(PBS theme intro) - [Bret] On the next "Prairie Sportsman," we go fishing on the St. Croix River with a seasoned angler and the fishing guide he mentored.

And we learn about battling invasive carp on the Mississippi and St. Croix Rivers.

And we'll join Nicole Zempel for a fast forage.

Welcome to Prairie Sportsman, I'm Bret Amundson.

We got a great show for you this week and it starts right now.

(soft music) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Prairie Sportsman" is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen, on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota, on the web at shalomhillfarm.org, Live Wide Open, Western Minnesota Prairie Waters, and the members of Pioneer PBS.

- [Bret] The St. Croix River that forms the Minnesota-Wisconsin border from Hinkley to Prescott, has been federally protected since it was designated a wild and scenic river in 1968.

Much of the upper St. Croix has been free from the pollution pressures of agriculture and urban development and it's known as one of the country's cleanest rivers.

In October, we joined three guys who have spent thousands of hours fishing the Croix.

(upbeat music) - Well, I used to fish a lot of lakes and I got to admit, I just keep coming back to the river 'cause I know it and there's no houses, and I catch a lot of fish.

So I had to stick to the river.

Put in at William O'Brien, and a lovely park.

It gets busy in the springtime, but this time of year just the locals are out there and maybe a few duck hunters.

Very few people, unspoiled shoreline, you can't beat it.

Rice Lake area of the St. Croix.

- [Ryan] It's an amazing fishery and it's just, it's scenic, it's beautiful.

Fishing the river is not like fishing lakes and it's something more exciting about the river.

It's always moving.

- [Eric] Ryan who started a guide business, I met him through my buddy Kevin.

They lived near each other and Ryan details boats and likes fishing so we started fishing and got him hooked up here too.

And I've been showing him some spots and how to read the current and stuff and he's a good learner and now he has his own guide business.

- So I just started guiding as of this year, named Croix Boys Guided Adventures.

Kind of after these guys, the Croix Boys they call 'em.

(upbeat music) Eric's a hell of a guide.

He's taught me pretty much everything about this river.

I guess I introduced, ooh, I just missed one.

I introduced you to swim baits, I guess, huh?

That's about all you learned from me.

- [Eric] Yeah.

- Yep.

There we go, that's a good one.

(fishing line whirring) (Ryan straining) That's a walleye.

Little floater here you get, I'll let you get some, It's a keeper.

Are we keeping fish today?

We don't, nah.

So this is about average up here.

It's all about your eyes.

You don't need a fish finder.

Not up here.

- [Fisherman] There's a shoreline there.

- It doesn't help me any.

I'll net you sir.

Whoa, get him outta the motor.

Agh!

(fishermen laughing) - [Kevin] You see that mouth come at you?

He was trying to swim out here.

- There we go, take him out.

That is a dandy.

There you go, Kev!

(blues guitar music) - Grew up on a little river down in Rochester, but limited to fishing, of course, very limited.

I mean, the river's so small you couldn't put a boat on it.

Maybe a canoe if you were lucky if a flood came through, and then finally graduated to having a boat, and fishing bigger water and loving every minute.

My wife Eileen and I came out here on our honeymoon, back in '89 and camped with my brother on the St. Croix.

And we loved it so much, we got back to Philadelphia, made a mental note if we ever moved back to Minnesota, it's gotta be the St. Croix area.

And that's exactly what happened.

(blues guitar music) Most memorable thing on the river is probably catching a 45-pound flathead at night.

It was really fun, yeah.

(rhythmic music) And one time I saw a paddlefish come outta the water and do a back flip like a dolphin would at Sea World.

And I didn't believe I saw it, but I did see it.

My wife heard the huge splash and I'm like, "Did I just see what I just saw?"

And it was a paddle fish.

That thing must have been five, six feet long.

That really floored me when I saw that.

- I grew up fishing.

My dad was a hardcore fisherman, he was a boiler maker.

So we moved all over the state, but I call Thief River Falls, kind of my home.

So I grew up fishing Lake of the Woods and Red Lake during the crappie boom, and the Red River.

And my dad got me hooked on fishing and I've loved it ever since.

My first sturgeon I ever caught.

It was that Lake of the Woods.

We were jigging for walleyes and I snagged a sturgeon right in the fin and we chased that thing around for an hour and we had a hundred walleyes on the clicker already.

My dad wanted me just to cut it, I'm like, "You gotta be kidding me!"

I had a six-pound test line on and it was stretched man.

And we had to throw it all away, but we got it in the boat after an hour of chasing it around.

My parents are divorced.

So I would go to my mom's in the summertime and I would ride my bike three miles to the Minnesota River and I would bring tinfoil and butter and onions and a filet knife, and I would catch channel cats out of the river and I'd filet 'em up and cook him on a fire when I was 12, 13 years old.

It's just something I enjoy, just being in the outdoors and enjoying nature and especially up here without houses and things around.

And really nobody, it's nothing better, it's peaceful.

(upbeat music) I have three kids, I have a family and it's hard to fish and get out fishing very often.

So I spent 10 years buffing boats and I thought it was time, it was time to get my captain's license.

It was time to make the guiding a reality.

And after meeting Eric and Kevin and learning the river, I felt confident that I could get people on fish, so I did it.

You gotta go through your captain's school, you gotta learn the rules of the road, rules of the river, Safety, navigational buoys is a huge one, you gotta do first aid, you gotta do CPR, you gotta get your TWIC card, you gotta do a drug test, and then you send all your paperwork into the Coast Guard.

You gotta get sworn into the Coast Guard.

Not all about the electronics finding fish.

It's honestly, it's about river seams, it's about finding these sandbars.

Depth does not determine fish, right?

It's the bait that does it.

The bait will be in shallow water and follow these fish up river into the shallows, and that's why you happen to find walleyes in three feet of water.

And it's not normal like lakes where you find 'em, in that 17-feet range to 20-feet range.

- You don't know what might happen given day-to-day, and the variety of fish, I mean what's ever in the lakes is definitely here in the river, plus more, plus more.

The muskies, Northerns, catfish, sturgeon, white bass, paddlefish, sheepshead, crappies, catfish, channels, flatheads, suckers, buffalo, carp.

You could go on and on.

You got to know, get to know the currents and the the eddies and where the fish will lay.

And also know the birds help too, where the seagulls are feeding on the shad, you want a fish there if the birds are up here.

And also visually just look for fish feeding, chasing minnows along the side.

And they're usually silver bass or large- or smallmouth bass.

Today we've been catching all our fish on shad raps and some top water and minnows do very well this year.

But I think we're gonna be sticking to what we've been doing, casting shad baits.

I got a hundred minnows in here and probably use only three of them.

So, lures are working.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

(upbeat music) Every year it's the fall bite, especially the bass bite.

I love it.

'Cause you can come out here and catch 30 nice three-, four-pound fish every day.

And as long as you throw 'em back, they'll be here next time you're out.

I will keep a few walleyes to eat, but 95% of the fish go back in the drink.

- It can definitely humble you on days, but when the fishing's good, it's good.

Like today.

We got a what, two doubles, maybe a triple.

We got what, 40 fish this morning alone.

And we catch a variety.

I mean we got, so we got silvers, we got smallmouth bass, largemouth bass.

We got a few walleyes this morning and a Northern, I mean we had, it's a multi-species day, so, can't beat it.

(upbeat music) - We had a high water event in 2019.

We had a whole bunch of fish move up and we had this large capture of 50 or so in pool eight in La Crosse.

- I am standing among some beautiful nannyberry bushes.

They are a little bit stressed.

(blues guitar music) - [Bret] Invasive carp are moving up the Mississippi River and knocking on Minnesota's southern door.

To track their movement and behavior, the Minnesota DNR has tagged three invasive carp, including Billy Bighead.

He was netted on the St. Croix River seven years ago and has evaded his captors ever since.

(blues guitar music) - Our tagged bighead, or we nicknamed him Billy, is a little bit of a legend at the DNR.

The fish was tagged in July of 2017, and since then we have been trying to recapture this fish.

His tag expires next February, so February of 2024.

And we have tried to throw every new piece of researched sampling at this fish that we possibly can.

Sampling's just kind of a broad term that we use to, it encompasses gill nets, commercial seines, beach seines, electro fishing, all the different things that we can do to target these fish and potentially remove these fish.

This tag goes off every 30 to 90 seconds for the last almost seven years now.

As of last spring, we had over 700,000 detections on this one fish.

One of the VPS arrays that we've had out here showed Billy just constantly hanging out in this spot for most of one winter.

So, and they're at 56 feet right there.

We need to get in closer, so I don't think he's sitting in there.

So I think we can go in there, at least start getting 'em and get a directional on 'em that way.

We'll go out there and try to net this fish and this fish just will disappear.

He'll be gone.

We won't be able to get a single detection on this fish and all of a sudden he's three miles downstream.

Had to go out and get a specialized net to sample deep water habitat because this fish would try to dive around our other nets and get down to like, 74 feet.

And it's not that the fish likes to do that, he's trying to avoid us.

Like, this fish definitely, I'm sure is laughing at us as it's watched us for the last six and a half, seven years now, try to net him again.

We always joke that he is a party fish.

'Cause you know, 4th of July comes, Memorial Day comes, that fish is tucked up tight in Anderson Bay, and as soon as we're back Monday, Tuesday, that fish is gone.

(blues guitar music) There is evidence there to suggest that these fish will associate certain activities like, such as netting, with like the sound of commercial fishermen pounding on the side of the boat, with the fact that they had surgery last time they were caught.

So they kind of have a tendency to panic in large groups and then therefore escape, and try to do everything in their power.

Or, I mean we've even had this fish hide behind trees as we're trying to detect 'em.

Of the three invasive carp that we have in Minnesota, bighead carp tend to get the biggest.

We don't have a lot of those.

Those usually come first with the invasion front and then silver carp come in after that.

And silver carp, the ones that jump.

Following these fish around, we've learn about new habitats that they like to be in and oftentimes we can sample that area where that fish actually is, and potentially remove other species, mainly silver carp.

We start by deploying the the purse seine, and we set that out using two commercial fishing boats.

And once that purse seine is completely closed up, then we can start pulling it like a traditional beach seine.

Our invasive carp program started in 2012, started with LCCMR funding and since then we've branched out and really tried to focus on new and innovative techniques.

Telemetry involves surgically implanting a hydroacoustic tag, that's about the size of your thumb, into a fish.

We just flip the fish over on a surgery cooler that's especially made.

You just cut open the fish, you carefully implant this tag, you suture the fish back up, and then you hold it in the water for a little while to make sure that it recovers adequately before you release it.

We have a whole network of receivers throughout Minnesota's waters that help us detect these individual tags.

- [Bret] The DNR has tagged almost 300 fish on the Minnesota, St. Croix, and Mississippi Rivers, including native species like muskie, sturgeon and big mouth buffalo.

- One of the key ones is paddlefish.

And we can actually watch paddlefish movement and oftentimes it's closely associated if there's invasive carp moving upstream.

The paddlefish are often moving upstream at the same time or very similar timing.

Right now in Minnesota, most of our invasive carp are centraled around anywhere from pool eight down La Crosse, all the way up to about Winona areas.

All of those fish have been moving upstream since they were introduced or accidentally introduced in the 1970s down in Arkansas.

We had a high water event in 2019.

We had a whole bunch of fish move up and we had this large capture of 50 or so in pool eight in La Crosse, - [Participant] It's a big seine haul, they got a whole pile of 'em here.

We've already pulled out five silvers and three grass carp.

- These fish continually move up with each high water event that we have.

That's what they're looking for, for not only food, but also for for reproduction, to spawn.

We do not actually have a confirmed sampling report saying that they have spawned in Minnesota.

The biggest problem with invasive carp is that where they land in the food chain, they eat the bottom, they eat algae, they eat, phytoplankton and zooplankton, so they're eating what everything else needs at some point in their life to survive.

Everyone always thinks that walleye are one of the top predators.

Well, they start out as small fry.

They can't eat minnows on day five of their existence.

They need that small phytoplankton, zooplankton to survive.

- [Bret] Agencies use several different methods to remove carp.

- [Kayla] Netting is probably the the best way, and that's what's been proven down south in high-density populations, is that commercial fishing tends to be the easiest way to remove these fish.

- [Bret] On November 30th, the DNR pulled a record 331 invasive carp from the Mississippi River's pool six, including 289 silver carp.

The capture was made possible by partnering with Wisconsin DNR staff to track tagged invasive carp.

The Minnesota DNR is also working with the U.S. Geological Survey to deploy floating gill nets and an underwater speaker system that can drive silver carp over the nets.

- [Kayla] We irritate them to the point that they jump, kind of like boat motors downstream.

- [Bret] The system was developed in Columbia, Missouri, and tested on the Mississippi last October.

Six silver and one grass carp were captured and tagged pool six and eight.

- We also do use electro fishing.

We actually take out a specialized boat that allows us to put electricity down into the water from anodes.

We can use it to not only sample fish and collect fish, we'll have two netters on the bow of the boat scooping up fish, but we can also use it to drive fish.

So we don't have to use high electricity with invasive carp all the time.

(blues guitar music) Bow fishing is one of the ways that citizens can partake in the removal of invasive carp.

Downstream of here where there's a higher-density population, it's one of the ways that people can go out and actually make a sport of it to get these things out of our system.

We don't see a lot of pressure up here for that quite yet, mostly because we don't have a high enough density population.

We had a work plan that was originally established in, I think it was 2011, to pretty much get all of our options for what to do on the table, and then we'll start analyzing that so that we find the best options for Minnesota.

So all of our partnering agencies, Fish and Wildlife Service, USGS, even Wisconsin DNR and Iowa DNR, they're all working on the same network.

We'll start comparing all the different methods, combination of methods, figure out which one's most cost effective, and then we'll actually write our action plan for Minnesota.

If we don't do anything about invasive carp, a leisurely cruise on the St. Croix, you might have to, if you go out there, you might have to put shields up like, acrylic shields on the front of your boat.

There's a lot of boats downstream that have chain link fence around their console, so that the driver of the boat doesn't get knocked outta the boat as they're driving downstream..

I mean the, these fish will break bones, they'll give you concussions, they'll do damage to your boat.

There's always going to be that opinion that the whole thing is a lost cause.

They're already here, they're gonna be established in the next, who knows how many years, who cares, right?

Well, I don't know about you, but I'm doing this for my children's children's children.

I'm doing it for yours.

Why give up on something so great that we have here in Minnesota?

(lively music) (soft music) - Okay, well then, I am standing among some beautiful nannyberry bushes.

They are a little bit stressed, just because we've had drought now, for the past few summers, but they are still producing berries and you can see they're starting to turn their really pretty fall colors.

They kind of remind me of sumac, because you get the real vibrant yellows, oranges, and reds, and the nannyberry shrub tree produces those same really vibrant colors.

So the fun thing about the nannyberry is that it is completely, in my opinion, unique.

Texturally, it's unique, it's got a thicker inside, almost kind of like a banana.

And then I also feel that it tastes a bit like a banana or I've heard people describe it as figgy, or kind of prune-like.

To ID this, nannyberries typically, well, it's a native shrub or tree to the east and then going into the upper Midwest area.

So it is native to Minnesota.

Let's see the leaves, they grow what we would call opposite.

And so they are straight across from each other and if you can see, they kind of create like a bit of a V, a V-shape.

So they are just opposite of one another.

And then I am not sure what this little pokey bit is called, but the nannyberry bush also has that at the end of each of their branches.

And so in the spring, May to June, you're gonna see these bushes with really pretty, kind of creamy, white flowers that have five petals per flower.

And then those give way to then, these clusters of berries.

And so they start out in the summer, late June, July, August, they're kind of green, initially.

They turn into kind of a red, a deep red, or I guess maybe deep kind of candy apple red, like that.

And then eventually when they're all the way ripe, which is usually fall, depending on weather, but September, October it's a great time to harvest nannyberries.

And they will sometimes shrivel up and kind of look a little bit like a raisin.

But when they are black like this, they are ready to harvest and they are delicious.

Now also another reminder, I'm standing here, and yes, these are nannyberries, they are edible and they're very, very good for me.

But behind me there is a snowberry plant and there is also buckthorn.

And those berries are black, as well.

And so just know your plants and know your surroundings.

And when you are harvesting, in this case, the nannyberry, just make sure that every berry that you pick is coming from a plant that you know is the nannyberry bush or tree.

So know your surroundings.

When prepping these yummy, delicious berries, because textually they are thicker, kind of a thicker inside I guess, I like to put them in just a slow cooker with a little bit of water and then kind of let them come up to a boil or a simmer for probably a good hour.

Then after that I'm gonna old school mash 'em up, with like the pedestal and then kind of a conical strainer kind of thing.

I don't know what they're called, but they work great, and it allows me to separate the skin and seed from the innards of the berry.

And then you can transform that into like, a berry butter.

You can make like a mousse, you can make, I make nannyberry maple syrup, that's fantastic.

The filling, or what you're creating, almost like a paste, a nannyberry paste, it's good on all sorts of baked items.

So just kind of a treat and something fun to harvest in the fall.

And in the winter, something for the deer and wildlife to still munch on and enjoy.

(upbeat music) (soft music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Prairie Sportsman" is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen, on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting, near Windham, Minnesota, on the web at shalomhillfarm.org, Live Wide Open, Western Minnesota Prairie Waters, and the members of Pioneer PBS.