- Hello, everyone.

Welcome to "Michigan Out Of Doors".

I'm Jenny Ciolek, and we've got a great show headed your way this week.

We'll take you all the way up to the UP and all the way down to Detroit.

We'll start off by getting an update on the wolf population in the Upper Peninsula, and we'll stop in with the DNR to check out a new project they're working on surveying wildlife populations using trail cameras.

You won't wanna miss those stories.

And Jimmy's gonna take us to Detroit for some fishing action.

- Well, that's right.

We are gonna head to the Detroit River on this week's show.

Now, typically we head down there in the spring for walleye, but there are walleye that you can be catching right now.

But there's a few other species down there in the Detroit River that make it a lot of fun to fish this time of the year.

Lots of stuff on this week's show, all brand new.

You stay tuned.

I'm Jimmy Gretzinger, and it's time for "Michigan Out of Doors."

♪ From the first spring rains to the soft summer breeze ♪ ♪ Dancing on the pine forest floor ♪ ♪ The autumn colors catch your eyes ♪ ♪ Here come the crystal winter skies ♪ ♪ It's Michigan, Michigan Out of Doors ♪ - [Jimmy] What a beautiful day in the woods.

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Offering a wide variety of calibers and colors backed by a lifetime warranty.

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(anticipatory music) (bouncy music) (upbeat twangy music) - All right, well, we're here with Brian Roell here in Marquette, Michigan just outside the DNR office here.

Brian, just tell me what do you do here for the state of Michigan and how long you've been working for the department?

- So I am the large carnivore specialist for the state of Michigan, and I'm actually in my 27th year for working for the department.

- [Jimmy] 27th year, you getting things figured out?

- Oh yeah, yeah.

We got her all even-keeled right now.

- Well, let's just start with kind of, where are we with the wolf population here in Michigan?

Let's just start with that kind of.

- Okay, well, wolves have been fairly steady for the last decade, and we really haven't seen a fluctuation in our minimum population estimate.

So that minimum is done midwinter when wolves are at their lowest point.

Our last data point was at for 2024, and we had 768 animals, plus or minus, you know, 50, 60 animals, something like that.

And they've kind of bounced like that, like I said, really actually for the last 14 years.

Somewhere between the 600, 700 number.

- Okay.

And what do you think is a healthy population here in Michigan?

Should there be less wolves?

Is it okay if there's more wolves?

- Well, that's all in the eye of the beholder.

- [Jimmy] Okay.

- We probably are at saturation point for say a biological carrying capacity, although there is some social aspects to that.

But, you know, yeah, there's folks that want fewer, there's folks that want more.

So I guess, you know, I really can't answer for those folks.

I can tell you biologically they are secure in Michigan.

- Okay.

- We're not looking at, you know, a threat of them going endangered or anything, or them not being in the landscape of Michigan.

- And how big of an impact do you think they have on the deer population?

Is it substantial up here, or do we overblow that?

- It's way overblown.

They really don't have an impact on the deer.

That's kind of a myth.

We can look at over a decade's worth of research that we did on the predator-prey relationship of deer in the Upper Peninsula.

And Tyler was involved in that.

And, you know, that was stuff that we did in three different snowfall zones looking at all four predators, and really what the driver of deer in Michigan is winter weather.

- [Jimmy] Hmm.

- And everybody always tells me, "The Upper Peninsula has always had hard winters."

And that is true.

We always have.

But what we've actually seen is a change in the frequency of severe winter for deer.

So anytime you get over 90 days of 12 inches or more snow on the landscape, that's what we call a severe winter for deer.

And so those frequencies has changed over time and a lot of that probably could be due, and I say probably 'cause we don't have, you know, the research yet to show that, but likely due to climate change.

So Lake Superior is warmer, it's not freezing like it used to.

- [Jimmy] Okay.

- And it's one gigantic snowmaking machine.

- Hmm.

- So we're getting more snowfall in those higher snowfall zones across that band across the Lake Superior.

And we're getting lake effect snows that actually are moving farther south.

- Wow.

Now, would the department like to see the ability to control wolf numbers?

Is that, I dunno if that's, I mean, you guys can't- - The department doesn't have a decision in that.

- Yeah.

- And that's kind of a misnomer is that the DNR, you know, that's the reason we don't hunt them or harvest them is because the DNR won't let us.

And we don't have a say in that.

That's a decision for the NRC.

And really the first step that would have to happen is they have to come off the federal endangered species list.

And then the NRC could give us that charge.

Legislators could give us that charge to develop what a harvest season may look like.

But until those steps occur, the DNR cannot really start.

- And I think that's a great point that I think a lot of people don't understand.

Maybe give me a little bit more background on the federal, what would actually have to happen or how does that process even start?

If the department went to the feds and said, "Hey, we'd like to be able to control these numbers," can they just, somebody's one decision can change that?

- The department wouldn't do that.

- [Jimmy] Okay.

- Obviously we have come out and said that we feel wolves don't warrant being listed as an endangered species in the state of Michigan.

And you can really kind of say that for the Western Great Lakes.

We feel they are recovered.

There is a five-year post delisting monitoring plan that would be put in place if they do become federally delisted that we would follow.

But like I said, harvest is really not a necessary tool.

It's just whether, you know, and so everybody says, "Well, should you have a harvest season on wolves?"

And I can't answer that question.

- [Jimmy] Hmm.

- What I can answer you is, can we have a harvest season?

And biologically, yes, we could have a sustainable harvest of wolves.

But when you get to wolves, you know, they're an iconic megafauna in the state of Michigan, and there's a lot of opinions on that.

- [Jimmy] Yeah.

- [Brian] And so when you say that word should, that's really not for me to answer.

- [Jimmy] Okay.

- [Brian] I gotta stick to the science and facts.

- Well, special thanks to Brian for sitting down with us, and I was really surprised to hear him say that they think the wolf population has almost zero impact on the deer population.

Well, we kind of know that's really not the case.

Even if only one deer is taken, it's having some sort of an impact.

The question is, how big is the impact of the wolf population on the deer population?

That's one thing they're also trying to figure out in this trail cam study that they're doing right now in the Upper Peninsula.

Tyler, tell us a little bit about this trail cam survey that you guys are doing.

How big is that, and how many trail cams you got out there?

How does that all work?

- Absolutely.

So this research project is known as the Wolf Abundance Project.

So we have right now just over 1200 trail cameras all across the Upper Peninsula - [Jimmy] Wow.

- to try to survey and get a better estimate of wolf abundance in the Upper Peninsula.

- Okay, and how often do you check those?

Are they the cellular cams?

Do you gotta go manually to each tree?

How does that work?

- Yeah, so these are not cell cams.

So these are actually all stored onboard.

So we visit these cameras once a year.

- [Jimmy] Once a year?

- Yeah, so the battery life on these trail cameras is really fantastic.

We're able to deploy these cameras usually in the summertime, leave them out for a full year, collect the SD cards, and then we go through the busy work of uploading all that data and going through those photos.

- Are they a trail cam similar to what sportsmen buy at Jay's Sporting Goods?

Are these like specific ones that you guys use that are different or?

- No, so these are, yeah, anything you can actually pick up off the shelf.

We standardize all of them.

So we actually Browning Dark Ops for all of our trail cams, just so that we have a standard detection rate across all of our cameras.

- [Jimmy] Okay, and that's just in the Upper Peninsula, or is there some in the Lower too, or how does that work?

- [Tyler] So this project is just for the Upper Peninsula.

So this project is actually done in partnership with Michigan State University.

- [Jimmy] Okay.

- They are running all the trail cameras in collaboration with us to get this work done.

And so we have staff that are going out and checking these cameras from July through October basically to get to all the camera sites, replace the ones that were maybe stolen or damaged, and then going through all the photos to identify species.

- And what are you kind of looking for?

What are you hoping to find?

Or maybe not hoping to find, but what are some of the things that you're seeing that's kind of surprised you a little bit?

- Yeah, absolutely.

So really, the impetus for this project was to get a better handle on, what does wolf abundance look like in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan?

Because right now we use a minimum track count, and that track survey has been a great tool for us monitoring wolf recovery across the Upper Peninsula.

But what's happened really over the last decade is that as wolves have become saturated across the Upper Peninsula in their pack territories, we start to see pack overlap.

And so it becomes much more challenging to differentiate, you know, pack A from pack B using track surveys alone.

And also that minimum count gives us a minimum known number of wolves.

We can say there's at least this many wolves in the Upper Peninsula.

But the challenge is that there's definitely uncertainty around what that upper limit on wolves might be.

And so what we're hoping with this trail camera survey is that we have those 1200 cameras separated across the Upper Peninsula.

So we have about eight cameras per wolf home range.

So that's about 130 square miles.

And really what we wanna make sure is that if there's wolves in a pack territory, we're gonna detect them.

- [Jimmy] Hmm.

- And so far early results, we're coming into the second full year of camera deployments, and we're going through the first year of camera deployments and we're using an AI software - [Jimmy] Wow.

- to help sort through and do an initial sort on camera images - Yeah, because you must, I mean, how many trail cam pics for a full year.

That's gotta be tons.

- Absolutely.

So for the first full year of deployments, we're actually looking at over 8 million images.

- Oh my word.

- But luckily what we're able to do is sort through those images that are empty, remove all the images that have vehicles or people - [Jimmy] Okay.

- to protect everyone's privacy.

So those images are actually removed from our dataset before we upload them to try to do species id.

- Now are these all on state property, or some on private as well or?

- Yeah, so we have a big group of collaborators to get this work done across state, federal, tribal, some private commercial forest lands as well where we have agreements that we have cameras out to try to get the best possible coverage.

Like I said, we really wanna make sure that if there's a pack territory, we want to have cameras out there to detect wolves if they're present.

- Wow.

Anything show up that's like really surprising where there's like high density of a lot of wolves?

Are you getting a moose on there too, I'm assuming?

- Absolutely.

So that's really one of the benefits of this camera survey is that the primary goal is to have a better estimate of wolf abundance in the Upper Peninsula.

But as you know, as anyone who uses trail cameras knows, anything that walks by that camera that's large enough to set off that infrared sensor is gonna be captured.

And so then we can use that data to help inform some of our other management in tracking of those populations.

So some notable detections so far.

We've had nine detections of cougar - [Jimmy] Wow.

- [Tyler] on that survey in the first year.

Two detections of lynx.

Over 6,000 photos of moose.

- [Jimmy] Wow.

- [Tyler] Giving us really the first look at what moose distribution looks like across the Upper Peninsula which is really unique to see.

As well as, you know, over a million photos of whitetailed deer, 80,000 photos of coyotes, over 50,000 photos of wolves.

- [Jimmy] Wow.

- [Tyler] So the data is really unique, and it comes pouring in.

And so right now we're just doing that heavy lift of sorting through those photos because the AI is only so good.

You can imagine that as hard as it is to distinguish between a wolf and coyote in a photo, - [Jimmy] Yeah.

- [Tyler] it's definitely hard for a computer to do that as well.

- So once you, what is the goal?

What are you hoping to learn so that, we're fairly limited in what we can do to control the wolf population, but what are you hoping this data at the end of it will, what will that teach us here at the end?

What's the goal here?

- So really the goal of the project, like I was talking about earlier is to get a better handle on what's an accurate estimate of wolf abundance in the Upper Peninsula.

And then what's the uncertainty associated with that abundance estimate.

- [Jimmy] Okay.

- Because right now we have that minimum population count from our track survey that we do every other year.

- [Jimmy] Okay.

- And that gives us a good understanding of when the population is at their annual low in late winter.

How many wolves are are on the landscape?

We can confidently say that.

- [Jimmy] Okay.

- [Tyler] The challenge is we know that when you go out and survey an area, you may miss an individual.

Or if you count three individuals traveling together, what's the likelihood that there's actually a fourth traveling in that pack territory as well?

- [Jimmy] Gotcha.

- [Tyler] And so that imperfect detection is something that we can account for in this new method using trail camera service.

How often do you have wolves run by and miss an animal?

How often do you go into an area in a wolf pack territory, and maybe there's four animals instead of three animals?

This is gonna give us hopefully a better understanding on what that potential uncertainty is around the estimate.

And uncertainty is not a bad thing in this case because it gives us the bounds to help us make the best management decisions moving forward.

- Gotcha.

And so just to kinda wrap things up, kinda what is the estimated wolf population, if you can kinda low end to high end kinda where are we at you figure right now in the state of Michigan?

- Well, so that's really what this project's goal is, is to actually come up with that estimate so that we're gonna have a summer estimate as well as a winter estimate - [Jimmy] Okay.

- hopefully across seasons, because we do know that there's a lot of mortality that happens in the fall in our wolf population.

- [Jimmy] Okay.

- And so what you may be seeing for wolf numbers in the summer versus the fall could be very different from what you're seeing in the winter time.

And so we don't have those population estimates yet from the camera survey.

- [Jimmy] Okay.

- Those are being done right now.

Like I said, we have to go through all those photos to make sure that we have an accurate estimate of how many of those are misclassified as coyote or misclassified as wolf.

- Okay.

- And once we have those, then we'll be able to generate our first estimate to compare to our minimum track survey.

- [Jimmy] Okay, so we're still in progress trying to figure that out.

- [Tyler] Yes, yep, absolutely.

- Special thanks to both Brian and Tyler for sitting down with us.

The wolf population in Michigan is a hot topic for sure.

And if anything changes on the delisting of the wolf, we'll make sure that you are aware of what's going on with that population.

Well, when you talk about fishing the Detroit River, you typically are thinking walleye, and that is really the case, especially in the spring.

But there are fish right now in the river that can be caught.

Walleye for sure, but also some other species that make it a lot of fun.

(upbeat music) - You fish in the river.

Our area, we're trying to target about 32 to 38 feet of water, hoping for some walleye.

Kind of call this a multi-species, hands-on fishing trip.

So no trolling today.

Nothing wrong with trolling, but it gets kind of boring when you're sitting there waiting for a rod to go off.

So hands-on, we're feeling the bite, we're fighting the fish with our hands, feeling that bite.

And we'll get all kinds of fish today.

So, that's our plan.

- [Jimmy] All right, and there's still some walleye down here?

- There's walleyes down here for sure.

Past couple days we've been get in a few.

Tough part is they're real finicky, they bite really light.

So they're heartbreakers.

You get 'em right to the surface and they get off.

But same plan as spring, really.

Jigs, we use stingers, some guys don't.

We'll put a little bit of bait on there sometimes.

Sometimes we'll throw Jigging Raps or spoons.

But basically the same thing as the spring.

And what's great is if you are a little nervous about fishing in the spring, you've never done it before, now's the time to come out and practice.

Nobody on the water.

You can work on your boat control.

You're not dealing with 500 boats next to you, you know, hooking other people and all this other stuff.

So, you know, it's a great time to kind of practice and get your game down.

And then when spring comes, you have a little more confidence.

I've got a Ironman color plastic on there.

I put a little flash on there.

So you'll see there's a little spinner on my stinger hook just for that little bit of kind of reaction, a little bit of excitement, a little bit of flash.

I will tip this with a little piece of crawler, but we've been doing well just as it is.

So you can do either one.

You could use a minnow as well.

And, again, same thing.

Keep your vertical straight up and down.

Hit the bottom every drop.

Just a quick snap, and we'll be on 'em here soon.

- [Jimmy] And what size rod and reel?

- [Captain Z] So these are 5'6" rods.

This is a heavy rod with medium action.

Just got a small Pflueger around here.

8 pound braid.

Some guys will tie, some guys will tie a leader on there.

I just go straight braid, 8 pound braid.

Yeah, I do lose muskies and stuff like that, but I'm not worried about it too much.

This is pretty strong stuff.

- [Jimmy] It's kind of a short rod then.

- [Captain Z] Yeah, it's a short rod.

This is a custom rod made for the Detroit River by a guy out of Illinois, Jim Grant.

So yeah, it's great because it's short.

You know, you can keep it close to the boat.

It's not, you know, getting in the way.

It's perfect.

- [Jimmy] Well, we had Evan Barrett and Kevin Johnson fishing with us today as well, and we had a monster coming towards the boat.

Question was, could Evan get him to the boat?

- Okay.

- [Captain Z] Seems like drums stay down.

Best to just kind of swim out.

- [Kevin] We wanna head over that way, but he's a little low on line.

- [Captain Z] Yeah.

Okay, I'm gonna follow you.

- [Jimmy] How's you drag?

Real low on line.

- [Kevin] Run outta line.

- [Evan] Yep, we're running outta line here.

- [Captain Z] You wanna tighten that drag?

- [Evan] It's gone.

- [Kevin] Oh.

Can we get the line?

- [Jimmy] He took the whole everything.

- [Kevin] Stripped the reel.

Never seen before on television.

- [Jimmy] No, that's a first for me.

- [Kevin] Wow.

- [Evan] Wow.

- [Kevin] Brutal.

- [Captain Z] I wish I could say that was the first time I've seen that happen.

You get a sturgeon or something.

- [Jimmy] You gotta get a better captain out there.

- That was unbelievable.

- [Captain Z] That my fault.

- [Jimmy] I have fished with Captain Eric a handful of times over the years, and he really does know his stuff.

We were hoping to run into some walleye today, but we felt quite confident on boating a few sheepshead and then chasing some white bass as well.

It was really just a fun time on the water catching fish.

- [Captain Z] This guy only catches big fish for some reason.

- [Jimmy] I guess so.

- Well, that's you bring me.

- He's not in yet, so let's not rush.

Oh baby, there's a little color.

- [Kevin] Deep color?

- [Captain Z] It might be.

It's gonna be close to a master here.

He's barely hooked.

Oh, oh, oh.

Another big old drum.

Wow.

- [Jimmy] We did lose a few walleye bites early in the morning, so once we had our fill of drum, we were on to the next challenge.

- So the plan here now is we're gonna head up river to a known silver bass spot, and we're going to cast some swim baits, some surface Zara Spooks.

And there's also some smallmouth in there too.

So we're gonna give it a go for both those species.

- [Jimmy] All right.

Now white bass can be really fun to target.

We did have a stiffening wind today, which made boat control a bit dicey, but we found some fish.

- [Captain Z] Good fish.

We just flip these right in the boat.

There we go.

- [Jimmy] That's our silver bass.

- [Captain Z] That's our silver bass.

We use these paddle tails, and they work great.

Kind of get like a fast jerking, aggressive motion on these, and they usually pound it pretty good, so.

- [Evan] Looks like a good size.

- [Kevin] Oh yeah.

Put this crank bait on.

The way I fish, I'll throw it out.

Put three or four hard cranks, slow retrieve, pause, give it a snap or two and then pow, fish on.

- [Jimmy] Nice.

- Boom.

I'm looking.

Boom.

Got it on top water.

- [Jimmy] Top water, that was cool.

- That was cool.

- [Jimmy] I really haven't seen anyone top water fishing for white bass before, so that was kind of a fun twist.

As was the fact that these guys love to eat these white bass and in fact they prefer them over walleye.

They swear it's true.

- We don't freeze 'em for too long, but clean 'em up and cook 'em within a week, and they're decent.

- [Jimmy] You guys did a little taste test on 'em recently?

- [Captain Z] Yeah, so Evan and I did a taste test.

We compared silver bass, smallmouth, and walleye.

And was it conclusive?.

Overall we thought the silvers were the best.

- [Evan] Yep.

- [Captain Z] Yep, silvers were the best.

- [Jimmy] Wow, blind taste test, eh?

- [Captain Z] Yeah, we just did breadcrumbs and Old Bay, pan fried and delicious.

- [Jimmy] I have to say, I'm sorry I missed the taste test day, but we may have to make another trip just to test this theory out because there are a ton of white bass down here on the Detroit River.

- Very much underutilized.

- [Captain Z] Yeah, this is actually a little slow.

So this is kind of our backup spot, but it produces.

One of three really.

So this is kind of a backup spot.

But yeah, you gotta find what they like.

So I think Kevin's getting them on, or we're all getting 'em on crank baits now.

So it's either a crank bait, Zara Pooch, or a swim tail.

You gotta be aggressive with them, give 'em that yank as you're retrieving.

But when they're in here, it's pretty fast and furious.

So a lot of fun.

Good place to take kids.

- [Jimmy] Is this kind of fishing all the way through into the fall then too or?

- [Captain Z] Yeah, they kind of slow down around October, but from May to September it's pretty reliable.

- So there you have it.

Come down here and practice your boat control.

Come down here and catch a bunch of fish that rival the famed walleye in the deep fryer.

But whatever you do, just enjoy all the variety of fishing opportunities we have right here in Michigan's out of doors.

- Thank you for joining us this week for "Michigan Out of Doors".

Make sure you come back in upcoming weeks.

We've got a lot of great things headed your way this summer.

We'll take you out on Lake Michigan trolling for some of those big fish, and we'll take you over to Lake Huron jigging for lake trout.

You won't wanna miss those stories coming up soon.

And as always, you can check us out online to keep updated on where we are and what we're up to.

- Well, that's right.

Online is a good way to see what we're up to.

Probably Instagram and Facebook are the best ways to see what we're up to on a day-to-day basis.

If you miss part of this week's show or maybe last week's show, you can always check us out on our website at michiganoutofdoorstv.com.

Full episodes of the show there, old recipes, as well as some of our new merchandise that's out there.

So lots of stuff that you could be checking out on our website.

And make sure you are joining us over the next several weeks.

Lots of good stuff coming.

If we don't see you in the woods or on the water, hopefully we'll see you right back here next week on your PBS station.

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(vibrant music) ♪ When I wonder far away a dream stays with me night a day ♪ ♪ It's the road that leads to my home state ♪ (gentle music)