What Is Killing the Walleye of Otter Tail County?

Fred Manuel is afraid for his granddaughter’s toes; “I’m almost scared to let her swim off the dock.”

The threat? A fish called the muskellunge, muskie for short—or the tiger of the lakes if you’re feeling dramatic. And when you’re talking about the muskie in northern Minnesota these days, there’s drama.

I’m sitting in Manuel’s 19-foot fishing boat in Little Pelican Lake, Otter Tail County. In the land of 10,000, Otter Tail has more lakes than any other county, 1,048. In fact, it has more than any other county in the entire country. But it’s the handful of lakes the DNR stocks with muskies that are making waves. Manuel is 74 now, a semi-retired CPA from Richmond who’s owned a home on Little Pelican since 1995. His friend David Majkrzak, a retired mechanical engineer, is in the boat with us. 

Majkrzak, whose own cabin lies two minutes away either by boat or by pickup, is known around the lake for three things: a steel cable contraption that zips his boats 30 yards down a hill from his garage onto his dock; the WeedRoller, basically a weed whacker for seaweed that he invented in 1990; and his hard-line position against the muskie. He’s the most radical anti-muskellunge activist in Otter Tail County, probably the entire state. 

Today, neither of these guys is up for facing their slimy nemesis, scientific name Esox masquinongy, derived from the Ojibwe word maashkinoozhe, meaning “elongated face.” Muskies’ enormous flat heads and long torpedo shape make them the perfect ambush predator. They lurk around weed edges or rock outcrops and suddenly strike, devouring with rows of needlelike teeth. They’re the king of the pike family, the top of Minnesota’s aquatic food chain: They can grow up to 60 inches long and weigh up to 70 pounds. 

No, my companions want nothing to do with these leviathans—we’re out here bobber fishing for bluegills and perch. 

“I dunno,” Majkrzak says. “Fred really likes fishing for sunnies.” 

“I like to eat!” Manuel replies. He’s hoping to host a fish fry later tonight, and he says lately it’s been difficult to bring home panfish big enough to clean. “And we know why,” he says. “We know exactly why.” 

Majkrzak is the president of the Pelican Lake Property Owners Association and Manuel is on the board, and the way they talk about muskies, I feel like our fishing trip should be scored by John Williams: duh-DUHNT…duh-DUHNT…duh-DUHNT. 

****

I struggled at first to understand the magnitude of the muskie threat. Manuel tells me that after moving full-time to his cabin on Little Pelican in 2001, he bought a second home on Bonaire, a Dutch Caribbean island famous for scuba diving. If he’s brave enough to swim with sharks, how much menace can there be in a freshwater pike? 

Majkrzak interrupts to assure me that this is more of a local, ecological concern. Even when he is making the most scathing comment, he never sounds excited. “Muskies are an invasive species,” Majkrzak says. “We never wanted them in this lake.” 

Manuel and Majkrzak have been locked in a years-long battle with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the state entity that has stocked muskies in Pelican since the 1970s. Their beef isn’t just with wildlife ecologists; it’s with the whole idea of technocrats making decisions about Pelican Lake from DNR headquarters in St. Paul, 200 miles away. Majkrzak doesn’t believe the DNR understands the fish’s impact on the lake’s ecosystem, despite numerous studies. “They imply they know what they’re doing,” Majkrzak says, “But it’s bullshit. They’re just guessing.”

His animus for the DNR swelled after the agency impeded his WeedRoller by requiring a permit to use it in Minnesota lakes. “Their point person was a tree hugger bicycle fanatic,” he says. “Had never driven a boat before. They get these guys, snot-nosed kids out of college, and they give them a badge and the brown uniform and suddenly they’re in charge.”

The DNR’s mandate is complex. It manages the ecological and economic health of area lakes. Fishing is big business—the DNR estimates $4.2 billion in economic impact, with 1.4 million licenses sold. And its data says muskie fishing is one of the fastest-growing segments and the biggest spending segment. Yet it manages only 101 lakes for the fish, or 493,000 acres (about 35 percent of accessible lake acreage). It tries to ensure anglers from every corner of the state have access to the fish.

“Lately it’s been difficult to bring home panfish big enough to clean. And we know why. We know exactly why.” 

—Fred Manuel, Pelican Lake Property Owners Association

As a sport fish, the muskie carries its own mystique: famously elusive, reluctant to strike unless the lure is presented with Oscar-worthy subterfuge. A ferocious and ingenious fighter. 

The walleye fisherman is everybody from age 8 to 80: all you need is a feel for the rod and reel, or a taste for a shore lunch. The muskie fisherman is younger, more dedicated to the craft of fishing. Some are true sport fishermen, thoughtful and studious, armed to the gills with the best equipment money can buy. Others are mouth-breathing rednecks who travel from county to county in search of the mean leviathans, without regard for ecology or local welfare. At least that’s how the walleye lovers see them. 

****

Majkrzak might be the most thorough amateur lobbyist I’ve met. He says the property owners association has been anti-muskie since ’78, when the DNR seemed to override concerns about (undocumented) harm to the fish population and shot down plans for a walleye-rearing pond. “Our people were livid,” Majkrzak says. “The unofficial policy was ‘keep a hammer in your boat, and if you catch one, kill it.’” Majkrzak decries the DNR’s decision, in 2014, to raise the harvest limit to 54 inches, effectively protecting most muskies for their entire lifespan. 

Majkrzak makes his muskie case with a 60-page spiral-bound booklet, handed out during the 2018 legislative session. It points out that while the muskie is only the 13th most pursued fish in the state, the DNR spends more on its stocking program than on any other fish save two (number one is Majkrzak’s favorite: the walleye). 

Majkrzak is especially galled that he can’t even get the DNR to admit that muskies are eating walleyes in Pelican. “The DNR says muskies are ‘environmentally benign,’” he says. “There’s no such thing. Of course muskies eat walleyes—it’s only a question of how many.” 

He is frustrated that the DNR is focusing much of its attention on muskie stocking on Pelican. Meanwhile, he says, it’s more difficult than ever to catch walleye or crappie of any real size. 

“Why would they want us to be a world-class muskie lake and not a world-class walleye lake?” he scoffs. Majkrzak believes he speaks for a Nixonian silent majority of walleye fishermen. “I’m fine with muskie fishing,” he says. “It’s fine if you want to jump out of an airplane, just don’t hit me on the way down.” 

A photograph of a huge silver-and-brown muskie with a walleye trapped in its jaws underlines Majkrzak’s question: “Why does the 13th-place muskie get stocked in our Minnesota lakes where they aren’t native?” Near the end of the volume, after Majkrzak picks both the DNR’s conclusions and methodology apart, after he has insinuated that muskies are a threat to children, household pets, and the state bird, and after blaming muskie fishermen for the spread of zebra mussels, comes the coup de grâce: a photograph of an 11-year-old girl’s foot with two bloody 4-inch gashes, believed to be from a 2017 muskie attack on Island Lake. Island is 200 miles northwest of Pelican, but it’s a terrifying picture. 

Majkrzak and the Property Owners Association filed a lawsuit against the state in 2016 and worked on persuading local pols. A non-binding resolution calling for a moratorium on muskie stocking passed the Otter Tail County Board in 2018. Republican State Senator Bill Ingebrigtsen’s more aggressive anti-muskie-stocking law actually made it into the omnibus bill in the legislature, only to go down with the governor’s broader veto. Ingebrigtsen, whose vendetta against the muskie has been described as “personal” by the Duluth News Tribune, declined repeated requests to be interviewed. 

In 2019, politics seems to either creep into nearly every human interaction, and Majkrzak doesn’t deny the parallels with the immigration debate. “Same thing: We brought ’em in the door and we’re gonna give ’em to you,” Majkrzak says. “The DNR says your lake is gonna get muskies, whether you want ’em or not. Don’t we have a right to say what happens on our lake?” 

So, it would seem all this muskie anxiety runs deeper than boats and hooks: an acute fear of the outsider, a predator that doesn’t belong and inflicts destruction on defenseless grandchildren. Otter Tail County, FWIW, voted more than 2:1 for Trump over Clinton. But most muskie fishermen—also largely middle-aged white men—surely voted Trump, too.

The wolf is the longest Minnesota case study of a predator inspiring irrational fear in its human neighbors. Until 1965, the state paid a bounty on gray wolves, ostensibly to protect farm animals and white-tailed deer. The population had dwindled to fewer than 750 before the gray wolf was protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1974. Decades later, when wolf populations recovered to healthier numbers, the species returned to state jurisdiction. The DNR held special wolf hunts until an irritated federal court returned wolf management to the feds. You can still find “smoke a pack a day” bumper stickers on pickup trucks up north.

Is the muskie a proxy for ancient anxieties about intruders, about who and what belongs or doesn’t? Or is it a Trump-era debate about the credibility of science and the contested role of experts and facts? Or is this story actually about localized grudges among townies and second-homers, shore lunchers and fishing’s elite? 

****

A week later, on a gray day in October, I drive up to Otter Tail for a different kind of fishing expedition, this time with the DNR. Since 2013, the supervisor of area fisheries in Otter Tail has been Jim Wolters. I meet him—a trim, clean-shaven guy in his 50s with salt-and-pepper hair under a khaki DNR baseball cap—in the garage of the DNR’s Fergus Falls office. He’s been in fisheries management for over 30 years. While the locals rage against DNR carpetbaggers down in St. Paul, they’re primarily dealing with a game warden living one town over. 

Despite the fact that most fishermen never lay eyes on a muskie, the fix was in on this expedition: Wolters promised around 1,000 of the creatures. His crew—six guys wearing rubber boots and waders over green DNR windbreakers—began their day scooping 813 five-month-old muskie fingerlings from a rearing pond in the New London Fish Hatchery. Their plan is to dump the tagged fish into Pelican Lake this afternoon. Wolters shows me how each baby muskie is stunned in a tub of chemical anesthetic. They go belly-up for a few seconds before being injected with a 12-millimeter pit tag, smaller than a penny, that can be read by an electronic scanner. 

Wolters explains the DNR stocks muskies in three different lakes in Otter Tail County: Pelican, West Battle, and Beers (in Maplewood State Park). In 2016, there were plans to expand stocking to one additional lake in the county, but the anti-muskie furor whipped up by the Pelican Lake Property Owners Association got so intense that the DNR backed away. Not that the concession settled anything—the muskie-stocking moratorium bill came afterward. 

“I think what makes this situation unique is the sustained intensity,” Wolters says. “You might have an issue flare up and then it either gets resolved or it kinda fizzles after a year or two.” Wolters shakes his head. “But this is just pedal to the metal.” 

Full disclosure: Growing up, my dad was a member of Muskies, Incorporated, a nerdy advocacy group for muskie anglers founded by St. Paul building contractor Gil Hamm in 1966. My dad would take me and my brother to chapter meetings in the basement of Little Jack’s Steakhouse on Lowry in Northeast Minneapolis. A bunch of middle-aged dudes would drone on in front of a chalkboard, discussing casting techniques and updates on various muskie-stocking programs throughout the metro. My brother and I would beg my dad for quarters so we could buy Cokes and play pinball upstairs in the bar. 

Once a summer, Dad would apply the knowledge by taking the two of us muskie fishing up in Canada, where I would spend long days in the boat reading entire volumes of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, forcing my little brother to take extra turns casting the heavy rod and tackle. I never caught a fish, and my dad would catch maybe one or two per trip—the proverbial ratio is “1 muskie : 1000 casts”—and each time he would hook one, he would rouse me from my book by shouting, “NET, STEVIE! GET THE NET!” 

I didn’t view the muskie as a bogeyman; I considered it a Snuffleupagus—my dad’s imaginary best friend that made the rarest of cameos a couple of times a summer. 

The DNR officially began stocking the muskie in Otter Tail County in 1963.  But local lore places the fish in the county as far back as the late 19th century, when Prospect House fishing guides on Battle Lake offered $1.50 tours in pursuit of the “muscalonge.” And a tome of local history describes evidence of anglers dumping muskies into Pelican by hand, at least as far back as the 1930s, with varying degrees of success.

With the baby muskies tagged and ready, Wolters says I can follow two junior DNR fish biologists to Pelican Lake. It’s a 45-minute drive up Highway 59 through a pageant of deciduous fall color—red maples, yellow ash, and brown oaks. When we get to Pelican’s landing, the DNR guys back their truck into the water and, 20 seconds later, I watch 813 five-month-old fingerlings sluice their way through a PVC tube into the cold October lake as if sprayed from a fire hose. The cigar-sized muskie babies kind of aimlessly float near the dock en masse, easy pickings for birds or bigger fish. The DNR maintains that without restocking every fall, the muskie population would eventually shrink and nearly disappear, but nobody is really sure what the attrition rate actually is. 

****

The shadows are starting to lengthen when Fred Manuel, Dave Majkrzak, and I finally make it off Little Pelican. We did pretty well—enough bluegill for a fish fry—and Manuel is stoked to give me a refresher course with the fillet knife on his custom fish-cleaning table. Not that we would risk going hungry: While we were out, Manuel defrosted a bag of frozen walleye fillets he’d caught earlier. 

While both are white-collar retirees, Majkrzak cleans perch with his big hands in a way that seems to hearken back to his childhood working the family farm in North Dakota. We load plates up with fried fish and hash browns and sit around the two couches in Manuel’s living room overlooking the lake. He turns on the Vikings with the sound low. Majkrzak makes the point that both he and Manuel may have come to live here later in life, but they care just as much as families who have been here for generations. Majkrzak and Manuel are both involved in the Catholic Church on Pelican Lake, and Majkrzak is a retired volunteer fireman. 

“I’ve put people in body bags,” he says. 

He loves this area, he says, and the people in the Property Owners Association love it, too. He says the people that live on Pelican part-time are doctors and lawyers and Microsoft executives from the Fargo campus. He points out that Doug Burgum, the Governor of North Dakota, has a cabin here. 

“These aren’t a bunch of people who fell out of Walmart,” he says. 

Majkrzak explains that his fellow property owners are the ones who pay 20 grand for the fireworks show every Fourth of July. And Majkrzak is out there parking cars. He says the average lake residence is worth $600,000, which means its average property tax is $6,000 a year. “The total value of property around the lake is $550 million,” he says. “That means 55 percent of the local township budget is coming from 500 people around the lake.”

“And everybody’s mad at us because we’re the bullies,” Manuel says. “We’re the liars here. But Dave’s just taking their data and using it against them.” 

The “everybody” that Manuel and Majkrzak blame for driving the muskie menace is primarily the DNR and Muskies, Inc. While we were in the boat earlier, Manuel pointed out a muskie fisherman across the water. We couldn’t really make out what he was wearing, but Manuel did point out that many of them seem to be partial to “backwards hats and tattoos.” 

****

Brett Waldera is the president of the Fargo chapter of Muskies, Inc. He agrees to meet me in a restaurant on the shore of Big Detroit, the most popular muskie lake in the region, just into Becker County. He has just spent the morning taking out a guy who won a fishing trip at a charity auction. They were fishing with $12 white suckers.  

Waldera wears insulated coveralls and a baseball hat over a face that was pink with the cold. I can’t tell if he has any tattoos underneath his sweater. I tell him about Majkrzak’s stereotype of muskie fishermen. 

“So what if every muskie fisherman was a biker?” Waldera rolls his eyes. “Does that make them bad? I don’t get that.” Waldera says he has guys in the club that have one rod, three baits, and a boat with no electronics, and other guys with $70,000 boats. “It’s like any other sport—some guy’s tearing it up with grandpa’s skis, and the other guy has a helmet that matches the rest of his outfit.” 

Waldera lives in West Fargo and got the bug when he was a teenager in the late ’80s. “Back then, Pelican and Big Detroit weren’t good muskie lakes, so I would get up early in the morning and drive to Leech Lake to fish.” But he caught his first huge fish in Big Detroit in 1998, and the fishing has gotten “better and better and better ever since.” 

We talk about the legislation and the public hearings, and I ask him if he thinks the tension between the two camps will ever abate. “Dave and this anti-muskie sentiment, it’s never going away,” he says. “They believe they’re right, I believe I’m right. We just have to keep getting people involved who are open-minded and want to look at facts.”

I didn’t have the heart to ask him, whose facts? 

****

Manuel says that back in 2016, when the DNR was holding public hearings, there were tense moments between the Property Owners Association and the Muskies, Inc., guys. Majkrzak describes the atmosphere as “a Philadelphia union hall” where Muskies, Inc., members were bused in by the Fargo chapter. 

At one meeting, Greg Nelson, a longtime DNR official, got so frustrated with the Pelican Lake Property Owners Association’s interpretation of data that he called them a bunch of Nazis. “I understand how things can get heated and people can say things they don’t mean,” Majkrzak says, “But Fred did not take that very well at all.” Then-DNR Commissioner Landwehr sent a prompt personal letter of apology, and Nelson was forced to retire early. The hyperbole goes both ways. Majkrzak has compared Muskies, Inc., to the National Rifle Association. 

It’s obvious where their resentment is coming from: The property owners feel ignored by the DNR, despite all the public listening sessions they’ve attended. “It’s the principle of the thing,” Majkrzak insists. “And the guys calling the shots are just out of school, and they’re wearing the brown shirts with the patches.” Majkrzak feels like the property owners are the ones who’ve paid to keep the lake picturesque, while day-tripping muskie fishermen toting “their $25 fishing licenses” are the ones getting the red carpet. 

****

As it happens, there’s another explanation for why Majkrzak and Manuel and the old walleye crowd may not be hooking walleye in the same numbers anymore. Alas, it’s not as sexy or scary as a devil fish lurking in the depths.

On a clear and cold day in October, Tony Mariotti, a 43-year-old promotional fisherman and outdoor educator from the Fergus Falls area now living in Detroit Lakes, invites me walleye fishing on Otter Tail Lake. He’s going out with his buddy Jeff Slipper. 

Otter Tail Lake is roughly 3.5 times larger than Pelican,* and the DNR doesn’t stock muskies—though supposedly some live in the lake. For the most part, it’s considered a great walleye fishery. “But the zebra mussels have made it much clearer,” Mariotti warns. 

“A walleye fisherman tries to fish the weedline. Now, with zebra-induced water clarity, the plants grow taller, so the weedline has gone from 17 to 22 feet.” Mariotti’s theory is that the guys bitching about muskies, like David Majkrzak, got used to having three spots on any given lake where they could reliably catch walleye. “But now their habitat has changed.” His point: The muskie is being blamed for the walleye angler’s failure to adapt to a changing habitat. 

Because the sun is out and the water is so clear, Mariotti thinks we’ll have our best luck fishing in deep water, jigging at 30 feet. Fishing walleye this deep feels unprecedented, but Mariotti says it’s the new normal. We anchor in the middle, and Slipper hands out Swisher Sweets. We jig off the bottom. Sure enough, I feel a fish gently tug my line, 30 feet down, so I set the hook and crank him up. Because of the rapid change in pressure, the fish emerges with its bladder popping out of its mouth. He is tiny, but, inevitably, a keeper. 

Later that morning, Mariotti calls into The Mike McFeely Show on WDAY-FM in Fargo with good news from our excursion. He tells McFeely, “I believe these ecosystems can live in harmony.”  

****

The case against muskies is underpinned by the thesis that they are eating the walleyes and perch on Pelican Lake, and that muskie fishermen are dragging invasive species such as zebra mussels and Eurasian watermilfoil into area lakes. Does science have an answer?  And what should we do when half the people in a debate don’t believe the science? 

I meet DNR state fisheries chief Brad Parsons in his office in St. Paul. Parsons, a 32-year DNR vet, has a straight-up Brawny-man vibe, wearing a checked flannel and jeans. “Our goal is to provide as diverse of fishing opportunities to as diverse a group of people that we can,” he says. The DNR’s management plans determine the fish population in each lake, collect public input, come up with a plan, and vet it through lake associations. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to go. What the hell happened in Otter Tail County? 

Most of the data on muskies comes from the Knapp study, a peer-reviewed report co-authored by DNR specialist Michael Knapp. His team surveyed fish populations, using nets and statistical analysis, in 41 lakes stocked with muskies. According to Knapp, the populations in lakes stocked with muskellunge are holding up as well as they do in other Minnesota lakes.   

Majkrzak refers to the Knapp study as the Crap Study. “You could just as well be standing on the corner somewhere and guessing,” he says. “If medical doctors and pilots had the same data collection methods as the DNR, we’d all be dead.” 

Parsons answers in the tone of a slightly exasperated kindergarten teacher. “Mr. Majkrzak talks about the declining fishing participation and those kinds of things, and harm to the local fishery, and we just don’t see that.” 

How can two sides see opposite things? I visit Dr. Peter Sorensen in his office at the University of Minnesota. Sorensen is a fish biologist and professor who has studied invasive species for years. When I meet him, he’s wearing suspenders with shark fin decals, which inspires instant trust. 

I ask if the muskie could be defined as an invasive species, and he offers the most interesting answer yet. “Almost nothing is native to Minnesota,” he says. “There were glaciers overhead 18,000 years ago—not a single fish species evolved here.” 

Sorensen doesn’t see this question—if the muskie is supposed to be in Pelican Lake or not—as scientific. “At least not biological science,” he says. “Social science, yes.” 

He reads the DNR’s definition of invasive species: “Invasive species are non-native to Minnesota and cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.” But Sorensen doesn’t think the DNR has the data to back up its definition either way. “It’s a socioeconomic question,” he says, “not a biological question.” 

The big problem is that Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes are our sine qua non. They are resources for muskie, walleye, waterskiing, and swimming, and these uses are not always compatible. “Some people even like zebra mussels!” Sorensen says. “Because they help with water clarity.” 

The problem lies in all these competing value systems using different metrics and different science in different ways to try to solve different problems. Fundamentally, the reason we can’t resolve the muskie argument is not divergent data, but competing beliefs. 

****

Spend enough evenings around the lakes of Otter Tail County and you’ll invariably hear a story about the one that got away. It goes like this: I threw a jig in the water and hooked a walleye near the bottom; then, as I reeled it to the boat, I felt a tremendous jolt. A muskie had grabbed onto the walleye on my line. 

The story can go two ways at this point. In one version, the muskie snaps the line and disappears with the walleye, off into the deep. 

In the other version, the fisherman reels both fish up to the hull together as one, nets the pair, and drops the whole tangled, needle-toothed mess on the floor of the boat. Whatever the fisherman was hoping for, everyone is screwed now. The lure is stuck in the walleye, the walleye stuck in the muskie, all trapped in a deadly embrace.

And no one is eating dinner.  

---

Correction: The original text misstated the comparative sizes of Otter Tail Lake and Pelican Lake.