Jeff Green | Dec 16, 2015


The Frontenac Addington Trappers’ Council (FATC) is an organization that is devoted to the interests of trappers. It is concerned with best practices on trap lines, the price of pelts, and public relations.

They have also, along with the Conservationists of Frontenac Addington (COFA), taken on habitat restoration in the northern parts of Frontenac and Lennox and Addington townships.

“At one time the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) did this kind of work,” said Wilf Deline, president of the Trappers’ Council last Saturday.

Deline was with a group of FATC and COFA members at Boundary Creek, one of the major creeks that flow into Big Gull Lake. It was unseasonably warm and sunny for a Saturday in December, which helped make the job easier of cleaning the stones under and around the creek, which is at one of its low points of the year, and dumping and raking tons of clean stone to make an ideal spawning bed for walleye.

The FATC uses the money it makes at its annual fishing derby, along with volunteer labour, to work on the spawning bed, a project that has taken five years to complete.

“We have to make sure the stone is clean as winter is coming on, because it will stay that way until spring. The walleye like clean stone,” Deline said.

Justin Punchard, a member of the FATC from Flinton, is also an employee of the MNR, based in Kingston. He was on hand on Saturday.

“The MNR does not have the field staff it once had,” said Punchard, “so it is groups on the ground like COFA and the trappers that have come on to do this kind of work.”

Punchard also helps out by ensuring that approvals from the Mississippi Valley Conservation Authority, the Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and the MNR are in place for the FATC to work on the creek bed,.

“Justin takes care of that stuff, which is good for us,” said Deline. “I certainly can't work my way through it.”

A number of students from North Addington Education Centre were there, wearing waders and moving and cleaning rocks in the water and along shoreline within the high water mark of the creek.

The project started five years ago, and each year more stone has been added and work has been done to extend the spawning bed. FATC members have been monitoring the creek in the springtime, and have found that the walleye have been using it. All told, they have put 120 tons of stone into the creek bed, 50 this year alone.

The Mississippi Valley Conservation Authority manages lake levels via a dam at the northeast end of the lake at Ardoch Road and in order to encourage spawning they keep the water in Big Gull at a minimum of 253.1 metres in May of each year, a level they struggled to maintain last spring.

“We like to get here in the spring to see them, and it is working for them, at least as far as we can tell,” said Deline.

Walleye were introduced to Big Gull Lake after the trout population dissipated in the 1930s and 1940s, victims of the dams that were introduced in the 1920's to draw down the lake each fall. Big Gull is 26 metres deep at its deepest point. The lake still supports cold water species such as white fish and lake herring, but is best known by anglers for small and largemouth bass and walleye.

The Trappers Council has been approached by lake associations from other nearby lakes for future spawning bed projects.

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