By Nancy Huddleston, Editor

It was a perfect fall morning – crisp and cool with bright sunshine bouncing off the surface of Eagle Creek.

Mark Nemeth of the fisheries department of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) was leading a team that was busy getting ready to fish – but not with a rod and reel. The team made up of representatives of the DNR and Scott Soil and Water Conservation (SWCD) was sampling Eagle Creek this week to assess the Brown trout population and water conditions.

Instead of rods and reels, a trio clad in hip-waders was armed with small nets, buckets and a system that mildly shocks the fish to allow them to be caught, assessed and returned to the creek. Meanwhile, two other members of the team stayed on shore to evaluate the fish.

On this day, the group had already been on the north end of Eagle Creek, in the Minnesota Valley Wildlife Refuge just off County Road 101. Now with cars whizzing by behind them, the group started under the bridge that goes underneath the CR 101 frontage road and worked its way south.

Eagle Creek is a protected stream because it has only one of two naturally-reproducing populations of Brown trout in the metropolitan Twin Cities area. As such, the DNR conducts periodic samplings of the fish population.

The group had pretty good luck within minutes of being in the water. At first, the team of Leah Weyandt and Jaime Rockney of the SCWD and Rob Dodd of the DNR found a few juvenile Brown trout, some mud minnows and even a small Northern. But soon, Nemeth and his assistant, B.J. Bauer, couldn’t keep up with the fish assessments as the crew kept bringing them more and more fish in buckets.

As he was working, Nemeth sounded pleased as he said “we’re seeing multiple classes of older and younger fish which means they are reproducing and maintaining a population in the stream.”

The two-day evaluation went through six stations of the creek and the data collected will be compared with similar data taken in 1996, 2002 and 2005.

Nemeth said when the stream first gained protected status in 1996, they found eight Brown trout.

Since then, the city, DNR, county, Trout Unlimited and nearby developers have worked to make sure urban runoff doesn’t impact the water quality of Eagle Creek, which is key to the survival of the Brown trout because it likes a cool environment.

In 2002, a sampling turned up 16 fish and in 2005 that jumped to 97.

Although the data from this week’s sampling will take awhile to compile, Nemeth was pleased. He noted that in one station area in 2005, they only counted one fish. This year in that same station, they counted 20.

The sampling is done in two passes on two different days. After the first pass in 2005, the total count over the six stations was 61. After the first pass this week, the count yielded 97 fish.

“There seems to be more trout there, even though we haven’t gone through all our data,” Nemeth said.

He also noted residents should be excited about the fish sampling, saying that in the 15 years since the creek was protected and the corridor around it was turned into public land, the trout are doing well.

Eagle Creek is a catch and release stream, where anglers can fish, but not keep their catch. It is posted as such in several areas, but the DNR also plans to put up more instructional signs to give anglers more guidelines.

 Nancy Huddleston can be reached at editor@savagepacer.com.