One of my favorite surprises of summer trout fishing in Minnesota comes after a good soaking rain. When storms sweep through the valleys, they don’t just raise the rivers a few inches. They send ants tumbling from trees and grass into the currents, and the trout are quick to notice. Ants...
Living on a trout stream in southeastern Minnesota, it doesn’t require too much effort to keep an eye on what’s hatching and when. However, it still caught me by surprise to see two adult craneflies on my bathroom floor early one morning in the first week of May. Maybe they...
April 2025 Every spring, as snowmelt charges the streams and the days grow longer, trout anglers eagerly await one of the season’s most iconic hatches: the Dark Hendrickson. This mayfly, known to entomologists as Ephemerella subvaria, helps kick off dry fly season and can offer some great surface action during the...
If you’ve spent any time fishing the cold, clear streams of the Driftless Area, you know that matching the hatch is often the key to success. Hundreds of fly patterns exist to mimic the many species of mayflies, caddisflies and stoneflies that emerge throughout the season. But in recent years,...
If you’re out scouting a favorite stream and notice their little black bodies clinging to the rocks or snow, take it as a good sign: the water is clean, the ecosystem is functioning and your trout fishing will be in good shape come spring.
Scuds are freshwater shrimp (bottom right) – a crustacean that lives among benthic invertebrates in the stream.
By Dr. Jennifer Biederman The Driftless Area, spanning parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois, is renowned for its spring-fed streams, cold water, and limestone geology. These unique environmental factors create ideal year-round conditions for trout. In streams with the most groundwater influence, both flows and water temperatures remain fairly constant...
If there is one thing that many degraded streams across Minnesota have in common, it’s a lack of key habitat types that support trout of all stages and ages.
Riffle habitats in trout streams are essential little ecosystems that provide an ideal environment for aquatic macroinvertebrates, which are small, aquatic organisms that play a crucial role in freshwater ecosystems – and the most important food source of stream dwelling trout in Minnesota. What is a riffle? Riffles are characterized...
As summer begins to wind down, July, August and early September bring a special treat for fly anglers in Minnesota: the trico hatch. Tricos, short for Tricorythodes mayflies, are a small-bodied but super important part of many trout streams' ecosystems, and they offer some of the best dry fly fishing...
