A Look Back
In this issue of North Dakota OUTDOORS, readers will find an article on fishing for channel catfish in the Missouri River System and elsewhere.
While checking some background information, we ran into a photograph taken more than 50 years ago that caught our eye.
The caption for the photograph, published in the July 1963 issue of OUTDOORS, reads: “Clarence Lindeman of Linton caught this 37 pound mud or flathead catfish in the Missouri River.”
Lindeman caught the big flathead on a legal set, or trotline, not with a rod and reel.
What’s interesting is that if you rummage through Game and Fish Department file photos dating back years, you’d be hard pressed to find a bigger example of what today is deemed North Dakota’s rarest fish.
In an article in OUTDOORS in 2013, Greg Power, Department fisheries division chief, said that while flatheads are native to North Dakota and the Missouri River System, they were never abundant and became even less so after impoundment.
“North Dakota is the northern end of their range,” he said. “We’ve really never had that many.”
To prove that point, Power said Game and Fish Department fisheries biologists have handled in roughly the last half-century about 20,000 channel catfish from the Garrison Tailrace to the South Dakota border. In those same netting surveys, they’ve caught only about 20 flathead catfish. Also, one flathead was caught in Lake Oahe by an angler in recent years.
The last time fisheries biologists caught any flatheads from Lake Oahe was 2015, when they netted two fish.
Because the flatheads captured in fisheries nets over the years aren’t anywhere as big (roughly 15 to 35 inches) as what Lindeman caught on a trotline years ago, it proves that the fish aren’t holdovers from pre-impoundment, but rather the product of reproduction.
Regardless of these spawning efforts, flathead catfish are still North Dakota’s rarest fish.