After Poisoning to Remove Northern Pike, Lake Davis Opens to Trout Fishing
By Tom Chandler on Feb 5, 2008 in News
Fish & Game wanted non-native, highly predatory pike out of Lake Davis
If you’ve ever experienced an insatiable urge to freeze your ass off ice fishing for stocked trout, then this story will make you very, very happy. From the Redding Record Searchlight:
Even though frozen over, fishing has resumed on Lake Davis, fisheries biologists with the Department of Fish and Game said.
…
Last month, DFG planted more than 31,000 Eagle Lake trout from its American River Hatchery, ranging in size from one-half pound to more than three pounds, into Lake Davis. Additional plantings of nearly 1 million trout are planned later this year.
Lake Davis was closed and poisoned to remove illegally introduced Nothern Pike (biologists didn’t want them spreading downstream to the California Delta).
Let’s hope they got all the pike this time; I doubt the political will exists to close and poison the lake a third time.
See you at Lake Davis, Iceholes…
Smellslikefish | Feb 5, 2008 | Reply
Impressive. I’ll bet it’s at least a year before they find pike again.
Tom Chandler | Feb 5, 2008 | Reply
One wonders if the same idiots who planted them in the first place won’t see this as some kind of challenge. At this point, I’d hate to do it and get caught by some of the local residents, who have lived with better than ten years of this crap.
And frankly, if I’d poisoned it out, I’d wait a while before providing a possible food source to any of the pike that may have survived…
yorkio | Feb 5, 2008 | Reply
How do you poison a lake to kill one sort of fish and no others?
Tom Chandler | Feb 5, 2008 | Reply
You don’t. They killed everything. The final count made it clear that pike had wholly taken over…
Smellslikefish | Feb 5, 2008 | Reply
Tom,
Surprised you didn’t know about pikealicious. Tastes great to everyone, only it kills pike. We can thank the pharmaceutical companies for coming up with this one. Oh wait, they never actually invent anything which isn’t highly profitable … and what’s the gdp of Portola? - yeah, that’s what I thought. So they said,
“Let’s just kill everything.”
Now that I think about it, whomever is selling the poison to kill all the fish - That’s the likely pike-planting-culprit. Bastards. They make Nestle look like heroes.
- Dave (Homeland Security is Watching Me)
Oncorhynchus | Feb 9, 2008 | Reply
I volunteer with DFG on a variety of projects.
This past year DFG spent millions of dollars and thousands upon thousands of ours of staff time to deal with those Pike that some selfish people introduced into Lake Davis.
That money and time could have been better spent doing the science necessary to maintain populations of native fish in their native waters. Or perhaps catching abalone poachers.
This is not a silly thing that only affects the people of Portola and other local areas.
Because people want to catch all sorts of fish in all sorts of places does not make it a good idea to introduce non-native species.
You want to catch Pike? Go to where those fish are native.
Don’t destroy a fishery and waste tax-payer and license fees.