Status quo reigns in area fisheries
Idaho Fish & Game will continue to manage Priest Lake for sustainable lake trout harvest while encouraging laker harvest on Upper Priest Lake. (Photo courtesy GLENN OAKLEY/IDAHO FISH & GAME)
PRIEST RIVER — The Idaho Department of Fish & Game is staying the course on fisheries management at Priest and Upper Priest lakes.
The state will continue to manage the lower lake for sustainable harvest of lake trout while encouraging anglers to suppress the lake trout population in the upper lake, Andy Dux, Fish & Game’s Panhandle region fisheries manager, told the Idaho Lakes Commission on March 28.
The decision to maintain the status quo on the two lakes follows a series of direct-mail, email and online surveying which covered Idaho’s five northern counties, in addition to Washington state’s Pend Oreille and Spokane counties.
Questions about whether to change course in management of the lakes emerged after lake trout suppression efforts on Lake Pend Oreille allowed embattled kokanee to mount a comeback.
A Priest Lake angling advisory committee developed three recommendations as Fish & Game contemplated a five-year management plan for the lakes. They involved continuing to manage the lower lake for lake trout, restoring the lake’s kokanee population so it could support harvest or a hybrid of the two approaches, Dux said.
Fish & Game sent out 5,000 pieces of direct mail to license holders and received about a thousand responses. Of the 10,000 email surveys, only about 400 responded. Another 800 filled out online surveys.
“We ended up hearing from over 2,000 people, which is a really good sample,” said Dux.
Roughly a fourth of the respondents had no opinion, while a third advocated for change and another third advocated for no change.
“What it meant was that, in the end, we were kind of where we were when we started,” said Dux.
However, the even split firmed up a conclusion that there was not a full-throated call for a change in management, which would likely be costly.
“To make that kind of change we’d need to see overwhelming public support to get something like that off the ground and we just, frankly, didn’t see that,” Dux said.
Dux said the state would continue to try and give Upper Priest kokanee a break by continuing with a no-harvest limit on lakers in that body of water. It also removed prohibitions against using barbed or baited hooks in the Upper Lake.
Keith Kinnaird can be reached by email at kkinnaird@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow him on Twitter @KeithDailyBee.