BirdTrout

Menominee Watershed, Michigan

1,118 miles of mapped stream across 2,293 square miles of drainage, in 85 named streams. Michigan designates 500 of those miles as trout water, on 46 streams. The 1 mainstem gauge with a July record read 75.6°F in July.

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 04030108 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

1,118 mi
of mapped stream
1,964 NHD reaches
2,293 sq mi
drainage area
1,467,463 acres
75.6°F
July water temperature at the gauges
1 mainstem gauge, mean 75.6°F
336,917 ac
public land
23.0% of the basin · 208 units

Cold, cool and warm water

MDNR's Valley Segment Ecological Classification, which types the valley segment rather than measuring the water. It covers 16% of this basin's stream miles (177.8 of 1,118); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

40.0 of the 177.8 typed miles in this basin — 22% — 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 78.5 mi, low 45.0 mi, very low 34.8 mi, high 19.5 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

2,293 square miles of drainage, the second largest on this map, but only 1,118.3 mapped stream miles across it — a sparser network than most basins here. 46 of the 85 named streams are designated trout water over 499.8 miles, and the Sturgeon River and its West Branch hold Blue Ribbon designations. The two branches of the Sturgeon run 41 and 40.5 miles and both type cold-transitional; the Sturgeon itself, 28.5 miles, types cool. The Little Cedar River is the longest water here at 55 miles, cool, and the Menominee River runs 46.4 miles warm. Of 177.8 typed miles — 16% of the network — 130.5 are cool, 32.5 cold-transitional, 7.5 cold and 7.3 warm. Public ground is 336,916 acres and 23% of the basin, with 178,492 acres of state land, 62,834 of national forest and a notable 22,231 acres in the hands of land trusts and conservancies.

Every named stream in the basin

All 85 of them, longest first. 14 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
Little Cedar River 55.0 Cool — Type 2
Menominee River 46.4 Warm — Type 2
East Branch Sturgeon River 41.0 Cold-transitional — Type 2
West Branch Sturgeon River Blue Ribbon 40.5 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Little River 35.2 Cool — —
Sturgeon River Blue Ribbon 28.5 Cool — Type 2
Pine Creek 27.4 Cool — Type 2
Shakey River 25.2 Cool — Type 2
Hays Creek 14.6 Cool — —
Kelley Creek 13.7 Cool — Type 2
North Branch Sturgeon River 13.5 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Cassidy Creek 12.4 Cool — Type 2
Little Shakey Creek 12.3 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Pemene Creek 11.6 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Phillips Creek 11.2 untyped — —
Holmes Creek 11.1 untyped — Type 2
Poterfield Creek 10.7 untyped — Type 2
Wolf Creek 10.6 untyped — —
Hamilton Creek 10.5 Cool — Type 2
Mitchell Creek 10.1 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Ross Creek 9.4 untyped — Type 2
Breen Creek 9.1 Cool — —
Fitzgerald Creek 8.6 Cold-transitional — Type 2
DeHaas Creek 7.8 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Fern Creek 7.6 Cool — Type 2
Twin Creek 7.5 untyped — —
Black Creek 7.1 Cool — —
Turners Creek 6.8 untyped — Type 2
Tom Kings Creek 6.1 Cool — Type 2
East Branch Skunk Creek 6.0 Cool — Type 2
Skunk Creek 5.9 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Seiberts Creek 5.3 Cool — Type 2
Schultz Creek 5.3 untyped — —
Burke Creek 5.2 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Bird Creek 4.8 untyped — Type 2
Sixmile Creek 4.8 untyped — —
Quarry Creek 4.8 Cool — —
Antoine Creek 4.8 Warm — —
Beaver Creek 4.7 Cool — Type 2
Jansen Creek 4.6 Cool — —
Rosebush Creek 4.5 untyped — Type 2
Camp Two Creek 4.3 Cool — Type 2
Hugos Brook 4.2 Cool — —
Blom Creek 3.7 untyped — Type 2
Gestner Branch 3.7 Cold — Type 2
Nadeau Creek 3.7 Cool — —
Camp Creek 3.6 untyped — Type 2
Harding Creek 3.5 Cold — Type 2
Carney Lake Outlet 3.5 Cool — —
Boyle Creek 3.5 untyped — —
Brown Creek 3.4 untyped — —
Sawbridge Creek 3.3 Cool — —
Chappee Creek 3.2 Cool — —
Hancock Creek 3.1 Cool — —
Solberg Lake Creek 3.0 untyped — Type 2
Fumee Creek 2.9 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Laurin Creek 2.9 Cool — —
Hammond Brook 2.8 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Hosking Creek 2.8 untyped — Type 2
Cheney Creek 2.7 untyped — Type 2
Koss Creek 2.7 Cool — —
Woods Creek 2.6 Cool — —
Hanson Creek 2.5 untyped — —
Finn Town Creek 2.5 untyped — —
Steel Creek 2.4 untyped — Type 2
Lost Lake Creek 2.4 Cool — Type 2
Little Kelley Creek 2.3 Cool — Type 2
Schetter Creek 2.3 Cool — —
Big Spring Creek 2.2 untyped — Type 2
Pocans Creek 2.1 untyped — Type 2
Twin Falls Creek 2.0 Cool — —
Sobiesky Creek 2.0 Cool — —
Lindberg Creek 1.9 untyped — —
Longrie Creek 1.8 untyped — —
Snow Creek 1.8 Cool — —
Lost Creek 1.6 untyped — Type 2
Wright Slough 1.6 untyped — —
Anderson Creek 1.6 untyped — —
Earle Brook 1.6 Cold-transitional — —
Coulter Slough 1.5 untyped — —
Swanson Creek 1.1 Cool — Type 2
Bog Brook 1.0 untyped — —
South Branch Breen Creek 1.0 untyped — —
Ostrango Creek 0.9 untyped — —
Martin Creek 0.7 untyped — —

Public land in the watershed

336,917 acres in 208 units, which is 23.0% of the 1,467,463 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 178,492 53% 54
US Forest Service 62,834 19% 8
Local Government land 49,146 15% 86
Land trusts and conservancies 22,231 7% 2
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources 14,812 4% 9
Designation overlay 4,008 1% 3
County land 2,880 1% 5
Waucedah Township 931 0% 1

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.

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for the Upper Peninsula, 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

42 insects are recorded from the Upper Peninsula. 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.

Plan a weekend around it

The weekend this basin adds up to — the biggest water in it, what is hatching when, the public land in range and a three-day plan.