New Fort Peck biologist manages diversity

new Fort Peck Lake biologist manages diversity

For the past four months, Heath Headley has been climbing a steep learning curve. As Fish, Wildlife & Parks’ new fisheries biologist responsible for managing Fort Peck Reservoir, Headley has been learning to navigate the sprawling lake, drive a boat in strafing winds, set and pull nets, and manage a crew of employees.

Now that Chinook salmon are trickling into Fort Peck’s Marina Bay, Headley has another talent to master: collecting enough egg-laden fish to spawn and produce another generation of the popular species. There are too few fish to activate the industrial-scale fish ladder that’s been used in the past to gather salmon, so Headley’s crew will use electrofishing gear over the next couple of weeks to collect the several hundred salmon required for propagation at the new Fort Peck Hatchery.

“We’re shooting for 400,000 green eggs,” says Headley. “And hopefully from that we can get 200,000 eyed-up eggs to achieve our standard salmon plant.”

Managing Fort Peck Lake’s fishery requires balancing available resources with fluctuating environmental conditions as the lake’s level rises and falls with runoff and downstream water demands. It’s a balance that Headley, as a recent university graduate, has appreciated since he arrived in Montana in July.

A native of northeast South Dakota, Headley grew up fishing for perch, walleye and northern pike. After graduating from South Dakota State University he worked as a fisheries technician for Wyoming Game and Fish and then returned to school for a graduate degree from Ball State University in Indiana where he studied yellow perch population dynamics in Lake Michigan.

His big-lake experience has plenty of relevance on Fort Peck, Montana’s largest water body. Since he joined Fish, Wildlife & Parks in July, Headley has stocked hatchery-reared walleye, sampled the lake’s population of adult fish, surveyed cisco and shoreline minnow populations and is now collecting Chinook for the hatchery.

“The best thing about this job is its diversity,” says Headley. “The lake has a lot of diversity, and from a fish management perspective, there’s a lot of complexity to the work and to the public’s expectation of the fishery.”

Headley arrived at Fort Peck just as the lake’s level was at its seasonal high, up about 5 feet from the first of the year thanks to abundant snowpack runoff.  That “bump” in water seems to have benefited the spottail shiners, young perch and other small fish that are prey for Fort Peck’s walleye, pike, bass and other predators.

“We saw a significant increase in young-of-the-year yellow perch numbers in our shoreline seining work this summer,” says the biologist. “And other forage species seemed to benefit as well. We just finished our young-of-the-year cisco netting and it appears that production was up about 70 percent over last year.

“Thanks to a great production year at the hatchery, we ended up stocking close to 4 million walleye fingerlings and another 35 million walleye fry,” says Headley. “We saw a lot of small walleye, from 10 to 14 inches, in our sampling nets, especially in the upper Missouri River and Big Dry arms of the lake. So between good forage production and lots of small fish, I expect to see more fish available for anglers in the next few years.”

Fort Peck Lake is unique, says Headley, in its ability to produce trophy-sized walleye.

“Growing up in South Dakota the fishing was good, but there wasn’t much potential for large fish,” he said. “The overall productivity of Fort Peck may be limited for smaller fish that are reliant on small minnows, but once they pass the size bottleneck and move to open water where they feed on cisco, they have the potential for remarkable growth. It’s tough for anglers because those deep-water fish are hard to target and catch.”

Once the salmon collection is accomplished, Headley’s crew’s next task is to sample adult cisco and lake trout. Headley will detail the results of this year’s surveys of all species and provide an outlook for next year’s management activities in the annual report required by the Fort Peck Fisheries Management Plan. That report will be delivered at a public meeting next February or March.

While the biologist is guardedly optimistic about the fishery’s potential to rebound in the next year, he provides this bit of reality: The Corps of Engineers is predicting Fort Peck’s level will drop to a record low elevation of 2,197 feet above sea level sometime this winter.

--- FWP ---