Spring is here!

Highs were in the low 70's today, and I did my best to make the most of it. The big lakes were too murky to catch anything, but the lagoon in Vilas Park was doing just fine. There's never anything big in there, but I had a good time catching small sunfish. Caught a total of 11 bluegill and 4 pumpkinseeds. I could see bass and a couple muskies swimming around, but they had their minds on other things (and aren't legal to fish for yet).



This time of year there is always a crowd of people at the dam separating Wingra Creek from Lake Wingra. There is a sign up that says no fishing allowed, so why are they there? The muskies are trying to jump up the dam to make their way to spawning grounds in Lake Wingra! The following two pics are of a musky swimming under the creek side of the dam, and one that made it over the waterfall and was building up courage to swim the rest of the way to the lake side of the dam.

Rainbow darter

Traveled down to visit my parents in central Illinois on Saturday. They have two streams running through the back of their property, and I wandered back there to see what fish I could catch with an old butterfly net I found in the garage. The larger of the two streams seems to be doing very well! I caught plenty of minnows, chubs, and dace, as well as a handful of rainbow darters. I really wanted to take them back to Madison to add to the 10 gallon aquarium with the sticklebacks and sculpins, but I didn't think they'd last the trip without an aerator. I'll find a good battery powered one before I go down there next, probably in May.

Mottled Sculpin

My first collecting trip! (Not counting the hundreds I did as a kid in Illinois.) Chuck and I drove west of Madison today to see what we could find in the creeks around the area. Unfortunately, most of the decent streams are designated trout streams, where netting is prohibited. We used a game/fishing map of WI of Chuck's to find some smaller creeks off the beaten path to try.

Mottled sculpin were the fish of the day! We caught 5 of them at the first stream, and 2 more at another. We also caught 1 brook stickleback. You can see most of them in the picture below, along with a few bait shop minnows.

My next task will be to get the small tank set up better for these guys since I'm going to keep them for a long time. I'll add more rocks and fake plants to give them plenty of cover. Hopefully Chuck and I will be able to find some more interesting species to put in there in the future (logperch, darters, dace, etc).



Update 4/3/09 - I moved all of the bait shop minnows to the big tank so the sticklebacks and sculpins will have more space. The sculpins are doing great. They aren't territorial (yet?) and even like to sit close together. They've been eating flake food and small pieces of nightcrawlers. The two sticklebacks swim around together part of the time, but fight each other at other times. They nip at each other's fins, something that you'll hear a lot about on forums. One of the sticklebacks ate a piece of nightcrawler as well, but they haven't touched the flake food.

Brook Stickleback

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I have a 10 gallon aquarium stocked with minnows from the bait shop that I use to feed the sunfish and smallies in my 30 gallon aquarium. The number of minnows has been dwindling down, and yesterday I found a surprise visitor to my tank, a brook stickleback! I've never seen one before, but I'm 99% sure that's what it is. I can clearly see the 5 spines on it's back. Sorry for the crappy photo, but it's the best I could do with such a small fish that insisted on staying at the back of the tank.



I took a short video too. The stickleback has some interesting behavior. He has to furiously move his pectoral pins to swim around, and tends to stay on the bottom like a darter when he's resting. I have no idea how to care for it; I'm really hoping he'll eat goldfish food.

Overdue post

Ice fishing really slowed down since my last post. I think I made it out on Monona twice, but didn't have any luck either time. I was really hoping for the 'late ice crappies' that a lot of people were talking up, but apparently I wasn't out there on the right days. Below is a pic from inside the portable shanty that Jeff is letting me borrow.



I was down in Champaign for one day 2 weeks ago and stopped by that small subidivision pond to do a little bass fishing with Jeff. The fishing wasn't spectacular - we each caught 2, but I was excited to fish open water for a change (the lakes in Madison are still frozen!). After Jeff took off I stumbled upon a channel cat sitting in the shallow water and grabbed him by hand. Does that count as noodling from land? It looked like he was sick and hadn't been eating because he was very thin. I let him go and he swam off, who knows if he'll make it or not.

I really need to get more sun. Dang I'm pale!