While it sure doesn't guarantee success, it's pretty fascinating to see where in Montana there might be freshly-stocked fish waiting for you.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks posts an updated guide to where they have stocked fish from hatcheries. You can also see the dates they were planted, the number of fish they planted, the various sizes and the species. This is a great tool for anybody looking for a certain species of fish in a certain area or if you were just interested in learning about the state’s stocking history.

For example, I plan to fish Beavertail Pond on Saturday. I simply typed Beavertail Pond in the search box and the results cam up. I can see that during the first week of April, Montana FWP planted 93 27-inch rainbow trout from the Jocko River Trout Hatchery. A week before that, 641 10-inch rainbows were planted. That right there is a total of 734 fish. In the past year during 10 plantings, a total of 5590 fish have been stocked just in Beavertail Pond!

And that is how many will STILL be in the pond when I'm done fishing! In part because I am such a lousy angler, but also in part because I'm a catch and release guy.

Seriously, maybe you're wanting to target walleye in Hauser or Fort Peck. Just choose your body of water, then species, and up pops not only the most recent planting data for those popular bodies of water, but a history of planting dates, numbers and sizes as far back as you might want to go. Although most of us are probably living for the here and now when looking to see what the fishing opportunities might be wherever we are planning to fish.

Simply go to the Fish Stocking Data Page of the Montana FWP site. It's interesting and kinda fun!

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