All river and stream related items are listed below, most of which are updates on stocking or plans for fish community surveys. A few items of intrigue include a plan for musky in the Grand in Ottawa County to check gizzard shad populations, a proposal to shift coho salmon stocking in the Grand away from Lansing, and the removal of two streams — Blue Jay Creek in Berrien County and Spring Creek in St. Joseph County — from the list designated trout streams for a lack of trout, of all things.

Allegan County

The Kalamazoo River will be sampled in April to determine the presence of spawning lake sturgeon as part of a long-term population rehabilitation effort. Available sturgeon eggs and larvae will be collected and raised in a streamside rearing facility in New Richmond. The Duck Lake Drain fish community will be surveyed as part of a random stream status and trends program.

Barry County

The Morgan Dam is scheduled for removal on Highbanks Creek, and floodplain restoration work will begin on Quaker Brook.

Berrien County

Blue Jay Creek in the Galien River watershed will be removed from the designated trout stream list due to a lack of trout. The Paw Paw River will continue to be stocked annually with yearling steelhead and with fall fingerling steelhead and coho salmon when available. Fisheries surveys will be completed at several sites on the St. Joseph River as part of a multi-year walleye population evaluation.

Calhoun County

A fisheries survey will be conducted on Nottawa Creek. Natural resource damage assessments associated with the oil spill will continue on the Kalamazoo River and Talmadge Creek. A rock ramp will be constructed on the Garfield Lake outlet control structure to provide better fish passage. Brown trout will continue to be stocked in Dickinson Creek at the Historic Bridge County Park.

Clinton County

A fish community survey is scheduled for Peet Creek and the Maple River.

Ingham County

The majority of the coho salmon stocked in the Grand River in Lansing are proposed to be moved downstream to improve survival. A public meeting will be conducted during the summer of 2012.

Ionia County

A fish community survey will be conducted on the Maple River. Steelhead will continue to be stocked in Prairie and Fish creeks, and the brown trout strain will change from Wild Rose to Gilchrist Creek in Fish Creek.

Kalamazoo County

Natural resource damages associated with the Kalamazoo River oil spill will continue to be assessed. Portage Creek will be surveyed to assess stream habitat improvements near Alcott Street.

Kent County

Spring Brook, Flat River and Bear Creek will be surveyed as part of a status and trends program. The Flat River and Rogue River will continue to be stocked with steelhead. Brown trout stocking will be discontinued in Buck Creek due to lack of survival and angler effort.

Ottawa County

Crockery Creek will continue to be stocked with steelhead. Walleye will continue to be stocked in Lake Macatawa and the Grand River. The Great Lakes strain of muskellunge will be stocked when available in Lake Macatawa and the lower Grand River to take advantage of over-abundant gizzard shad and to provide a sport fishery.

St. Joseph County

Fish community surveys are scheduled for Lake Templene and the Pigeon River. Spring Creek will be removed from the designated trout streams list and Type 4 trout regulations due to a lack of trout.

Van Buren County

Walleye stocking will continue in Maple Lake and the Black River. The East Branch Paw Paw River will be stocked with brown trout.

Male walleye and prey fish in the Saginaw River have almost three times more chemicals in them than their bay dwelling counterparts. The chemicals, PBDEs, are sticking in the river sediment.

Male walleye in the Saginaw Bay really need to start taking a cue from their female counterparts and hang out in a better neighborhood.

A study about to be published by the Journal of Great Lakes Research found male walleye contain three times more flame retardant chemicals than females. The chemicals, polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDEs), have been used in plastics, foams and fabrics as flame-retardants since the 1970s. Animal tests suggest they could damage the liver, thyroid and brain, according to the EPA.

Why the difference? The males are hanging out in the wrong places.

“Males use the Saginaw River and its tributaries to feed in and for habitat, while the females mostly stay out in the bay,” said Charles Madenjian, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and the study’s lead author.

The river has much higher levels of PBDEs than the bay, Madenjian said. Once in the river, the chemicals are ingested by small fish that are eaten by the walleyes. Gobies and other small fish from the river had 10 times more PBDEs than those dwelling in the bay.

But industries do not discharge PBDEs into the Saginaw River, which means the chemicals are non-point source pollutants; draining from landfills and other waste sites. And it appears they stick in the river sediment.

“The Saginaw River is a large drainage basin,” said Rick Rediske, a professor at the Annis Water Resources Institute at Grand Valley State University, and study co-author. “As these plastics get old and breakdown, the dust gets airborne and the river collects the pollutants.”

Since the area is heavily farmed, erosion worsens the river’s contamination, Rediske said.

While considered an emerging contaminant, PBDEs are increasing in our waters and fish. They don’t appear to affect fish health, but, much like other obscure acronym chemicals, the risks to human aren’t fully understood.

“They’re like PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) where there are over 200 different forms of the chemicals,” Rediske said. “We’re just starting to get a handle on impacts, and while there’s no human health standard, we’re starting to see that this could be a significant pollutant.”

Most humans are exposed to low levels of PBDEs, usually through breathing in or eating them, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Fish aren’t the only route. Studies found PBDEs in milk, cheese and beef, because cows can eat contaminated grass.

Great Lakes fish advisories do not include PBDEs, but state agencies consider them an emerging contaminant.

Madenjian said researchers don’t know why the males spend so much time in the river. It’s not the first time male walleye have shown higher chemical levels than females.

A 2009 study showed Saginaw Bay male walleye with 2.5 times higher concentrations of PCBs than females. And the findings were even more ominous as PCB levels were 15 times higher than the PBDE levels in the recent study.

This, too, was because males spent more time in the Saginaw River than females did. But industries used to spew PCBs directly in the river, which makes the recent study all the more interesting, Rediske said.

“There is no industrial drainage of PBDEs, it’s all atmospheric deposition,” Rediske said. “The Saginaw River really is a hotspot for its ability to collect sediments and pollutants from the outside environment.”

This story first appeared in Great Lakes Echo and is reprinted with permission.

“The Governor recommends a new competitive grant program to assist public and private entities with dam removal and maintenance. One-time funding of $2 million along with $500,000 of ongoing funding is recommended to prevent the most at-risk dams from failing.”

You can find that on page 73 of the budget PDF.

Reaction on our Facebook page has been a mix of appreciation and recognition that $2 million won’t go very far. It’s certainly well short of the $50 million recommended by the Michigan Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers (PDF).

Photo: U.S. Forest Service

Remember last April, when Field & Stream Magazine’s Kirk Deeter said in a blog post that Michigan is the top state in the country for fly-fishing?  And how we all called our friends and relatives in Montana and Colorado and New York, and asked them how it felt to be such a loser?

Well, Michigan landed on another Deeter list yesterday, but don’t reach for the phone just yet.

This time the blogger compiled what he calls the rudest trout rivers in America.  And ranking way higher than we Michiganders might like–second only to the famous Henry’s Fork of the Snake River in Idaho–was our own Pere Marquette River.

Before I’d given the list a careful read, I took that to mean that visitors to the P.M. are likely to encounter anglers swearing at each other, ruining others’ fishing and throwing beer cans at canoeists.

Balderdash!  Blasphemy!  Surely Deeter isn’t disparaging the plainspoken, hard-working, god-fearing fisherfolk of the Great Lake State!

No, as a closer look at the list reveals, he isn’t.  Deeter’s talking about the rivers themselves, not the people who fish them.  He points to the P.M.’s fly-stealing stumps and its unpredictable insect hatches as evidence of the river’s rudeness.

As he puts it, “some rivers don’t give a rip who you are, where you’re from, how good you are, or what you paid to get there.”

Now that sounds like the Michigan I know and love, and I’ll take this as another compliment.  I might even call my out-of-state friends to tell them I don’t give a rip who they are.

Streambank erosion has toppled a tree in this litter-filled bend in Plaster Creek. Photo: Plaster Creek Stewards

Faith, fellowship and federal funds are helping a West Michigan group restore a creek so polluted it’s considered unsafe for human contact.

What started as an effort by Calvin College to get faculty members and students involved in protecting the environment has since grown into the Plaster Creek Stewards, a partnership between the college, local churches, environmental groups and others to restore the stream.

Their work is capturing some national attention. In June the group netted $58,500 in one of just five grants from a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency program for restoring urban streams.

While much of the watershed is indeed urban, the 14-mile creek also flows through agricultural, commercial and residential land before emptying into the Grand River in Grand Rapids. The EPA grant is helping the group build connections between the farmers near the creek’s headwaters, the residents of its suburban middle reaches, and the largely low-income population near its mouth.

“If you get to know someone who lives downstream, or has a school just like yours downstream, hopefully it will create a sense of ownership and compassion,” said Dana Strouse, who provides technical assistance to the restoration effort through her position in the nonpoint source pollution program of the Department of Environmental Quality. “Everybody has a small part to play, so it takes a lot of relationship-building to get there.”

The Stewards figure their best avenue for building that shared sense of purpose is through the Christian Reformed Church, which plays an important community role throughout the watershed. They work through liaisons at local churches to get congregations involved in restoring the creek.

The denomination was brought to West Michigan by Dutch settlers. Its tenets are central to Calvin College’s educational philosophy, and to the Stewards’ work.

“Our motivation for caring about the environment is the biblical vision we hold, that creation is good, and we want it to flourish,” said Gail Heffner, director of community engagement for Calvin and a leader of the Stewards.

The creek certainly isn’t flourishing now. The DEQ considers it unfit for bodily contact, and Strouse said it’s “one of the more impaired streams” in west Michigan.

In the upstream agricultural areas, fertilizer and animal waste runoff creates E. coli problems, and sediment from erosion chokes habitat for aquatic insects and the fish that feed on them. Suburban sprawl has covered much of the watershed in pavement, leading to increased water temperatures, unstable stream flows and erosion.

There’s also “some pretty nasty industrial stuff in the middle and lower watershed,” Heffner said, but the expensive, complicated work of cleaning up industrial pollution “is down the road a ways.”

The Stewards are tackling more immediate water quality problems with a range of tactics.

In the urban portion of the river, they help volunteers stencil signs on storm drain covers, indicating that anything going into the drains ends up in the creek. With the help of local churches, school groups and others, they plant trees and build rain gardens and buffer strips with native plants.

The Stewards are also taking less conventional approaches to stream restoration. For instance, they’ve launched an oral history project to record stories about the creek from people who live in the watershed. The idea is to create a vision of what the creek once was, and could be again.

“We do know there were some very interesting rare plant species that lived here,” Heffner said. And brook trout–a species highly sensitive to water quality and temperature–were once found in the watershed, said project manager Nate Haan.

But they aren’t kidding themselves.

“I don’t think a brook trout would last five minutes in there now,” Haan said.

“The problems are just so severe,” Heffner added. “It’s going to be a very long process.”

Still, the Stewards say they are encouraged by their progress. In addition to winning the EPA grant, they’ve submitted what Strouse said is a strong proposal for federal Clean Water Act funding that is passed along to states for watershed restoration grants.

And it seems their message of moral duty to protect the creek is beginning to resonate even among some of the toughest sells in the watershed. A few years ago the DEQ sought the Stewards’ help in convincing conservative farmers in Kent County to take measures to protect local streams.

“There are farmers there who are connected to our denomination, but they’re not very interested in talking to DEQ,” Heffner said. “There shouldn’t be any farmers in our faith community who don’t want to take part in protecting the watershed.”

By discussing stream restoration efforts in terms of their shared beliefs, Heffner said the group has convinced some farmers to allow them to plant native vegetation along the banks of Plaster Creek’s headwaters, and she hopes more will follow.

Church teachings also motivate volunteers in the creek’s lower reaches. “I don’t live in the watershed, but I worship there,” said Andrea Lubberts, a liaison to the Stewards for Roosevelt Park Church in Grand Rapids. She’s helped her church plant rain gardens and get kids involved in protecting the creek.

“We use a lot of ‘re’ words like restoration, redemption, resurrection,” she said. “We are called to go out into the world and be that redeeming force.”

Photo: MiCorps

The Department of Environmental Quality and the Great Lakes Commission today announced the availability of $50,000 in grants for projects to monitor the health of Michigan streams.

Nonprofit organizations and local governments are eligible for funding to monitor water quality, habitat conditions and populations of benthic macroinvertebrates–aquatic insects, mollusks and other creatures that are indicators of stream health.

New volunteer stream monitoring groups are eligible for training and for funding to help them establish strategic plans.

Funding is available through the Michigan Clean Water Corps, or MiCorps.  The program was created eight years ago to provide stream data to the DEQ, and has since made $340,000 in grants.

Applications are due by Feb. 17.  Application materials and instructions are available here.

Sure, this post exists in part because it’s a journalism convention to revisit the year’s top stories (largely because it requires no original reporting, and allows us to spend more time watching the A Christmas Story marathon and sipping booze-laced eggnog).

Still, we’re proud of the stories we’ve produced this year.  At the risk of sounding smug, we are confident that the articles and blog posts we’ve written this year have been quality pieces of reporting. And most importantly, as we see it, they are stories that would not have been reported in a world without MRN.

We hope you’ll keep coming back to us in 2012 for more in-depth reporting on the waters you care about. In the meantime, here are some of our favorite stories from 2011:

TOXIC SALMON:  This was our last story of the year, and one of our best.  It’s on the list because nobody else has reported on this potentially significant source of pollution in Michigan streams, and because of the role this issue could play in future dam-removal debates.

GRAYLING GAMBLE:  A plan to reintroduce arctic grayling to Michigan waters got a fair amount of media attention.  But we dug a little deeper by speaking with a state biologist who said the stretch of the Manistee River being studied for the reintroduction effort was poor habitat for the fragile fish.

SNAGGING BOOM: Salmon anglers will remember the 2011 salmon run as an absolute monster: very big fish, and lots of ‘em.  The massive migration wasn’t lost on poachers, as we reported in this short blog post on an uptick in snagging. There was nothing terribly original or earth-shattering about the post, yet more people read it than any of our other content. We had to laugh when we discovered that readers had arrived at the post–which included warnings about the stiff penalties for snagging–by Googling “How to snag salmon.”

BOARDMAN DAMS: This story on the biggest dam removal project in state history was our first entry in an occasional series on such projects around the state. Federal and state agencies are working with non-profit groups and local governments to remove or modify four dams on the Boardman River in an effort to restore hundreds of acres of wetlands and reconnect 160 miles of stream habitat.

BLOODY RUN: Brian Bienkowski’s report on a plan to uncap a long-buried stream running through Detroit was one of our most read. Bloody Run Creek was covered with concrete and routed into the city’s sewer system, but a plan to restore it could ease the burden on the city’s ailing sewers and become the centerpiece of green development.

GAUGE FUNDING: As far as we can tell, we wrote the only report on Michigan’s potential loss of dozens of USGS stream monitoring gauges, which provide crucial river data to pollution regulators, flood forecasters, paddlers and anglers. This follow-up post listed which gauges were ultimately lost and how some were saved, but only for another year.

Researchers on Pine Creek, a Manistee River tributary, found brook trout gorging on salmon eggs had high levels of PCBs, especially compared with trout in a nearby stream closed off to salmon.

Fish that share Michigan streams with spawning Great Lakes salmon tend to carry high concentrations of toxic chemicals—in some cases, high enough to potentially warrant state warnings against eating the fish, according to developing research.

The research has not yet been published or peer-reviewed, said David Janetski, post doctoral researcher with Grand Valley State University’s Annis Water Resources Institute and lead scientist on the project. But preliminary data show that fish in stream sections open to migrating salmon are generally more contaminated with toxic PCBs than those in sections of the same river system where salmon are blocked by barriers like dams.

Though PCBs were banned in the 1970s, the chemicals still accumulate in the flesh of Great Lakes fish like salmon and steelhead. When the migrating fish spawn in the lakes’ tributaries, stream-dwelling fish eat their contaminated eggs.

The issue isn’t news to fisheries managers, but the findings highlight the complexity of dam removal projects, especially if a dam is the only barrier between contaminated Great Lakes salmon or steelhead and the rest of a river.

“If you remove one of these dams, these contaminated salmon are going to move upstream and transport contaminants into what were isolated habitats,” Janetski said. “It’s kind of an ironic twist that man-made structures may in some cases actually be protecting pristine environments upstream.”

That could be the case on the Boardman River, where the largest dam removal project in state history could open up the river to Lake Michigan steelhead. Four dams will be removed or modified, including the dam at Union Street, which is closest to the mouth of the river and now blocks fish passage.

Whether steelhead will be allowed to pass Union Street is far from settled and will ultimately depend on upcoming scientific assessments and calls for public input, according to Rick Westerhof, fish biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and member of the team coordinating the Boardman project.

The need to keep out invasive species like sea lamprey will also factor into the decision, as will the project’s overarching goal of reconnecting habitats within the river and the Great Lakes, Westerhof said.

“There are going to be positive impacts on a wide range of animal and plant species,” he said. “Of course, that has to be weighed with the impacts of which species you’re passing and also looking at the contaminant burdens in those fish.”

The project, which was part of Janetski’s doctoral dissertation at Notre Dame University, also includes a method for resource managers to estimate the how much contamination salmon could bring into a previously isolated stretch in the event of a dam removal.

While previous research has looked at the issue in individual streams, this project takes a more wide-ranging look at the problem in Great Lakes watersheds. The researchers tested fish in 15 Great Lakes tributaries in Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana and Ontario. Contamination levels were highest in Lake Michigan tributaries, followed by Lake Huron and then Lake Superior.

The most extreme case showed fish in Pine Creek, a Manistee River tributary with a heavy salmon run, were 60-times more contaminated with PCBs than those in a nearby salmon-free stream.

“So that was…I guess alarming is the right word,” Janetski said.

It’s alarming because the PCB concentration they found in the sample fish, which included brook trout, were potentially high enough to earn them a spot on the state’s list of fish consumption advisories—a list stream fish rarely make.

The method Janetski used to measure contaminants differs slightly from the state’s method when issuing advisories on eating fish, so it’s not immediately clear whether these trout would qualify for a warning or how strict it would be.

But the data, when published, could encourage the state to make a higher priority of testing trout in streams with salmon runs, according to Joseph Bohr, an aquatic biologist with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality who runs the state’s fish contaminant monitoring program.

“It’s certainly something we need to consider,” Bohr said. “That’s something we should put on our radar.”

State biologists haven’t previously tested contamination in the Lower Manistee’s brook trout, but the state is well aware of the potential for salmon to move toxic substances into rivers, Bohr said. High PCB levels have led to consumption advisories on brown trout and suckers from the Pere Marquette River despite no known sources of PCB pollution there.

“Our guess is that the PCBs were brought up by salmon,” he said. “And steelhead, for that matter. But salmon probably more than anything else.”

Photo: Michigan Department of Natural Resources

A fish-stocking experiment by the Department of Natural Resources appears to have happy results for Michigan’s brown trout anglers.

State biologists last year began stocking rivers and lakes with a new genetic strain of brown trout–offspring of wild fish from the northern Lower Peninsula’s Sturgeon River–in response to flagging survival rates for hatchery fish, according to an article on the DNR website. They continued stocking the hatchery strain, outfitting the fish with clips to identify their origin.

In electrofishing surveys on the Au Sable and Manistee Rivers, the Sturgeon River fish far outnumbered the hatchery strain. The technique uses mild electric shocks to temporarily stun fish so they can be netted for data collection.

Indeed, on the Manistee below the Hodenpyl Dam, every single fish identified was from the new strain. Below the Mio Dam on the Au Sable, Sturgeon River fish outnumbered their hatchery cousins five-to-one. The surveys also turned up unusually large fish, the DNR article says.

“I’m looking for the fishery below Mio to not only keep going, but get better,” fisheries biologist Steve Sendek says in the article. “With year-round fishing now and new regulations, this could be a win-win situation. This fishery is very special. And we can’t count on natural reproduction to sustain that fishery because of the influences of the dam. Stocking is going to be an important part of maintaining that fishery.”

It’s unclear how the Sturgeon River fish will fare in Lake Michigan and the inland lakes where they were stocked, but for river anglers–at least in tailwater fisheries like the areas studied–the new strain could be the beginning of a bright fishing future, biologists say.

“I’m very optimistic about the future with the early results,” Sendek says. “I’m hoping this will revitalize all of our brown trout fisheries, we just have to learn how to utilize this new tool.”

Streamflow gauges marked by blue and black dots on this USGS map show water levels “much above normal” or flat out “high” as of 12:30 a.m. Friday. Look here for the most recent version of this map, where pointing at specific gauges brings up information like the current river level and its flood stage.

Another USGS map shows the only river above flood stage is the Raisin, which is filling basements with raw sewage in Monroe, mobilizing sandbags and sump pumps in Dundee, and closing bridges into Blissfield.

The National Weather Service in Detroit has issued flood warnings for the Raisin and Huron rivers. Flood advisories stand for the Grand at Jackson and Ionia, Sycamore Creek at Holt, Portage River near Vicksburg and the St. Joseph at Burlington.