PITTSFIELD — Jim Ryan stood with Ray Colton on the banks of the Tweed River on Oct. 7 and shook his head, more in resignation than disbelief. He’d seen too many places like this in the last month.

“What a mess,” he said. He made a note in his notebook: “Colton’s mill site: Site is hammered.”

The river running past Colton’s firewood mill looked more like an abandoned gravel pit than a babbling brook.

On Aug. 28, Tropical Storm Irene had ravaged this stretch of the Tweed, a scenic stream that borders Vermont 100 between Killington and Stockbridge. Highway crews compounded the damage. Desperate for gravel to repair the washed-out highway and its broken bridges, they drove excavators and dump trucks into the river and scooped out tons of stone.

The tracks of heavy equipment could still be seen as ridged indentations on gravel bars. Much of the river’s water ran in a stony ditch gouged out by the road crews, but the rest trickled in multiple threads through the gravel islands.

Just upstream, the river had jumped its bank, eating up the field behind Sarah and Gordon Gray’s house and carving a new channel that barely missed Colton’s mill. More than 100 feet of riverbank snowmobile trail had disappeared.

Colton was worried about what would happen in the next high water.

“I’m afraid the river wants to come right through the yard,” he said, referring to his millyard with its stacks of logs. He’d spent the night of Irene sleeping in a camper at the mill to keep an eye on the river.

Ryan shared Colton’s concern about damage from a future flood, but had other worries as well.

“From a water quality and fish habitat perspective, the conditions were just horrible,” he said later. “Think about fish trying to stay cool in the middle of summer. Instead of deep shaded pools, they would have this shallow, braided stream.

“Yes, the river might have healed itself, but it could have taken decades. Something needed to be done,” he said.

Irene had jerked Ryan, a stocky, soft-spoken man, from his job as a state watershed coordinator to join the state’s lightly staffed River Management Program. He had spent the weeks since criss-crossing the White River watershed to survey river damage and to provide guidance to towns about rebuilding bridges and culverts in more flood-resistant ways.

A little over one million pounds of carp were taken from the lake starting in November of last year by a commercial fishing business — the La Crosse based Monsoor Fishing Company, which sells the carp to fish distributors. See the dozens of unique artificial fish habitat models, fish attractors and fish cover used at fishiding.com, the leader in  science based, proven, fish protection.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has renewed the company’s contract for this year to continue its carp removal efforts from Lake Puckaway located west of Oshkosh in Green Lake County.

The possibility exists that upwards of four to five million pounds of carp could be removed from the lake in the next few years in continuing efforts to clean up the invasive species and provide a better habitat for game fish.

Officials from the DNR said so far they’re also pleased with the Monsoor Fishing Company and its efforts to remove carp.

“We’ve been working with them and they’re taking out a good number of carp,” said Dave Bartz, a DNR fisheries biologist in Wautoma. “They have good equipment and are experienced and professional.”

It was a much different story two years ago when an Ohio man and his crew workers committed a huge blunder while removing carp from the lake.

Ron Bruch, DNR fisheries supervisor in Oshkosh, said they didn’t properly handle the carp removal and as a result there was a pretty substantial killing of game fish, including a sizeable number of walleye.

“They killed about 10 percent of the walleye stock. It didn’t have any measurable effect on the fisheries, but we would have preferred the walleye still be in Lake Puckaway,” Bruch said.

Timothy J. Smith of Swanton, Ohio, who had the contract to remove the carp, pleaded no contest to three counts of unlawful possession of fish and two counts of possessing illegal fish in Green Lake County Circuit Court in September of 2010.

He entered into a deferred prosecution agreement on a felony charge of violating fish dealing rules. A Jan. 17 motion hearing has been scheduled to possibly revoke the agreement for failure to make payments on fines levied for the violations.

The fish kill came to light on Nov. 27, 2009 when a shoreline property owner reported seeing piles of dead fish along the shore in the town of Marquette. DNR agents went to the scene and found thousands of dead fish. The number of game fish, which included highly prized walleye, white bass and northern pike, was estimated at more than 3,300.

Their value was placed at $8.75 each, according to a criminal complaint.

The fish became stressed and many of them died when Smith failed to remove the game fish from his carp nets as required.

Carp studies underway
A major theory behind the carp removal is to improve the habitat so game fish can thrive on Lake Puckaway.

Bruch said carp mess up water clarity by rooting up vegetation beds, which destroys habitat the game fish population needs to be successful and stable.
“We’re hoping to remove some of the carp so the habitat will be less influenced by carp left there,” Bruch said.

Phil Malsack, chairman of the Lake Puckaway Protection and Rehabilitation District, said not only will game fishing improve on the lake with fewer carp, but is also a plus for water fowl, including Forster’s Tern, who nest on the lake in what he called “floating mats of vegetation.”

“With fewer carp there will be more vegetation and expand the opportunities for terns to nest,” Malsack said.

Bruch said attempts have been made to remove carp on Lake Puckaway and other area waters for about 100 years, but with no lasting results so far.

Bruch said the current carp management strategy on Lake Puckaway is much more than taking fish out of the water. He said the DNR is doing additional monitoring and studies of carp in partnership with the Lake Puckaway Protection and Rehabilitation District.

Bruch said the Lake Puckaway group provided $7,000 for sonic telemetry tags surgically embedded into 20 carp from Lake Puckaway this past November. He said the tags should help define where carp call home and how fast they grow and die.

“We’re trying to define the stock size of the carp and to figure out the home range of the carp and do they move long range,” Bruch said. “We want to know just what are the dynamics of the carp population in Lake Puckaway.”