Kootenai River open for burbot fishing as numbers rebound

Daryl Hageman of Hope spent a day this week taking advantage of the Kootenai River’s latest fishery.

Hageman used nightcrawlers to lure Kootenai River burbot into taking a hook.

It didn’t pan out though.

“We got skunked,” Hageman said.

He and fellow anglers caught whitefish instead.

Hageman was among a handful of fishers testing the river south of Bonners Ferry this week to cash in on the first burbot season since 1992, when the fish’s population was considered endangered.

Rebounding numbers prompted the Idaho Fish and Game Commission to once again adopt a fishery — it began Jan. 1 — allowing anglers to harvest six burbot per day with no size restrictions in the Kootenai River, its tributaries and Bonner Lake.

Once a popular fishery in the river, burbot, a fresh water cod, were a sought-after commodity that had anglers slipping onto the river’s ice in the cold season (before the Libby Dam was built, causing sporadic river conditions) to angle the snaky-looking fish from its river-bottom haunts.

“People used to catch a lot of them and sell them at the store,” Hageman said.

That was in the 1950s, but a change in river conditions brought on by the building of the dam 20 years later, edged the fish into extinction. By the 1990s fisheries biologists estimated fewer than 100 of the fish — which look like a cross between a catfish and a spotted eel — remained.

“The population was nearly lost,” said Kiira Siitari, Fish and Game communications manager.

The Burbot Conservation Strategy, adopted in 2005 by a group of sportsmen and women, industry, and the state and Kootenai Tribe, helped bring the fish back from the brink, Siitari said.

Known by some anglers as “ling,” “ling cod” and “eel pout,” burbot are native to the Kootenai River, and anglers fish for them like they would for pike, Hageman said.

The fish in the Kootenai River average between 16 to 20 inches long, but fish as large as 33 to 35 inches have been caught in fishery surveys, according to IDFG. Burbot are most active, and spawn, in the winter months, which makes them predominantly a winter fishery. And because of their nocturnal predatory habits, anglers are more likely to catch them early in the morning, late in the day, or at night.

“Historical reports suggest that night fishing is often most productive, particularly on shallow flats where burbot tend to congregate for feeding and spawning,” Siitari said.

Current estimates show around 40,000 to 50,000 burbot in the Kootenai River, according to Fish and Game officials.

When he returns maybe later this week to try catching a burbot, Hageman said he will use a sinker with a three-way swivel to keep bait — probably a night crawler — about a foot off the bottom.

“They like to hang out in structure near the bottom,” Hageman said.

Changes in the weather will likely improve fishing, and so will time, and technique.

“I think fishing for them is going to get better,” he said.