Rose Creek grows Kokanee for Montana

The orange glow of roughly 3.8 million Kokanee salmon eggs populates the round water-filled incubators that line the insides of Rose Creek Hatchery’s fish troughs.

Each incubator, or up-welling hatch jar, holds 180,000 eggs harvested by Flathead Lake Salmon Hatchery manager Mark Kornick and his employee Brad Flinkinger.

“We’re starting to see eyeballs now,” Kornick said. “In a couple of weeks they’ll start moving around in there.”

Water is constantly pushing into the jars from the bottom and cycling out the top of them. It simulates the movement of water in their natural environment.

The eggs were spawned by about 40,000 male and female Kokanee out of Lake Mary Ronan at the beginning of October.

The salmon will begin hatching around December, but just before they are ready to hatch, roughly 1.5 million of the eggs will be shipped to the Lewistown hatchery and hatcheries in Utah and Wyoming.

Kornich said 700,000 will also go to the Flathead Lake Salmon Hatchery, but the rest will stay at Rose Creek. Rose Creek was built in 2010 as an additional site for the Flathead Lake Salmon Hatchery in Somers. It’s located a few miles north of Bigfork on Riverside Road and started operating in 2011.

“Water quality at this site (Rose Creek) is a much higher water quality as far as egg incubating is concerned,” Kornich said.

Water at the Somers site has a fine silt in it that can be harmful to the eggs, but once the fish hatch the silt doesn’t bother them. Eggs won’t be transferred to Somers until they are hardy enough to survive in the water.

The hatchery in Somers has raised fish and stocked lakes in Montana for the last 100 years. Original concrete troughs and raceways are still in good working condition, and at one point in Montana’s history it was one of dozens across the state. Now, it’s one of about a dozen.

“Flathead Lake hatchery has a lot to do with the recreational fishing species in the valley,” Kornich said. “Non-native and native.”

In addition to Kokanee, the two hatcheries produce westslope cutthroat trout and grayling, and helped with brook trout and rainbow trout hatching projects.

Another reason Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks built the new hatchery was because of increased demand. At about 700,000 fish, the Somers hatchery reaches capacity. The Rose Creek site adds another 1.5 million fish to the Flathead Lake hatchery system’s capacity.

Last year the hatcheries successfully incubated roughly four million Kokanee salmon eggs with a low mortality rate. Kornich said as far as mortality is concerned, the salmon eggs incubating this year are ahead of last year’s.

The spot where the salmon are trapped every year is a gravel shoreline on Lake Mary Ronan where the salmon like to lay their eggs. The shoreline’s water is too shallow for most of the eggs to survive the winter because of ice.

The fish are caught using something that mimics a trap designed for catching Pacific salmon. Kornich said the trap was created when Flathead Lake Kokanee failed to produce enough eggs for the rest of the state. A lead from the shore to the trap creates a 100-yard wall that the fish follow into the trap. Kornich and Flinkinger then scooped them up and spawned the eggs by hand.

The Flathead Lake hatcheries will hang on to the fish until about April, when the salmon will be two to three inches long. Then the fish will be stocked into 25 lakes from Libby to Seeley to south of Missoula.

“Kokanee are a real popular fish for fisherman and that’s the primary reason why we raise them,” Kornich said. “And the fishing value to the local economy is pretty darn good.”