Credit: Wildlife and Parks photo |
Rainbow Trout #0068 measures 21 inches and weighs a mere 3.5 pounds. That was enough, it turned out, for a journey up 150 miles of western Montana river.
“That’s the longest migration that I can remember for a trout,” said William Ladd Knotek, a fisheries biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
#0068’s record-setting journey reflected not just the strength of its fins, but years of efforts to monitor fish and ease their passage upstream. “We’re doing lots of small positive things with lots of parts and lots of people kicking in,” he said and cumulatively, it’s having an impact. |
|
|
The first of those positive things #0068 encountered was the fish ladder at NorthWestern Energy’s Thompson Falls hydroelectric dam. Built a decade ago, it’s given passage to an estimated 33,000 fish, said NorthWestern fish biologist Jon Hanson.
“We first encountered the fish when it entered the fish ladder at Thompson Falls,” he said. When it reached the top on March 25, it was fitted with a bright pink “floy tag” atop its dorsal fin with its new number — and a phone number that anglers could use to report its whereabouts.
In recent years, fish-watchers along the Clark Fork River have opted to track fish by tagging them en masse, rather than fitting a few with radio transmitters, Knotek explained. |
|