Walleye Spawn on Fort Peck Reservoir in April

Collecting 60 million walleye eggs from pitching boats in freezing weather and whitecaps takes grit, dozens of volunteers, and a surprising number of turkey feathers. https://qr1.be/BMXTR2

If you catch a walleye in Montana, there’s an excellent chance it started life as an egg squeezed out of the belly of its mother by a burly FWP worker perched on a four-legged stool in a temporary spawning barge nosed up to the wind-whipped shoreline of Fort Peck Reservoir.

April’s annual Fort Peck “spawn,” as it has come to be known, supplies walleye fry and fingerlings back to the reservoir. It is also the source of every walleye stocked statewide. This “assisted reproduction” is especially important in years when conditions hamper natural reproduction.

“There’s limited natural spawning habitat in Fort Peck to begin with, and low reservoir elevations leave rock and gravel substrates high and dry,” says Heath Headley, Fort Peck Reservoir fisheries manager for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. “And in some years with high reservoir elevations and spring runoff, we’ll see walleye and all variety of other fish species trying to navigate some pretty skinny water to spawn,” he says, flocking to tributaries like Big Dry Creek on the lake’s southeast arm. “I mean, you can see their fins sticking out of the water. I look at our spawning operation as essentially giving walleye a hand.”

Actually, hundreds of hands. The annual Fort Peck walleye spawn, which marked its 25th year in 2025, is the fisheries equivalent of a bucket brigade. Dozens of volunteers work shoulder to elbow with FWP staff to capture wild walleye, extract their eggs, mix them with milt (fish sperm), and transport them to hatcheries where they’re incubated, reared, and eventually planted back into Fort Peck and more than a dozen other Montana waters as juvenile fish.

Read or listen to the full story from Montana Outdoors here: https://fwp.mt.gov/montana.../archive/2026/all-hands-on-peck

Story by Andrew McKean

Photo by Sean R. Heavey