Spring Steelhead: Your First Move
What season are steelhead in? Looking at your calendar doesn’t quite decipher the answer to that question. Steelhead have their own seasons, and our spring is divided in two for them: Pre-spawn and spawn. But it’s really more complicated than that. A lot more complicated.
Fall-run fish spawn early, especially where steelhead are wild, which is not to be confused with native fish or stocked fish. Stocked fish are another matter entirely, and often spawn all together in one big rush in spring. But even stocked fish that run in summer or fall can be found working the gravel early, sometimes before snow cover leaves the ground.
Wild steelhead are those stocked long ago that took hold and eventually populated rivers through natural reproduction. Native steelhead belong to their native range, along the rim of the North Pacific. Those that run in the fall may spawn several weeks to a month, sometimes more before the mad rush of spring fish floods the spawning riffles with silver. Summer and fall-run fish, at least in some rivers, seem to have an earlier window (a window of time measured in day length, measured by the fish themselves). Fall-run steelhead may spawn in water registering 38°F or colder.
Winter- (in the West) and spring-run (in the Great Lakes) steelhead spawn heaviest in water temperatures ranging from 40°F to 42°F, if they have the chance. Sometimes the water warms too fast, and things become even more urgent. Sometimes the water won’t warm fast enough, and steelhead are forced to spawn in colder-than-usual temperatures before their window of opportunity threatens to close.
The window has nothing to do with conditions. It’s that period of day length that triggers an individual fish to spawn. The window that triggers a steelhead is written into the genetic code. Survivors scrawl it into the DNA. Those that spawn too early risk the devastation of anchor ice, in which case the gene pool of an entire run could be lost. Those that spawn too late may produce progeny that, in colder years, will not reach suitable size to survive the rigors of winter in a stream. Another gene pool lost. In other words, survivors write history in more ways than one.
The closer a steelhead comes to that moment when its genetic imprinting has determined it must spawn, the more urgent its activities become. The degree of urgency determines location. Urgent fish may hold in colder, faster, dirtier water than we think is comfortable for them. A lack of urgency tends to make steelhead behave in patterns more consistent with our own concepts of what they are and what they do after they enter rivers.
Complicated enough? That’s just the beginning. But in order to know exactly where to find steelhead in a river, you need to know what season they’re in, which is determined in part by what season they ran in. And you need to identify the window they tend to spawn in. Different streams at different latitudes produce different peak times. Learn those peak times for the rivers you fish and you will have the first piece of a complicated puzzle successfully in place.
The Spring Run
The first movements of spring steelhead tend to be determined by environmental keys. The warming of the lake or ocean is the first key. Rivers and streams steelhead run up will warm faster than the lakes and oceans they stage in.
Sometimes you can identify these keys through observation. I was tempted to write “simple observation,” but it’s not really simple. You must become something of a naturalist.
In some environments, the best clue to the first flush of fish that enter the river is nighttime temperature. The first nights that stay above freezing can herald a run. Rain tends to be a universal indicator, but especially a warm rain (one that doesn’t freeze when it hits metal surfaces, or turn to sleet, snow, or hail). Rain raises water levels—another indicator, which can arise from snow melt, ice melt, water-table fluctuations and other things that have nothing to do with precipitation.
Sometimes the hatch of a certain insect or the blooming of a particular wild flower can indicate things are about to happen, or already happening, on a particular river. To really know when steelhead run, becoming a lay naturalist is a very good idea.
Falling water levels can trigger the bulk of the run. When the river is flooded, high, and cold, many fish hold back. If the window is closing, however, no amount of high, dirty water will stop steelhead from heading upriver. When they run rivers in flood, or even rivers with flows slightly higher than normal, steelhead (like all other migratory fish) follow a path that offers the least resistance to the flow. In other words they traverse the insides of bends, they find current breaks, they pause behind obstructions, and they find the slowest possible current lanes. In high rivers, I’ve caught steelhead up in the flooded timber on the inside of bends.
The outside of the bend, like the outside edge of the track in a car race, also represents the farthest distance to travel. But it is the strength of the current there that makes steelhead avoid it in high water. Steelhead hold where they feel secure. In low water that means finding cover, like logs, shade, or depth. In high, cloudy water, steelhead often feel secure in the open in depths of 2 feet.
Warming water alone can key the run. When air temperatures become unseasonably warm much faster than usual, steelhead sense quicker-than-normal increases in water temperature. Despite all other conditions, if water temperatures quickly rise past 40°F and keep going, the steelhead that feel they must spawn will run—especially in the latter stages of their genetically-determined spawning window. When that happens, the steelhead can literally, physically bowl you over. Silver bullets seen jumping hundreds of yards downstream will be jumping right in front of you within a matter of seconds. Those fish have no intention of biting anything. Just sit back, relax, and watch the show.
Or head for the spawning riffles and crowd your way in. On rivers with no natural reproduction, God speed. If you’re bothering spawners that produce progeny that eventually come back to that river, what’s wrong with you? Leave them alone. And for God’s sake, stop walking on that gravel and squashing the life out of your own angling future.
All of these conditions and clues, however, can be overridden by genetics. To truly know your steelhead waters, know their spawning windows. The timing can be resolved by history. The research can be done by keeping a journal, calling biologists, recording the observations of others, or becoming our own naturalism-observation post. Through whatever method you choose, the goal of attaining a more complete understanding of when, why, and where steelhead run is certainly attainable. By doing it yourself, you learn so much more than anyone can teach you.