Hoping to find out why Black Earth Creek hasn’t fully recovered after a massive fish kill eight years ago, conservation officials plan to install monitoring stations that will let anyone — hydrologists and anglers alike — view current conditions in the prized trout stream.

“We’ve got one of the more famous trout streams in southern Wisconsin ... and we want to be able to manage it in a fashion that is productive for the state,” said Ken Johnson, water team leader for the DNR’s south central region.

The stations, which could go in this fall, will monitor water flow and continually sample water for sediment, ammonia and chloride.

But the plan is drawing concern from at least one nearby landowner, worried she could be unfairly blamed for problems in the creek.

“We are very leery,” said Danna Dee Turk who owns a dairy farm with her husband on Kahl Road in the town of Black Earth — near where one of the monitoring stations will go. “We try to take good care of things. We don’t even haul manure across the creek because we don’t want to take a chance” on spilling it.

Turk, who said her farm has about 15 acres of grassland buffer to block runoff, said she believed the large number of houses that have been built and land that has been paved along Black Earth Creek have “done more harm to the creek than anything the farmers have done.”

While the monitoring stations positioned along the stream should be able to zero in on problem areas, the DNR is “not trying to point fingers,” said Scot Stewart, fisheries supervisor for the state’s south central region.

Similar monitoring sites were installed along the creek between 1986 and 1998. “This is taking a new peek,” he said.

Fish kill in 2001

Native trout numbers in Black Earth Creek have fluctuated over the years, but a fish kill in 2001 “knocked the trout population down (by) better than 80 percent for a large portion of the river,” Stewart said.

The stream had been recovering until 2008 when the trout population dropped again — possibly due to variable water flow and a mix of very dry and very wet conditions. And while numbers this year indicate some rebound, “the population, according to our survey, had dipped enough where we were concerned,” he said.

Mike Grimes, conservation chairman for Trout Unlimited’s southern Wisconsin chapter, agrees there’s a problem.

“The trout population is down,” said Grimes, who has fished the creek since the 1970s. “After (the 2001) fish kill it was consistently better every year,” he said, adding he would catch a “normal distribution” of small, medium and large trout. “(But) last year we stopped catching so many of the big fish.”

This year Grimes said he’s catching bigger fish, but fewer of them.

However, Steve Born, a retired UW-Madison water resources professor and former national chairman of Trout Unlimited, said he believes the creek has fully recovered since 2001.

“The quality of fish, weight, color, body shape (and) fighting ability was superb this spring,” he said.

But, Born said, the spring-fed stream provides a trout habitat that’s “among the rarest on the planet. “There’s no question that some additional monitoring is necessary,” he said.

In addition to the automated water quality samplers, up to four real-time water quality meters will be installed to continuously monitor water temperature, pH, turbidity, oxygen levels, and the presence of dissolved solids like salt along the creek. All those parameters help describe the water conditions that can affect the health of fish.

Yearly fish counts

Currently, the DNR conducts a yearly fish count by shocking fish in the creek, which temporarily immobilizes the fish but does not harm them. Officials also looked for acute events — such as manure spills — when monitoring the stream’s health.

The meters will continuously collect data and transmit it back to the USGS database where it will be displayed and analyzed for potential problems, said Matt Komiskey, hydrologist with USGS. The information also will be posted on the USGS Web site, waterdata.usgs.gov/wi/nwis, this fall.

The project’s total cost, which includes the equipment, installation and two years of operation, is about $236,000. It will be paid for by the state, Dane County, the United States Geological Survey, and the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission.

Of the municipalities along Black Earth Creek, so far only the village of Cross Plains is looking to help fund the project and has applied for a $10,000 grant.

“What the results will show, we don’t know,” said Jerry Gray, the village’s director of public facilities. “It could be good, it could be bad.”

But Gray said even if the monitoring shows something in Cross Plains is harming the creek, that’s not necessarily bad.

“I look at that as a positive,” he said. “If we know ... then maybe we can start fixing things.”