As noted, water levels in Devils Lake have risen more than 20 feet during the past 14 years. "You are dealing with a deep basin," explained Hiltner. "The perch can be anywhere, so it can be hit or miss. It's about 105,000 acres; it was 45,000 acres or so before. It has more than doubled. When it goes up 12 more feet it will empty into the Sheyenne River, which historically it has done in the past couple of thousand years."

With more water and fewer fish, perch become scarcer. Trying to make up for that, the NDGFD stocked 1.3 million perch into Devils Lake last summer -- all North Dakota "natives," too, raised in North Dakota in the Valley City Fish Hatchery and at Garrison Dam Fish Hatchery.

Biologists won't know for a while just how well this works, if at all. The fingerlings were chemically marked so that the stocked fish can be identified later when they're caught or netted. The chemical is harmless to fish and humans, but it does show up in the bones of fish when they're sent to the laboratory for analysis. Biologists will be able to come up with a percentage of the perch in the lake that came from lat summer's stocking.

"Obviously if we get the results back and 2 percent are marked, then we didn't contribute much to the perch fishery and it is mostly natural reproduction," Hiltner acknowledged. "We have stocked perch in the past, but they weren't marked with the chemical."

Yellow perch sizes have been staying fairly large. Their diet is nutritious, with a high proportion of it freshwater shrimp, which put weight on fish very quickly, but also make them less interested in anglers' baits; sometimes they seem to be full, and not really very hungry.

"Fishermen like to come up here and search and catch jumbo perch," said Hiltner. "Who doesn't? But the last two winters have been pretty tough. We have some good anglers come up here with all the electronics and sensitive rods and everything that you need to catch perch. But our perch are stuffed with the freshwater shrimp, so even on the good days it is hard to make them bite. But with that being said, one might go out and catch 20 perch in a day. It is not etched in stone."

The higher water levels probably created highly welcoming habitat for the shrimp, since they are so abundant. "Freshwater shrimp -- it is an important item," remarked Hiltner. "But (game fish) are opportunistic. If they have a good white bass hatch, they will eat that. Freshwater shrimp is an excellent backup forage. They can grow well just eating that."

That's fine for well-fed, contented perch swimming about in the lake, but not necessarily ideal for the angler intent on catching them on hook and line -- which would go a way towards explaining the uneven rewards of Devils Lake perch fishing.