Lake Pend Oreille Pays Anglers and Spearfishers to Remove Lake Trout and Walleye

Idaho has a fisheries management program that understands something simple: sometimes anglers and spearfishers are the tool that makes the most sense. On Lake Pend Oreille, people can earn cash by turning in walleye and lake trout heads through the Angler Incentive Program.

The walleye side works partly like a bounty and partly like a raffle. Idaho Fish and Game has about 60 tagged walleye swimming in the lake at any given time, and each tagged fish is worth $1,000 to the person who catches it. Every walleye head turned in also earns an entry into a monthly drawing for ten $100 rewards.

Lake trout are even more direct. Every lake trout head turned in earns $15. Turn in 100 heads and that is $1,500. Since the lake trout incentive began in 2006, anglers have earned about $1.5 million. The walleye part was added in 2019, and roughly $125,000 has been paid out on that side.

This is not just paying people to go fishing for fun. Lake trout and walleye are effective predators, and without enough control they can hammer kokanee. Kokanee are a key forage base for Lake Pend Oreille’s trophy rainbow trout fishery, and they are a popular fishery on their own. If the predator-prey balance gets out of line, everyone pays for it later.

That is real-world conservation: use legal harvest, track the results, and put sportsmen to work where their effort helps the resource. Anglers get a shot at cash, biologists get help managing predator numbers, and the lake’s kokanee and rainbow trout fisheries get a fighting chance. That beats pretending every fishery problem can be fixed from behind a desk.