Friends of the Upper Mississippi

Walleye nets are hung on a fence in spring. Photo by USFWS.

The weather has not able to make up it’s mind this year at Genoa, we have warmed up several times and then received snowstorms right after! In between the snow and rain, hatchery staff have been busy getting the station ready for the spring field season. The buildings have been sprayed down, cleaned up, tanks are getting set up, spawning ponds were set up with air stones and screens and nets are getting prepped for the river. As soon as tanks were set up in the Sturgeon Building, we began draining our host fish pond after it finally warmed up enough to melt most of the ice on the pond, allowing us to harvest the fish. Every fall, Genoa National Fish Hatchery will harvest the production ponds, collecting enough fish first for the mussel program and then any fish beyond that will be used for fish requests or to help out our state partners. The host fish then will either be used immediately for mussels that brood in the fall or will hang out over the winter to be used in the spring or summer the following year. Because of space constraints at the hatchery, the fish will over winter either in the mussel building, sturgeon building or in one of the hatchery ponds. The most of the fish kept in the mussel building will be the ones inoculated in the fall with either Winged Mapleleaf or Washboard Mussels. Access to the colder pond water helps to keep the channel catfish closer to their normal temperatures, reducing stress on the fish and the growing mussels over the winter. The sturgeon building only has access to well water over the winter, so the golden shiners and largemouth bass will spend their time in in there. They are much better suited to the more constant water temperatures. The remaining channel catfish not used, smallmouth bass and walleyes will spend the winter in the pond. These species survive much better following the normal cooling down and warming up of the water outside, and the extra space reduces stress on the fish as well. By Angela Baran-Dagendesh

The Great River Road Interpretive Center has a new exhibit to call its own. We are proud to be able to display the history of the construction of Lock and Dam 8 on the Mississippi River built just up the road from the hatchery at the Genoa Wisconsin site. This pictorial history is being displayed in the local history room of the Center, and was compiled by local historian Anne Muirhead. Included is the method of diverting the mighty Mississippi to allow for construction, the construction of the retaining dike and spillway, the construction of the locks using historic steam shovels, and pictures of the local crews of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA was a depression era work program initiated by the Roosevelt Administration to put people back to work on public works projects across the country. Also included in the pictures is an image of a steam powered paddleboat moving down the River, the historic mode of transportation at the time. Paddleboats were used due to their low draft, or profile in the River, that allowed them to move through shallow areas safely without running aground in the pre-lock and Dams reaches of the River. Once the navigation system was constructed and in use, a navigation channel of 9 foot depth is now maintained, allowing the current barges to transport their goods on the River. The dike at Genoa is over 3.3 miles long and the dam structure is 934 feet long. The lock can accommodate barges with lengths of over 500 feet long, and typically moves over 16 million tons of cargo down the River annually. The Great River Road Interpretive Center was built as a collaborative effort with the National Scenic Byways Program and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and its mission is to educate and inform Great River Road travelers on the unique geography, natural history and local history of the region, while instilling a conservation message to the public. For more information about the center, please see our Facebook site, or feel free to call the station at 608-689-2605. By Doug Aloisi

By Raena Parsons, Genoa NFH

On Saturday February 15 volunteers with the Coulee Region Audubon Society led a family-friendly bird walk at Genoa National Fish Hatchery (NFH). 14 people of various ages made the trek to the hatchery to participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC). The GBBC is a worldwide citizen science project that takes place over four days every February where participants collect data on wild birds and can see results in near real-time. Participants counted 25 Bald Eagles, 6 Common Mergansers, 6 Killdeer, 1 Wilson’s Snipe, and 1 Peregrine Falcon during a 45 minute walk at the hatchery. A huge thank you goes out to the Audubon Society volunteers, Dan and Roger. This event would not have been possible without you!

You don’t see too many rainbows in Southwest Wisconsin in the middle of winter. That view is usually saved for thunderstorm season in the heat of the summer time. And if you were looking for a Rainbow this winter, you would find 8,000 less of them. That Rainbow, of course, is the Rainbow Trout, raised in Coulee Region of Southwest Wisconsin at the Genoa National Fish Hatchery. Due to some good quality eggs from the Ennis (MT) National Fish Hatchery, and good survival the hatchery was fortunate to have a surplus this year. It was fortuitous as our sister hatchery Neosho National Fish Hatchery in Missouri was limited in rearing space due to a construction project. The Neosho station found a weather window and sent two drivers up in December to pick up their new charges. 8,000 8 inch trout weighing a total of nearly 1800 pounds were loaded onto 2 trucks for the long 12 hour trek back to the Ozark Plateau of southern Missouri. Word back has it that they like southern Missouri just fine, and the 60 degree weather has sweetened their disposition and diet. They will be raised for roughly another 2 months and stocked as 11 inch fish in Lake Taneycomo, to mitigate for the federal water project of Table Rock Dam. The dam and its resulting deep cold water discharge eliminated a local smallmouth bass fishery below the water control structure. Rainbows like the cooler waters of the downstream Lake Taneycomo, and create a very popular fishery there. Plenty of Rainbows still remain in southwest Wisconsin, however. Plenty enough to brighten many fisherperson’s disposition and creels coming this spring for the trout season opener. Over 30,000 still await the spring trout season, when they should be 12 inch sticks of dynamite, just waiting to fight their way into a lucky creel. The trout will be used to create recreational fisheries on Midwestern tribal waters, in Fort McCoy Army base ponds, and also be used at Genoa’s kids fishing events, and limited accessibility fishing events. By Doug Aloisi

Logperch in a hatchery tank. Photo by Megan Bradley/USFWS.

Freshwater mussels are host specific, not just any fish will do. Snuffbox, a federally endangered species of mussel, depend on Logperch, a large darter that can grow up to approximately six inches and is found across the Midwest to transform their larvae into juvenile mussels. This fall a biologist with the Columbia Environmental Research Center in Missouri let us know that he’d had a great year raising Logperch in his ponds and we were able to pick them up in November. Five hundred Logperch arrived on station and were moved into quarantine. Logperch are a favored fish species because they learn very quickly to associate food with people and are charming when they beg for their breakfast with their rostrums (noses) out of the water. The Logperch are here to act as hosts for Snuffbox collected from the Wolf river system in the late fall. The hatchery is hosting three female Snuffbox collected from the Wolf River for the winter. Biologists from the hatchery and Wisconsin DNR plan to infest the Logperch in the spring and then drop off and grow the juveniles for a couple of years before reintroducing the species back into Wolf River streams where the species has been extirpated. By Megan Bradley