Column: Menominee Nation brings fish to ancestral grounds

Whenever you need a little good news about our natural resources, just take a few minutes to catch up on lake sturgeon in the Winnebago System of east-central Wisconsin.

Recent analysis by the Department of Natural Resources, for instance, revealed that 9.5 percent of sturgeon taken from Lake Winnebago during February’s spearing season weighed more than 100 pounds, which is a record. In contrast, sturgeon biologists in the 1950s and ’60s believed the population was healthy if more than 1 percent of adult sturgeon, or the annual kill, exceeded 100 pounds.

Then, just a few weeks ago, DNR and Menominee Indian biologists found proof that this prehistoric fish is naturally reproducing in the Wolf River north of Shawano for the first time since 1893. That’s when construction of the Shawano dam on the Wolf blocked sturgeon from their ancestral spawning grounds at Keshena Falls on the Menominee Indian Reservation.