Dan Keifer on Trout and the Clinton River Watershed

Maintaining trout focus of Clinton river project

Sunday, December 21, 2008 12:25 AM EST
By BOB GROSSSpecial to The Oakland Press

Steelhead season is still a couple of months away, but trout and the Clinton River are always on Dan Keifer’s mind.Keifer, 60, is community outreach coordinator for the Clinton River Watershed Council.

He’s also one of the driving forces behind the council’s coldwater conservation project, an effort to reinvigorate and maintain a year-round trout fishery in the Clinton and its tributaries, notably Paint Creek.The project enters its seventh year this spring, he said.

“Certainly, the visible physical success has been building fish habitat,” Keifer said. “We’ve done four years worth of building fish habitat structures in the Clinton River main stream as well as Paint Creek.“We have gained a greater appreciation of the fish habitat we have here.”

The project is focusing on Paint Creek and a stretch of river totaling about 20 miles from Interstate 75 in Auburn Hills east to Yates Dam on the border between Rochester Hills and Clinton Township.

“Paint Creek is OK,” he said. “We’ve focused more of our attention in the past couple years on taking care of Paint Creek.”

Keifer said the goal is to determine what the limiting factors are that keep the Clinton River from sustaining a larger trout population.Over the past six years, Keifer said, the project has determined that stream flows and resulting temperatures, particularly in the summer, comprise perhaps the greatest limiting factor in sustaining a year-round brown trout population in the main stream of the Clinton River.“(Trout) are very sensitive, especially in the summer months,” he said.

Not only does the stream temperature increase as the flows decrease, he said, but warm stormwater coming off parking lots, streets and rooftops can cause a sudden spike in temperature, stressing the fish.In a more rural area, he said, stormwater has a chance to soak into the ground, where it is cleaned and chilled before it returns to the stream.

“When you have a lot of rooftops, parking lots it happens all at once,” Keifer said. “Rivers are asked to handle more volume of water than Mother Nature ever intended.”

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources in 2003 resumed stocking brown trout in the Clinton River in Auburn Hills as part of the project.“They have fared fairly well,” Keifer said. “It is hardly a huge success. It has been successful in that we know from angler reports and our own findings there are holdovers. Fish planted as seven to eight inches are now 12 to 14 inches, indicating they are three to four years old.”

Shaun Keenan, water resources coordinator for Auburn Hills, said the city does receive reports from anglers catching fish in the Clinton.“Over the summer, there were a few anglers who I spoke with — when I go out to lunch or whatever I go out to the parks — and they mentioned they were catching some as well, of the browns and the rainbows,” he said.

The rainbow trout in the river are typically young steelhead — a rainbow trout that spends much of its adult years in the Great Lakes before returning to its natal river to spawn.Keenan called the project “a success because we are still doing it.”

“As far as Auburn Hills is concerned, we see it as a success because we have fish in the area, and we are seeing an increase in the number of people fishing in the parks,” he said.

Keifer, who this past fall received the National Distinguished Service Award from Trout Unlimited for his efforts on the coldwater conservation project, said the group intends to study stream flows in the main branch of the Clinton River this summer.

“It’ll look at all of the flow regimes, including how all the lake level control structures up through the upper part of the watershed affect flow regime and water temperatures,” he said.