Heavy snow leads to stinky spring mess on SW Minn. lakes

Even though the grass is turning green, there are still reminders of this year's tough winter. The latest appeared amid breaking ice on southern Minnesota lakes: lots of dead fish.

Thousands of dead fish--mostly dead carp weighing up to 20 pounds--float in a bay on Lake Shetek, packed in by the wind. Even fin to fin, they cover an area that is easily the size of a football field. A crew of more than 30 volunteers is picking them up with pitchforks.

"It's not probably the most pleasant work; it's kind of smelly," volunteer organizer Mark Slettum said. "But I think we all believe that we're caretakers of the lake and we certainly want to give back to it by cleaning it up and kind of being the custodians of the lake."

The smell of rotting fish fills the air. One by one, volunteers toss the carcasses into trailers and the buckets of front end loaders. They land with a squishy plop.

Heavy snows this winter were the main factor in the fish kill, as more than two feet of snow covered the ice on Lake Shetek. That prevented sunlight from reaching lake vegetation, which practically shut down oxygen producing photosynthesis in the water. As a result, the fish suffocated.

"There's spots like this all around the lake, I guess," said Jerome Barstad, a volunteer who is picking up dead fish. "This isn't the only side."

Barstad, who has been working since the weekend, said the fish kill is the worst at Lake Shetek in almost 60 years.

According to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, roughly 10,000 fish died last winter, with a total weight around 40,000 pounds, but that's a very preliminary estimate.

"We worked two hours over there at the marina Saturday," Barstad said. "We figured there was about 10,000 pounds on about 150 feet of shoreline."

The problem is more widespread than just Lake Shetek. Other lakes in southwestern Minnesota lakes also had heavy winter kills, said Ryan Doorenbos, fisheries supervisor at the DNR's Windom office.

They include East Stay Lake in Lincoln County, St. James Lake in Watonwan County and Buffalo Lake just east of Lake Shetek in Murray County. Doorenbos said the heavy winter snow prevented efforts to help fish survive the winter.

Wildlife groups often install winter aeration systems on shallow southern Minnesota lakes to artificially enrich oxygen levels in the water.

Doorenbos said many aeration systems were installed late or not at all because workers couldn't get on the ice to install them. As late as January, the aeration crews were finding that the heavy snow had functioned as insulation and prevented ice from growing thick enough, he said.

"They were still finding only a few inches of ice and they felt that they weren't comfortable putting these systems out because it was a safety issue," Doorenbos said.

But even if all the aerators had been installed on time there still would have been winter kill. During severe winters like the one just ended, aerators can reduce fish kills, but not prevent them, Doorenbos said.

The fish scooped up at Lake Shetek are being hauled out to nearby farm. John Nelson, who owns the land, drove a tractor Monday to pull a wagon full of dead fish to the dump site.

"This is a monumental fish kill," Nelson said. "The reason I'm involved is it's everybody's water. And we just want the water to get cleaned up."

When Nelson arrived on his land and tried to dump the fish, the load was so heavy that the hydraulic system couldn't lift the wagon enough to empty it. So Nelson drove up a small slope to help the hydraulics lift and dump the wagon.

"Plan B worked I guess," Nelson said. "That's quite a pile of fish, a big pile."

Nelson said he'll probably end up burying the fish on his farmland. That's yet another task, but hopefully the last chore from a winter that produced more than its share of extra work.

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