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A small group of interested fishermen gathered around the Creamery Pond in Luverne Monday afternoon, Aug. 10, while two Minnesota Department of Natural Resource (DNR) officials crisscrossed the former gravel pit looking for fish.
“A lot of nice shiners,” shouted Ryan Doorenbos from the boat.
Doorenbos is the area supervisor from the Windom area fisheries office.
Along with the shiners, Doorenbos and technician Luke Rossow also found other game fish, including black crappies, large mouth bass, yellow perch, pumpkinseed sunfish and blue gills.
“There’s not too many bullheads,” he told the group.
Doorenbos and Rossow were electrofishing the Creamery Pond using an electrical current to draw fish to the research boat. The current reaches out in a 10-foot radius to a depth of 2 feet from the boat.
“They are basically paralyzed and then they come back to,” Doorenbos explained.
The paralyzed fish are scooped out of the water and measured, and the species is recorded. The fish are then released back into the pond.
The carp, however, an invasive species, are not returned to the pond. They found some of those, too, in the Creamery Pond.
Bringing the DNR to the area were public accounts of an occasional northern pike and walleye caught from the shallow pond. None were found on Monday, however.
Earlier this month, Doorenbos and Rossow sonar-mapped the pond, recording the deepest depth (in the southeast corner) at 7 feet.
They also mapped and inventoried the former Hiawatha Pageant pond in Pipestone.
Both sites are being considered for the DNR’s Youth Fishing Pond Program.
That would make the Luverne and Pipestone locations eligible for the DNR’s game fish stocking.
“It’s encouraging to see these (game fish) species present,” Doorenbos said.
Also encouraging are recent efforts to make the Creamery Pond accessible to the public.
Currently there are 10 youth fishing ponds in southwest Minnesota including Edgerton campground pond and Schoeneman County Park located south of Luverne.
Doorenbos said the collected data from Creamery Pond would be entered into the DNR database to match results with historical data.
“We want to make sure there will be no harm in stocking (the Creamery Pond),” he said.
If stocking proves to be a positive for the area, Doorenbos said the Creamery Pond could be placed on the DNR’s work plan for stocking as soon as next summer.