A handful of students and curious onlookers gathered on the Beal Street bridge Friday afternoon to watch as a crew from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, stocked the Red Cedar River with 3,300 steelhead trout on April 12.
Unloading from a specialized fish stocking vehicle, DNR employees used slides and buckets to drop the trout over the side of the bridge and into the river.
Friday’s drop is only one small part of the DNR’s spring-long process of stocking rivers and lakes across the state of Michigan with various species of fish. From mid-March to early June, around 20 million fish are stocked using a fleet of specialized fish stocking vehicles that travel around the state.
Alexa Curtis, one of the DNR employees who was dumping trout into the Red Cedar, said the year-old fish would spend a short period of time in the river before swimming downstream to Lake Michigan. She added that the fish released today were raised at the Wolf Lake State Fish Hatchery in Mattawan.
"They will return to this area when they’re adults, they’ll try to spawn up here, and then it’s for people to catch them from here," Curtis said.
People interested in keeping tabs on where and when fish are being stocked can visit this link on the Michigan DNR’s website.
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