BirdTrout

Black Watershed, Michigan

531 miles of mapped stream across 600 square miles of drainage in Cheboygan, Montmorency counties, in 46 named streams. Michigan designates 269 of those miles as trout water, on 31 streams.

Open in BirdTrout
Map key
Public land — where the bank is open to walk and fish
USGS gauge — live water temperature
Water temperature — the colour of every stream in the basin

50°F and colder is cold, through cold-transitional and cool, to warm above 70°F — the same four bands the app paints. On this map the colour is MDNR's classification of the valley segment, not a measurement, except at the gauge dots, which read live. Grey is water MDNR has not typed.

The watershed in numbers

HUC8 04070005 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

531 mi
of mapped stream
736 NHD reaches
600 sq mi
drainage area
384,004 acres
210,011 ac
public land
54.7% of the basin · 38 units

Cold, cool and warm water

MDNR's Valley Segment Ecological Classification, which types the valley segment rather than measuring the water. It covers 17% of this basin's stream miles (91.4 of 531); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

42.9 of the 91.4 typed miles in this basin — 47% — are cold or cold-transitional water. The dominant class is cool.

There is no elevation model behind this page, so it carries no elevation range. MDNR's gradient class is the field that answers the same question, and over the typed miles it reads: medium 30.9 mi, low 25.0 mi, very low 19.7 mi, high 15.8 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

Three Blue Ribbon designations sit in this 600-square-mile basin — the Black River, Canada Creek and the East Branch Black River — which is a lot for 46 named streams. The Black runs 78.5 miles and types cold-transitional, with Type 2 and Type 3 water along it. 31 streams are designated trout water over 268.8 miles of the basin's 530.9 mapped stream miles. MDNR's typing reaches 17% of that water, and across the 91.4 miles it covers the split is 37.4 cool, 27.7 cold-transitional, 15.2 cold and 11.1 warm. The East Branch, 21 miles with Type 3 reaches, is untyped. Public ground is 210,011 acres and 54.7% of the basin, and it is state land almost to the exclusion of anything else: 208,929 of those acres are Michigan DNR. No gauge carries a July record here and MDNR holds no survey station, so what this page knows about the water is its classification and its designation.

Every named stream in the basin

All 46 of them, longest first. 2 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. Thermal class is MDNR's, over the reaches it has typed. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.

Stream Miles Class Now Designation
Black River Blue Ribbon 78.5 Cold-transitional — Type 2, Type 3
Rainy River 22.2 Cool — Type 2
Canada Creek Blue Ribbon 22.1 Cool — Type 2, Type 3
East Branch Black River Blue Ribbon 21.0 untyped — Type 2, Type 3
Tomahawk Creek 14.3 Cold-transitional — Type 2, Type 3
Stony Creek 12.9 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Milligan Creek 11.4 Cool — Type 2
Little Rainy River 8.2 Warm — Type 2
Cold Creek 7.9 untyped — —
Oxbow Creek 7.5 untyped — Type 2, Type 3
McMasters Creek 7.4 Cool — Type 2, Type 3
Stewart Creek 6.2 Cold — Type 2, Type 3
West Branch Upper Rainy River 5.3 untyped — Type 2
East Branch Rainy River 4.9 untyped — Type 2
Packer Creek 4.7 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Myers Creek 4.7 Cool — —
Owens Creek 4.3 Cool — —
Long Lake Creek 4.2 Cold-transitional — —
Fisher Creek 3.9 Cold — —
Bowen Creek 3.7 untyped — —
Gokee Creek 3.6 Cold — Type 2
Van Hetton Creek 3.5 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Mud Creek 3.5 untyped — Type 2
Little McMasters Creek 3.4 untyped — Type 2
Welch Creek 3.2 Cool — —
Lewis Branch Adair Creek 3.1 untyped — Type 2
Section Seven Creek 3.1 Cool — —
Rattlesnake Creek 2.6 untyped — Type 2, Type 3
Little Mud Creek 2.6 untyped — Type 2
Adair Creek 2.6 untyped — Type 2
Hardwood Creek 2.5 Cold-transitional — Type 2, Type 3
Saunders Creek 2.5 Cold — Type 2
Hodge Creek 2.4 untyped — Type 2, Type 3
Cains Creek 2.3 untyped — —
Tubbs Creek 1.9 untyped — Type 2
Sturgis Creek 1.8 Cold — Type 2
Gillis Creek 1.8 untyped — —
Gregg Creek 1.7 untyped — Type 2, Type 3
Montague Creek 1.6 untyped — Type 2
Twin Lakes Outlet 1.6 untyped — —
Doriva Beach Creek 1.6 untyped — —
West McMasters Creek 1.4 untyped — Type 2
Weed Creek 1.4 untyped — Type 2
Spring Creek 1.3 untyped — —
Beechnut Creek 0.7 untyped — —
Lyons Creek 0.2 untyped — —

Public land in the watershed

210,011 acres in 38 units, which is 54.7% of the 384,004 acres the basin covers. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

Managing agency Acres Share Units
Michigan DNR 208,929 99% 17
Local Government land 662 0% 8
US Fish & Wildlife Service 239 0% 1
Little Traverse Conservancy 44 0% 2
Benton Township 41 0% 1
Land trusts and conservancies 30 0% 1
US Forest Service 29 0% 1
City and township land 17 0% 2

The biggest named blocks of it, each with its own page — the streams on that ground, what is open to hunt on it, and where the access sites are.

Species present

Recorded by MDNR at 0 survey stations in this basin, or in its stocking record. The temperature ranges are our own species table and are the same numbers the app's picker uses.

Species Best water Tolerates Evidence
Brown trout
Salmo trutta
 55–63°F 45–70°F stocked
Rainbow trout
Oncorhynchus mykiss
 55–64°F 44–70°F stocked
Lake sturgeon — — stocked
Muskellunge — — stocked

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for northern lower Michigan, which is the region this basin's centre falls in — the same regions the app's hatch panel uses. It is a regional record, not a survey of this watershed: nobody has counted insects basin by basin. Year-round records (midges, scuds, sculpins) are left out; they are true every month and they are not what a calendar is for.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

53 insects are recorded from northern lower Michigan. Each links to its own page, with the flies that imitate it.

Neighbouring watersheds

The subbasins that share a boundary with this one and carry coldwater streams.