Chasing Those Schools of Yellow Perch

By Steve Weisman, Outdoor Editor

Late ice and Big Spirit Lake = yellow perch bonanza. We’ve been saying it for the past two years. Big Spirit Lake yellow perch are prime for the taking.
However, the winter of 2010 brought loads of snow, and driving on the lake was just about impossible. So, the harvest was well below the anticipated take.

The result? Still huge schools of perch, only bigger! This past summer and fall were  good, and ice anglers could hardly wait until this winter. Then right before Christmas some big snows, wind and drifts that all but stopped the vehicle traffic.

Finally an early January thaw, and the perch fishing went wild. The schools moved, but patience and work brought nice buckets of 9-10 inch perch.
BUT – now, now as we hit the last month of the ice fishing season, the perch really put on the feed bag. It’s time to hole hop and find the schools of active perch.

How many times have you heard it said, “You gotta match the hatch”? The more you look at it, this is pretty sound advice. Here’s where I’m going to throw you a curve when it comes to presentation.

Certainly, a slip bobber and a minnow, a Jigger Spoon, a Northland Buckshot Rattle Spoon or a size 10-12 Rat Finke or a Genz Worm or a tear drop tipped with silver wigglers or wax worms will work.  However, I want to go back to that earlier quote: “You gotta match the hatch.”

Chironomids
Talk the hatch on Big Spirit Lake, and we’re talking Chironomids. If you are not interested in biology, you might go, “A what?”

My curiosity was tweaked, and I wanted to learn more in order to understand the life cycle, which might help me catch more fish. So, I went to Mike Hawkins, Fisheries Management Biologist for the Spirit Lake District. Hawkins first gave me a background biology lesson.

Chironomid: a family of non-biting midges. Hawkins said, “Their larval form is found in lake and stream bottoms, and they are commonly known as midges. They have more than one life phase, and the larval stage of their life is spent in aquatic or semi aquatic habitats.”

And that, folks, is as Paul Harvey used to say, “The rest of the story.” You see, the lay term for the larvae that comes out of the muck in the basin of Spirit Lake is “blood worm, commonly called that for the hemoglobin in the larvae’s body. This allows the larvae to live in extremely low oxygen conditions. Later the larvae take on a mosquito appearance and live only a few days.

A lot of you perch fishermen right now are saying, “Ok, now I know what you are talking about.” The perch on Big Spirit gorge themselves on these blood worms. Often, when I dump my perch out of my bucket before cleaning, I will find lots of little blood worms that the perch have puked up.