BirdTrout

Tahquamenon Watershed, Michigan

765 miles of mapped stream across 810 square miles of drainage, in 61 named streams. Michigan designates 354 of those miles as trout water, on 46 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 04020202 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

765 mi
of mapped stream
2,161 NHD reaches
810 sq mi
drainage area
518,216 acres
269,183 ac
public land
51.9% of the basin · 25 units

Cold, cool and warm water

MDNR's Valley Segment Ecological Classification, which types the valley segment rather than measuring the water. It covers 26% of this basin's stream miles (198.7 of 765); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

153.8 of the 198.7 typed miles in this basin — 77% — 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: medium 89.4 mi, high 65.2 mi, very low 30.6 mi, low 13.4 mi.

What makes this watershed distinctive

Half of this basin is open ground: 269,182 acres, 51.9% of it, held in only 25 units, of which 234,076 acres are state land. The Tahquamenon River runs 90.1 miles and MDNR types it warm; its East Branch, 29.1 miles, types cold, carries Type 3 water and holds the basin's only Blue Ribbon designation. That contrast runs through the whole watershed. Of 198.7 typed miles — 26% of the 764.9 mapped, a reasonable sample — 101.8 are cold and 52 cold-transitional, against 22.8 cool and 22 warm, so the mainstem is the warm exception rather than the rule. Auger Creek, Murphy Creek and the East Branch Sage River all type cold. 46 of the 61 named streams are designated trout water over 353.7 miles. No gauge here carries a July record, and MDNR has no survey station in the basin.

Every named stream in the basin

All 61 of them, longest first. None has a page of its own yet; all of them 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
Tahquamenon River 90.1 Warm — Type 2
Hendrie River 30.7 Cool — Type 2
East Branch Tahquamenon River Blue Ribbon 29.1 Cold — Type 2, Type 3
Auger Creek 22.6 Cold — Type 2
Murphy Creek 21.3 Cold — —
East Branch Sage River 13.8 Cold — —
West Branch Hendrie River 11.3 Cold — Type 2
Gimlet Creek 11.1 Cold-transitional — —
Sage River 9.7 Cold-transitional — Type 2
South Branch Hendrie River 9.4 Cold — Type 2
Teaspoon Creek 8.5 Warm — Type 2
West Branch Sage River 7.4 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Silver Creek 7.3 Cold — Type 2
Cheney Creek 7.3 Cool — Type 2
East Creek 6.9 Cold — Type 2
Syphon Creek 6.9 Cold — Type 2
McLeod Ditch 6.2 Cool — Type 2
Third Creek 5.8 Cold — Type 2
Naugle Creek 5.5 Cold-transitional — —
Popps Creek 5.3 Cold — Type 2
Creek Number Fourteen 4.7 untyped — Type 2, Type 3
Linton Creek 4.6 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Savage Creek 4.6 Cold-transitional — Type 2
First Creek 4.1 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Carlson Creek 4.0 Cold — Type 2
Riley Creek 3.9 Cold — Type 2, Type 3
Big Beaver Creek 3.9 Cool — Type 2
East Lake Creek 3.9 Cold-transitional — Type 2
North Branch Murphy Creek 3.9 untyped — —
Grants Creek 3.7 Cold — Type 2, Type 3
South Branch Linton Creek 3.7 untyped — Type 2
Schouts Creek 3.6 Cold — Type 2
Creek Number Eight 3.5 untyped — Type 2, Type 3
Baird Creek 3.5 Cold-transitional — Type 2
West Branch Teaspoon Creek 3.5 untyped — Type 2
Quinn Creek 3.4 untyped — —
Kings Creek 3.2 Cold — Type 2
Middle Branch Linton Creek 3.1 untyped — —
Red Creek 3.0 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Thirtynine Creek 2.9 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Sixteen Creek 2.6 Cold — Type 2
Penny Creek 2.5 Cold-transitional — Type 2
North Branch Linton Creek 2.5 Cool — Type 2
Little Beaver Creek 2.2 Cold-transitional — Type 2
McGraw Creek 2.1 Cold — Type 2
Big Ditch 2.1 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Bowers Creek 1.9 Cold — Type 2
Hiawatha Creek 1.9 untyped — Type 2
Atwood Creek 1.9 untyped — —
Laketon Slough 1.8 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Lynch Creek 1.8 Cold-transitional — Type 2
Callam Creek 1.7 Cool — —
Petes Creek 1.4 Cold — Type 2
Anchard Creek 1.3 Cold — —
Freeman Creek 1.2 Cold-transitional — —
East Branch Teaspoon Creek 1.2 untyped — —
Brant Creek 1.0 untyped — Type 2
Maye Creek 1.0 untyped — —
Anguilm Creek 0.9 untyped — Type 2
Rose Creek 0.9 Cold — —
Gage Creek 0.5 untyped — —

Public land in the watershed

269,183 acres in 25 units, which is 51.9% of the 518,216 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 234,076 87% 13
Owner not recorded 21,896 8% 4
Local Government land 5,131 2% 2
US Forest Service 3,177 1% 1
Designation overlay 2,958 1% 1
Other State Land 1,457 1% 2
Michigan Karst Conservancy 484 0% 1
City and township land 4 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.