BirdTrout
Waiska Watershed, Michigan
110 miles of mapped stream across 107 square miles of drainage, in 15 named streams. Michigan designates 42 of those miles as trout water, on 14 streams.
Open in BirdTrout50°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 04020203 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.
Cold, cool and warm water
MDNR's Valley Segment Ecological Classification, which types the valley segment rather than measuring the water. It covers 24% of this basin's stream miles (26.0 of 110); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.
- Cold 26.0 mi (100%)
26.0 of the 26.0 typed miles in this basin — 100% — are cold or cold-transitional water. Every typed reach carries the same class, which is as likely to be the coverage as the water: MDNR has typed 24% of it.
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 24.3 mi, medium 1.7 mi.
What makes this watershed distinctive
The smallest watershed on this map by every measure: 107 square miles, 110.5 mapped stream miles, 15 named streams, and none of them longer than the 6.1 miles of Roxbury Creek. It is also the coldest. Every one of the 26 miles MDNR has typed here is cold — the only single-class cold profile on this map — and 24.3 of those miles run at high gradient. That sample covers 24% of the network. 14 of the 15 named streams are designated trout water, over 41.8 miles, though none carries a Blue Ribbon designation. Pendills Creek, 4 miles, holds Type 1 and Type 2 designations; Halfaday Creek, 3.8 miles, adds Type 4 water and is untyped by MDNR. Public ground is 39,963 acres and 58.3% of the basin, held in four units, of which the US Forest Service has 35,090 acres. No gauge here carries a July record.
Every named stream in the basin
All 15 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roxbury Creek | 6.1 | Cold | — | Type 2 |
| Pendills Creek | 4.0 | Cold | — | Type 1, Type 2 |
| Halfaday Creek | 3.8 | untyped | — | Type 1, Type 2, Type 4 |
| Grant Creek | 3.6 | Cold | — | Type 2 |
| Galloway Creek | 3.5 | Cold | — | Type 2 |
| Naomikong Creek | 3.3 | Cold | — | Type 2 |
| Bearpen Creek | 3.0 | untyped | — | Type 2 |
| Ankodosh Creek | 2.9 | Cold | — | Type 2 |
| West Branch Halfaday Creek | 2.6 | untyped | — | Type 2 |
| Mill Creek | 2.5 | Cold | — | Type 2 |
| Silver Creek | 2.4 | Cold | — | Type 2 |
| Bergman Creek | 2.0 | Cold | — | Type 2 |
| Viddian Creek | 1.4 | Cold | — | Type 2 |
| Ladd Creek | 1.1 | untyped | — | — |
| Clear Creek | 0.7 | untyped | — | Type 2 |
Public land in the watershed
39,963 acres in 4 units, which is 58.3% of the 68,550 acres the basin covers. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.
| Managing agency | Acres | Share | Units |
|---|---|---|---|
| US Forest Service | 35,090 | 88% | 1 |
| Michigan DNR | 2,423 | 6% | 1 |
| Owner not recorded | 2,387 | 6% | 1 |
| US Fish & Wildlife Service | 63 | 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
April
May
- Blue-Winged Olive
- Blackfly
- Cranefly
- Grannom
- +10 more
June
July
- Caterpillar
- Crayfish
- Green Sedge
- Light Cahill
- +15 more
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.