Early in the morning, when fog still clings to the water at Busse Reservoir, nothing hints at the challenge waiting beneath the surface. Every year, powerful muskellunge slip over the dam on the lake’s southeast corner and drift into the narrow, winding flow of Salt Creek. If no one intervened, many would continue downstream through DuPage County, eventually disappearing into the Des Plaines River.

This is why, each spring and fall, the Forest Preserves of Cook County’s fisheries team launches its muskie salvage operation, working in partnership with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR), which stocks the lake once a year with muskie and other game fish to provide anglers with something to catch.

“This is something we’ve been doing since 2011, and officially twice a year since 2013,” says Senior Fisheries Biologist Steve Silic. “We stock them in Busse Reservoir because people want a chance to fish for muskie. But muskie are very prone to going over dams. Once they go over, they’re out of the lake and basically heading for the river.”

Before any boat hits the water, the team focuses on one priority above all else: minimizing stress on the fish. “We do this in the spring and fall because the water temperatures are colder,” Silic explains. “If you do this in the summer, the fish are more stressed, their chemical levels are higher and they’re more likely to die from handling.”

Everything in the process is designed to keep the fish healthy: working quickly, handling them as little as possible, keeping them in oxygenated water and reducing the time they spend in the boat. Silic warns that once fish are in hand, “we don’t want to be messing around too much because we don’t want to risk killing them.”

Busse Reservoir, built in the late 1970s as a stormwater impoundment of Salt Creek, unintentionally creates the perfect escape route for muskie. When heavy rain pushes water over the dam, the fish go with it. Below the dam, two deep pools act like temporary refuges. The fish linger there, drawn by steady flow, baitfish and warm discharge water entering from the west.

“Some of them hang around the pools, but they will swim downstream,” Silic says. “We’ve had people catch them as far as the Des Plaines River. Once they escape, there’s the potential for them to just be gone.”

To save them, the team launches compact electrofishing boats from the shaded bank near the dam. These are narrow working boats, 16 or 17 feet long, packed with nets, a generator, a fresh tank of lake water and metal booms that electrify the water.

A generator powers the control box where the operator adjusts the voltage and amperage of the electrical current running into the water. “It’s a direct current,” Silic says. “It stuns the fish. Their muscles contract and they lock up. They’re drawn toward the electrodes.” Netters stand at the front of the boat, ready to scoop the muskie from the electrified water within seconds. The electric field is small, only reaching a foot or two down, so the boats cruise the shallow edges where fish can’t slip beneath the current.

Following one of two 20-minute runs, each fish is quickly moved into a 400-gallon hauling trailer filled with lake water and pumped with pure oxygen to help them recover. Depending on the year, the team might save two muskies or 60.

Since 2011, 440 muskie have been returned to Busse Lake, but the team also saves other game species swept over the dam. During the same period, more than 1,500 walleye, 640 largemouth bass, 91 northern pike and 21 channel catfish were caught and put back in the lake.

After the salvage runs wrap up, the whole operation moves to the public launch at the northwest corner of the lake. There, IDNR crews move quickly to measure, weigh and identify the sex of each muskie.

“It’s kind of a two-for-one,” Silic says. “We’re getting scientific data and we’re salvaging them to get them back into the fishing lake.” Silic says on occasion, it’s a “three-for-one” when wildlife staff is on hand to implant transmitters to study movement patterns.

Behind every rescue is the shared goal of the Forest Preserves and IDNR: to keep a thriving muskie population in a lake where anglers can chase the catch of a lifetime.

“If we didn’t do this,” Silic says,“there’d be no muskie in Busse Reservoir.”