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Adopt-A-Fish Update: May 15, 2003 Adopt-A-Fish sure did! Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks WADE KING U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and MARK HENCKEL Billings Gazette Outdoor Editor Got Milk? Well, the fish in Missouri River Adopt-A-Fish got theirs' this past week and they're on the move. Due to the rains last week, the Milk River is raging. It's running high at about 3,000 cubic feet per second. Because of this pulse of rainfall runoff, the water in the Missouri River below the Milk has been warmed and muddied and the fish have responded by heading upriver. We've already seen five paddlefish and one pallid above Wolf Point. They're not the only fish that reacted to this pulse of water. The blues that had been holding in the Missouri River just below the Milk are now swimming up the Milk River. Blue sucker No. 4 crossed one of our ground stations Sunday, and was about 10 miles up the Milk on Monday. Blues No. 1, 2 and 3 were last seen just below the Milk and we didn't find them between the Milk and the dam, so that leaves only one option. They must be up the Milk, too. Unfortunately, we're experiencing technical difficulties on the Milk station. The high flows not only bring the fish up, but they bring the logs down and send them crashing into our Milk River floating receiver station, leaving it useless for that time period. We may have missed the exact time these fish went up the Milk, but we'll be able to catch them on their way down. We relocated 3 blues and 1 shovelnose in the first 20 miles. We're going to go up the Milk as far as we can Thursday to see if we can find some more of these fish. It's about 115 river miles to Vandalia Dam - the first major barrier on the river. After the water comes out of the Milk and into the Missouri, it takes about three days for this pulse of runoff to reach the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, so it should have reached this point yesterday or today. I expect this should trigger some movements from those fish that were waiting below the confluence for something to happen. It should be an exciting week. On the Internet, anyone can go to www.walleyesunlimited.com and click on the Missouri River Adopt-A-Fish button to see maps of the movements of the adopted fish or learn more about this unique stretch of the river. Classrooms can still sign up for the program and adopt fish of their own. Missouri River Adopt-A-Fish is a cooperative effort of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, The Billings Gazette and Walleyes Unlimited of Montana. |
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