Joining together to improve the Kings River fisheries. Summer 2006 Kings River Fisheries News Summer 2006 1 continued on page 4 Along the Kings River below Pine Flat Dam these days, the top-rated radio stations are being operated by fish. A pilot project that began last year employing radio telemetry has provided a wealth of information to researches and managers within the Kings River Fisheries Manage- ment Program related to trout. “From a data gathering point ofview, what we’ve seen thus far has been very valuable in that it has helped to dispell misconceptions about fish placed in the river,” said Clifton Lollar, Kings River Water Association Resource Analyst and a member of the program’s Techni- cal Steering Committee. Many people felt trout would typically be swept downstream or into canals. “We’ve found the fish are holding quite well in the r iver,” he said. Making that determination possi- ble are state-of-the-art radio trans- mitters that have been surgically implanted into several dozen trout in two separate phases and releases (in October and February). A third release is scheduled to take place in June after this spring’s high water conditions abate. The releases were planned to track fish in a typical va- riety of flow regimes. The trout equipped with trans- mitters are released into the river where they are tracked on a regular basis by Kings River Conservation District environmental staff mem- bers using monitoring equipment. Tracy Purpuro, A KRCD biolo- gist, said five different frequencies are utilized and each fish has its own identification code. Tracking and monitoring can take place in any type of water flow con- ditions. Anglers catching tagged fish are rewarded for returning the radio devices. Some transmitters have been found along the river mi- nus fish and a few have been lost. Purpuro said no major patterns ofmovement have been detected and, under high flow conditions, the fish have tended to move toward the river edges. “They are finding places to hide,” he said. There has been one air reconnais- sance survey. Additionally, two Fish Go ‘On Air’ To Aid In Tracking Studies KRCD’s Genevra Ornelas uses monitoring equipment on a daily basis to track fish behavior and movement for the study. Trophy Trout Prove Popular With Anglers A trophy trout planting program has proven to be extremely popular with Kings River anglers. The trophy trout planting program, which conclud- ed in March, was started in De cember by the Califor- nia Department of Fish and Game. With the possibility of catching planted trout weigh- ing up to nine pounds, anglers responded in much greater than typical numbers by fishing the river downstream from Pine Flat Dam. The larger fish were planted in various areas, with some going into the Kings below Cobbles Weir, within the river’s catch-and-release zone. Anglers say the enthusiasm over the trophy trout has expanded interest in the river’s entire fishery. KRCD biologist Jeff Halstead with one of the trophy trout planted in the Kings River. At left is Dale Mitchell of the California Department ofFish and Game.
Transcript
8/2/2019 Summer 2006 Fisheries Newsletter, Kings River Conservation District Newsletter
Joining together to improve the Kings River fisheries. Summer 2006
Kings River Fisheries News Summer 2006 1
continued on page 4
Along the Kings River below PineFlat Dam these days, the top-ratedradio stations are being operated by fish.
A pilot project that began lastyear employing radio telemetry hasprovided a wealth of informationto researches and managers withinthe Kings River Fisheries Manage-ment Program related to trout.
“From a data gathering point of view, what we’ve seen thus far has been very valuable in that it hashelped to dispell misconceptionsabout fish placed in the river,” said
Clifton Lollar, Kings River WaterAssociation Resource Analyst anda member of the program’s Techni-cal Steering Committee.
Many people felt trout wouldtypically be swept downstream orinto canals. “We’ve found the fishare holding quite well in the river,”he said.
Making that determination possi- ble are state-of-the-art radio trans-mitters that have been surgicallyimplanted into several dozen troutin two separate phases and releases
(in October and February). A thirdrelease is scheduled to take place in June after this spring’s high waterconditions abate. The releases were
planned to track fish in a typical va-riety of flow regimes.
The trout equipped with trans-mitters are released into the riverwhere they are tracked on a regular basis by Kings River ConservationDistrict environmental staff mem- bers using monitoring equipment.
Tracy Purpuro, A KRCD biolo-gist, said five different frequenciesare utilized and each fish has itsown identification code.
Tracking and monitoring can takeplace in any type of water flow con-ditions. Anglers catching taggedfish are rewarded for returning theradio devices. Some transmittershave been found along the river mi-nus fish and a few have been lost.
Purpuro said no major patterns of movement have been detected and,under high flow conditions, thefish have tended to move towardthe river edges. “They are finding
places to hide,” he said.There has been one air reconnais-sance survey. Additionally, two
Fish Go ‘OnAir’ To AidIn TrackingStudies
KRCD’s Genevra Ornelas uses monitoring
equipment on a daily basis to track fish behaviorand movement for the study.
Trophy Trout Prove Popular With AnglersA trophy trout planting program has proven to be
extremely popular with Kings River anglers.The trophy trout planting program, which conclud-
ed in March, was started in December by the Califor-nia Department of Fish and Game.
With the possibility of catching planted trout weigh-ing up to nine pounds, anglers responded in muchgreater than typical numbers by fishing the riverdownstream from Pine Flat Dam.
The larger fish were planted in various areas, withsome going into the Kings below Cobbles Weir, withinthe river’s catch-and-release zone.
Anglers say the enthusiasm over the trophy trouthas expanded interest in the river’s entire fishery. KRCD biologist Jeff Halstead with one of the trophy trout planted in the
Kings River. At left is Dale Mitchell of the California Department of Fish and Game.
8/2/2019 Summer 2006 Fisheries Newsletter, Kings River Conservation District Newsletter
Urbach wasn’t always so optimistic. “I was on theoriginal Lower Kings River Committee in the 1980’s thatfiled a public trust complaint on the Kings River,” hesays. “We were pretty upset with what had happenedto the fishery.”
It was a tremendously contentious time, he recalls.There was little or no trust between the anglers and theriver’s primary oversight agencies—the Kings RiverWater Association, Kings River Conservation Districtand California Department of Fish and Game.
The public trust complaint, filed in 1991 with theState Water Resources Control Board, was the anglers’choice of strategies (rather than a lawsuit, such as theenvironmental litigation that has dominated San Joaquin
River interests since 1988).“Out of that came the Framework Agreement,” he says.
“We could have been like the guys on the San Joaquinand we would have taken 25 years to get one boulder inthe river.”
That agreement established the Kings River Fisheries
Viewing The Kings’ Fishery Habitat ProgressPublic Advisory Committee’s New Leader Has Been On Hand All The Way
Management Program in 1999 in a partnership betweenthe KRWA, KRCD and California Department of Fishand Game, with cooperation from Pacific Gas and ElectricCompany and, ultimately, the anglers themselves.
Cooperation, consensus and program implementation
are at the heart of the Fisheries Management Program.The 28 KRWA member agencies voluntarily provided12 percent of their storage rights to establish theprogram’s 100,000 acre-foot temperature control poolalong with providing increased minimum releases. Inthe program’s first 10 years, the partnering agencies willhave contributed $2 million for habitat work.
“We recognized the reality that we were not going toget an imposed agreement,” Urbach said. “It would haveto be voluntary. That was a new concept at the time.”
Although some anglers wanted a Public AdvisoryGroup to have a major and direct role in managing thefisheries program, Urbach said he was among those who“took the approach, ‘Let’s see what happens.’ We’ve
been in it ever since.”Urbach, a Minnesota native who has lived in Fresno
County since 1979, has been a regular at Public AdvisoryCommittee meetings, first under the chairmanship of Mickey Powell of Visalia and more recently under theleadership of Kevin Wren of Fresno.
He sees the Kings River Fisheries ManagementProgram as “an example of how cooperation can work.”He also appreciates the amount of studies, data collection,program design and habitat improvement constructionthat the Fisheries Management Program has been able toachieve on a modest spending plan.
“I think if we did it in the typical way, we’d be looking
at millions and millions of dollars,” Urbach said.Instead, he said, the three partnering agencies have
been generous with their personnel resources and theenvironmental and engineering staffs of KRCD have beenparticularly well positioned to lend credible professionalexpertise to the Fisheries Management Program.
Big Water Year Sets Stage For IncreasedMinimum Flows
For a second straight year, nat-
ural Kings River runoff is goingto be high enough to trigger thepotential for higher minimum re-leases through the period whenthere is no irrigation demand.
When the Fisheries Manage-ment Program was adopted in1999, KRWA members volun-tarily doubled minimum releasesfrom 50 c.f.s. to what is now thetypical minimum release of 100c.f.s. at times when there are noirrigation demands.
In addition to this voluntary
increase in minimum flow, theFisheries Management ProgramFramework Agreement establisheda non-binding objective for KingsRiver Water Association memberunits to provide minimum releasesscaled up to 250 cubic feet per sec-ond when higher runoff year pro-vides additional water supplies.
Last fall and winter representedthe first time since the Kings RiverFisheries Management Programwas established in 1999 that supply
conditions had been great enough
for the increased minimum re-leases to take place.Anglers—and particularly fly
KRWA member units internallyused a one-time, non-precedent-setting arrangement to providethe higher releases last year andare attempting to frame such aprocedure for use this fall.
Hank Urbach - Chairmanof the Kings River Fisheries
Management Program Public Advisory Group.
Hank Urbach, who is nowchairing the Kings RiverFisheries Management Pro-gram’s Public Advisory Group,looks back at more than two
decades and is generally pleasedwith what he sees in terms of the river’s fishery enhancementprogress.
“Some of us are reasonablyhappy with the way thingshave developed,” says Urbach,a Centerville area resident whois retired as a computer expert.
“We think there is anopportunity to turn thingsaround in the river fishery.”
8/2/2019 Summer 2006 Fisheries Newsletter, Kings River Conservation District Newsletter
Objectives For The FisheryHank Urbach, Kings River Fisheries Management Program Public Advisory Group Chairman
Nearly 25 years after concernamong anglers began mountingover fishery conditions below Pine
Flat Dam, anglers and agencies thathave collaborated on constructive-ly solving problems are beginningto see results.
We are now seven years intothe first decade of the Kings RiverFisheries Management Program. Atremendous amount of knowledgehas been gained. Many habitat im-provements are being made. Theprogram’s three partnering agen-cies—the Kings River Water Asso-ciation, Kings River Conservation
District and California Departmentof Fish and Game—have investedhundreds of thousands of dollarsand significant staff and consultanttime into planning and projects to benefit the fishery.
Most of all, there has been a greatdeal of hard work and willingnessto understand other points of view,leading to cooperation, consensusand accomplishment of some of theinitial goals of the program.
As the new chairman of the pro-
gram’s Public Advisory Group, Ihave three primary goals to pursuethis year. I will encourage the Fish-eries Management Program to:
• Continue implementing its habi-tat master plan, which has alreadyresulted in significant improve-
ments in and along the river and, tosome extent, Pine Flat Reservoir.
• Continue gathering data andstudying the river and its ecosys-tem, including all the new waterquality criteria and permanent useof the novel telemetry that is mak-ing it possible to accurately moni-tor fish movements in the river.
• Improve public outreach to de-velop a wider base of public in-volvement in order to build greater
understanding of the FisheriesManagement Program, apprecia-tion of program needs, respect forfishing regulations and interest infishing itself.
This last point is of great im-portance because a key to the pro-gram’s future success will be build-ing public support for continuationof funding, particularly at the statelevel through the Department of Fish and Game. An important re-sponsibility of the Public Advisory
Group is to help build a coalitionthat will go to Sacramento to lobbyfor continued funding, and high-lighting the economic and recre-
ational values of a high quality fish-ery in the lower Kings River.
In the longer term, I’d like to
see us work toward extending im-proved minimum flows—those thatoccur when there is no irrigation de-mand—downstream from FresnoWeir. That part of the river fisheryis or could be the most productive but it simply doesn’t get the flowsit needs. I see conjunctive uses of water as a creative way to get moreflows into that reach. To accom-plish this would really be no dif-ferent than the sorts of discussionsand technical effort that established
the program in 1999 through itsFramework Agreement and relatedagreements. We’ve asked the Tech-nical Steering Committee to take alook at the river below Fresno Weir,particularly where it has stretchesof slow moving water to see if moreriffles, that are so important to bugproduction, can be created. It’s anengineering problem.
And, as we’ve seen since all of this began, engineering and poli-cy problems pop up all the time.
Working together, we can continuethe progress we have made towardthe goal of restoring the Kings Riv-er to the “Blue Ribbon” fishery forwhich it was once famous.
continued on page 4
A great deal of effort during the Kings River Fisheries
Management Program’s first seven years was directed to-
ward gathering data and understanding the river’s habitat
and its needs but this past fall and winter that knowledge
was translated into action.
Funding totaling $400,000 from the program’s three part-
nering agencies—the Kings River Conservation District,
Kings River Water Association and California Department
of Fish and Game—permitted large numbers of boulders to
Fisheries ManagementProgram Puts ItsFishery HabitatMaster Plan To Work
Boulders placed in the river improve habitat by providing shelter from flows for fish.
8/2/2019 Summer 2006 Fisheries Newsletter, Kings River Conservation District Newsletter
Kings River Fisheries NewsKings River Fisheries News
Published by theKings River Conservation District,
Kings River Water Association,California Department of Fish and Game,
and the Public Advisory Group.
Please send subscription requests to:Kings River Conservation District
4886 E. Jensen Avenue
Fresno, California 93725
Kings River Fisheries News Summer 2006 4
fish were found downstream fromHighway 180 and another transmit-ter, although not found, was trian-gulated to be somewhere in a field
along Mill Creek, leading to specu-lation it might have been caught bya terrestrial predator.
Fish Go ‘On Air’ To Aid In Tracking Studies, continued
There are also continuous moni-toring telemetry stations locatedalong the river to track upstreamand downstream movements.
Lollar said some fish had beenfound to make movements bothways through a diversion structure
in the river, Cobbles Weir, in whichthe Alta Irrigation District left a bayopen to aid fish movement.
The program’s objectives includedetermining:• Performance and applicabilityof alternative telemetry methods(e.g., radio and ultrasonic tagging,stationary and mobile monitoring,etc.) within the river and select apreferred method for use in the pi-lot study.• Residence time of wild andhatchery produced adult trout afterrelease into the river over a range of seasonal flow conditions.
• Geographic distribution of adulttrout within the river.• Whether other aspects of the fish-ery monitoring program should bemodified to more effectively sampleand monitor trout abundance usingother fishery sampling techniques.
• Habitat selection preferenceswithin the river including the useof gravel and boulder habitat en-hancement projects.• Movement of adult trout withinthe river system in response to vari-ation in stream flows.• Potential for existing weirs to actas barriers or impediments to adulttrout migration.• Mortality or loss of adult troutfrom the river.
“The study is providing data on
a level we have never seen before,”Lollar said.
Fisheries Management Program, continued
be installed for fish shelter from high,
swift flows as well as with layers of
gravel for trout spawning in parts of
the river below Pine Flat Dam.
Heavy equipment was also used to
rip cobblestone-laden bottoms in sev-
en reaches of river in order to improveaquatic habitat.
The work, carried out by contractors
and KRCD’s flood operation and main-
tenance staff, was all contemplated in
the program’s Fishery Habitat Master
Plan.
Work began November 12 and
continued until high water condi-
tions from winter storm events
made further construction impos-
sible until next fall.
Since 1999, the Kings River
Fisheries Management Programhas included pledges from KRCD
and KRWA to provide a total of
$100,000 annually for program
use. The CDFG pledged to seek a
like amount in state funds, which
it has done.
An adult rainbow trout with an implanted transmit-ter is planted as part of the Fisheries Management
Program’s Telemetry Study.
CDF&G Warden-Pilot Gary Schales (left) andKRCD’s Louie Long get ready for takeoff on a
