BirdTrout

Sturgeon Watershed, Michigan

1,422 miles of mapped stream across 730 square miles of drainage, in 78 named streams. Michigan designates 578 of those miles as trout water, on 67 streams. The 1 mainstem gauge with a July record read 73.0°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 04020104 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

1,422 mi
of mapped stream
3,959 NHD reaches
730 sq mi
drainage area
467,333 acres
73.0°F
July water temperature at the gauges
1 mainstem gauge, mean 73.0°F
175,218 ac
public land
37.5% of the basin · 35 units

Cold, cool and warm water

MDNR's Valley Segment Ecological Classification, which types the valley segment rather than measuring the water. It covers 12% of this basin's stream miles (175.4 of 1,422); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

110.1 of the 175.4 typed miles in this basin — 63% — are cold or cold-transitional water. The dominant class is cold.

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: high 129.5 mi, medium 22.2 mi, low 15.3 mi, very low 8.3 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

The Sturgeon River runs 98.3 miles through this basin, types cool and carries Type 4 water; its West Branch, 34 miles, types cold and holds Type 3 reaches. Both are Blue Ribbon. 67 of the 78 named streams are designated trout water across 577.8 miles of a 1,422.3-mile network — a high proportion. The water MDNR has typed leans cold: 94.3 miles cold and 15.8 cold-transitional against 65.3 cool, with no warm water in the sample at all, and 129.5 of the 175.4 typed miles running at high gradient. That typing covers 12% of the basin. The Silver River and both branches of the Otter, 77.6 miles between them, all type cold. Public ground is 175,218 acres, 37.5% of the basin, held in only 35 units — 105,610 acres of state land and 59,396 of national forest. No gauge here carries a July record.

Every named stream in the basin

All 78 of them, longest first. 58 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
Sturgeon River Blue Ribbon 98.3 Cool 59.5°F Type 1, Type 2, Type 4
West Branch Sturgeon River Blue Ribbon 34.0 Cold — Type 2, Type 3
Silver River 31.4 Cold — Type 2
North Branch Otter River 23.2 Cold — Type 2
West Branch Otter River 23.0 Cold — Type 2, Type 4
Perch River 20.8 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Tioga River 16.7 Cool — Type 2
Sidnaw Creek 14.8 Cold — Type 2, Type 4
Otter River 12.7 Cold — Type 1, Type 2, Type 4
Greenier Creek 12.2 untyped — Type 2, Type 3
Boulder Creek 10.5 Cold — Type 2
Dead Stream 10.3 untyped — Type 2
Bruno Creek 9.9 untyped — Type 2
North Branch Bear Creek 9.9 Cold — Type 2
Lateral Creek 9.6 Cool — Type 2
Clear Creek 9.0 Cold — Type 2, Type 4
Sante River 8.7 untyped — Type 2
Vermilac River 8.7 Cool — —
Pelkie Creek 8.3 untyped — Type 2
Ebers Creek 7.6 Cold — Type 2
Pine Creek 7.4 Cool — Type 2
Murphy River 7.2 Cool — —
West Branch Sante River 7.1 untyped — Type 2
Little Silver River 7.0 Cold — Type 2
Slates Creek 6.8 untyped — Type 2
Plumbago Creek 6.7 Cold — Type 2
Tama Creek 6.3 Cool — Type 2
Bart Creek 6.3 untyped — Type 2
Wolf Creek 6.3 Cool — —
Hickey Creek 6.2 Cool — Type 2
South Branch Bear Creek 6.2 Cold — Type 2
Rock River 6.1 Cool — Type 2
Lake Fifteen Creek 5.7 untyped — Type 2
Cliche Creek 5.6 Cold — Type 2
Gurgle Creek 5.4 untyped — Type 2
Thirteenmile Creek 5.3 Cold — Type 2
Black Creek 5.2 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Wiggle Creek 5.2 Cold — Type 2
Mountain Creek 5.2 untyped — Type 2
Mill Creek 5.2 untyped — Type 2
Small Bear Creek 5.1 untyped — Type 2
West Branch Sidnaw Creek 4.9 Cold — Type 2
Kelsey Creek 4.8 Cold — Type 2
Perjury Creek 4.6 Cold — Type 2, Type 3
Gristmill Creek 4.6 Cool — Type 2
Beaver Creek 4.2 Cold — Type 2
Tradition Creek 4.2 untyped — Type 2
North Branch Bart Creek 4.2 untyped — Type 2
Farce Creek 4.0 untyped — Type 2
Mustard Creek 3.7 Cold — Type 2
Woo Creek 3.5 Cold — Type 2, Type 4
Coach Creek 3.5 untyped — Type 2
Dry Wash Creek 3.4 untyped — Type 2
Posse Creek 3.3 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Kidney Creek 3.3 untyped — —
Creeper Creek 3.2 untyped — Type 2
Stretch Creek 3.0 untyped — Type 2
Hill Creek 3.0 Cold — Type 2
Sullivan Creek 2.9 Cold — Type 2
Coffee Creek 2.9 Cold — Type 2
Maronen Creek 2.7 Cold — Type 2
Bocco Creek 2.6 Cold — Type 2
Dead Slough 2.6 untyped — Type 2
Sauna Creek 2.5 untyped — Type 2
Humbug Creek 2.3 untyped — Type 2
Dew Creek 2.3 untyped — —
White Creek 2.2 untyped — Type 1
Marten Creek 2.2 untyped — Type 2
Hershley Creek 2.1 untyped — Type 2
Funks Creek 2.1 Cold — —
Erickson Creek 2.0 untyped — Type 2
Little Otter River 1.9 untyped — Type 2
O'Connell Creek 1.8 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Gallagher Creek 1.7 Cold — —
Festuca Creek 1.4 Cold — —
Acadian Creek 1.3 untyped — —
Knave Creek 1.0 untyped — —
Goblin Creek 1.0 untyped — —

Public land in the watershed

175,218 acres in 35 units, which is 37.5% of the 467,333 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 105,611 60% 14
US Forest Service 59,396 34% 5
Designation overlay 7,189 4% 1
Other State Land 2,148 1% 1
The Nature Conservancy 430 0% 1
County land 118 0% 1
Upper Peninsula Land Conservancy 112 0% 3
City and township land 103 0% 3

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.