War On Pike

There was an interesting story in the Spokesman Review this morning about the State of Washington’s declared war on Northern Pike (Esox lucious) in Box Canyon Reservoir and the lower Pend Oreille River. As part of an aggressive campaign to reduce pike numbers, the state of Washington, Department of Fish and Wildlife “officials say they will work with the Kalispel Tribe to control pike and minimize conflicts with efforts to restore native cutthroats and bull trout in the Pend Oreille River and tributaries.”

In the Flathead, we tend to focus on the effects of lake trout, another, more radical nonnative threat to our native fish. We do however have a “pike problem” much like Washington. We have a population of illegally introduced northern pike in the Flathead River and sloughs just upstream of Flathead Lake. According to a 2008 report by fishery biologist Clint Muhlfeld and others, the population numbers 1,200 to 1,300 fish and they annually consume around 8 metric tons of fish including native westslope cutthroat and threatened native bull trout. In fact, the pike population annually consumes about 13,000 westslope cutthroats and 3,500 bull trout.

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Northern pike in the Pend Oreille River (and Box Canyon Reservoir) are the result of illegal stockings in the Flathead, Bitterroot and Clark Fork River systems in Montana. From there, the pike migrated downstream into Lake Pend Oreille, then into the Pend Oreille River through Idaho and into Washington.

In Montana we have taken a backwards position and we treat these invasive, nonnative predators as game fish. We set limits on pike in the Flathead River and even protect them by limiting the season as our native fish populations continue to decline. We have another illegally-planted, popular, if stunted pike fishery upstream from the Flathead River in Smith Lake (limit 15 fish) on Ashley Creek where they likely leak downstream into our native trout waters.  In spring, northerns stage at the mouth of Ashley Creek in large numbers where they would be easy to target if that area wasn’t closed in spring by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks to prevent over-harvest.

While Washington is planning to remove game-fish status for these invasive predators and allow more aggressive fishing techniques to reduce the pike population and protect their native and nonnative fisheries, we coddle our pike and protect them as they gobble up our declining native fish populations. “Washington has officially declared it isn’t welcoming a non-native fish that poses a major threat to native species ranging from trout to salmon in the Columbia River system.” We have put out the Welcome sign in Montana to illegal plantings by treating them as game fish. There is a strong disconnect in Montana as we protect large predatory, nonnative lake trout and northern pike while at the same time decrying the demise our our native cutthroats and bull trout. We could perhaps learn something from our neighbors to the west.