new volunteer list before the beginning of the next brushing season. The list will be called “Brushing Volunteers” and it is my hope that if you request to be on the list you will do so with the intent of participating in our workdays on a regular basis. Knowing that we have a committed list of volunteers is important when assessing the time and effort necessary for each project as I continue to work with Kasey and the Kiap-TU-Wish board to determine what future habitat projects.
There are two species of Ephemerella mayflies in these parts, one of which is kind of a big deal on the lower Kinni. Or at least it was until the City released all that sand into the river. Anyway, because of its rather light color, people got into the habit of referring to it as the Light Hendrickson. Traditionally the Light Hendrickson was an angler’s term for E. Invaria but there were at least two other species that were lumped together under that angler’s term. It wasn’t until about 2005 when Clarke Garry, Ph.D, correctly identified it as E. Excrucians that we knew what it was. Now you’d think that anglers would welcome that news, but you’d be wrong. At least one of my customers was visibly upset by the news and shouted, “No! It’s the Light Hendrickson!” He got over it but it’s a clear illustration of another angler’s conceit. Is hanging on to an inaccurate term really more important than a positive ID from a scientist?
I used to go to the Fly Shop when Bob and Jean owned it to find out what was hatching on the Kinni. Bob always said the same thing, “Blue Wing Olives.” I was always kind of disappointed by that because I kept expecting to find something else to fish over. However, Bob was right because so many Baetis species are bivoltine means that they’re almost always available to the trout. But they are not all olive. The vast majority of the samples I’ve collected have been tan. Don’t believe it? Get yourself a little insect net and try it yourself. Baetis could be olive, but they’re more likely to be tan, brown or even grey. It’s hard to break a habit. And the one I hear most often is, “Are the Olives hatching?”
OK, one more and then I’ll stop. For decades people who tie imitations of the Trico spinner have tied them with three, widely separated tails. Back in the ‘70’s I watched Tom Andersen tie some of these flies for Bob and he artfully positioned his dubbing needle underneath the tail filaments, spread them apart and held them for a second or two until they stayed in that position. Look at the selection in any fly shop and you’ll see many examples of this style. Gary Borger once opined that a trout’s IQ was 6. Six. Do you really believe a trout would reject your Trico imitation if it only had two tails? With that robust thorax and spent wings why would the fish focus on the tails? They probably don’t, and to bolster my opinion there’s this; Perry Palin is one of the better tiers around here and he’s been tying a very effective Trico pattern for years using a few grizzly barbs for the tail. They’re not long, they’re not spread and they’re definitely more than three. And it works fine.
