By Pete Rust, Senior Fisheries Research Biologist
Biologists track acoustic-tagged walleye to help anglers catch walleye and participate in the Lake Pend Oreille angler incentive program and to learn more about walleye movements. Between late fall 2019 and early May 2020, we tagged an additional 21 walleye with acoustic transmitters, bringing the total number to 40 active tags. We also added seven more stationary receivers throughout the system to get a better idea of movement timing and patterns.
The data we’ve gathered so far has taught us that walleyes in Lake Pend Oreille are very mobile, capable of moving more than 10 miles per day. They move the most during the late summer into the early fall and move the least during the spawning season.
Walleyes use the Clark Fork Delta area the most but are well distributed throughout the northern sections of the lake all year. There is some use of the southern part of the lake down towards Bayview based on some previous netting we’ve conducted, but few of our tagged fish have ventured south of Garfield bay. In mid-April into early May during the 2020 spawning season, we documented a strong push of fish into the Clark Fork River all the way up to Cabinet Gorge Dam.
With the recent high flows in the Clark Fork River, we have not been able to download many of the stationary receivers in the river, but those that we have been able to get to had only a few fish detections in recent weeks. We have however, noticed good concentrations of walleyes on the Clark Fork Delta recently, with 11 tagged fish located around the Delta and Sheepherder point as recently as June 9.
Other areas of the lake where we’ve noticed good concentrations of walleye recently include the Sandpoint area near the Burlington Northern train bridge down to the Highway 95 long bridge area. Walleye have also been found by active tracking in Denton slough, Oden Bay, and Kootenai Bay in the last couple of weeks. Few walleyes have moved down into the Pend Oreille River so far this spring.
We plan to continue tracking walleyes all summer and will provide location data with maps similar to last year to help you catch more walleyes and help us manage this complex fishery.
