A Year of Native Animals: Channel Catfish

In 2026, Friends of the Chicago River invited people across the Chicago-Calumet River system to make Wild River Resolutions, a yearlong reminder to discover, celebrate, and protect the wildlife that depends on a healthy river. Throughout the year, we are highlighting 12 native animals, one each month, that call the 156-mile river system home.

Designed to both educate and inspire, Wild River Resolutions connects people to the species living in and along the river while spotlighting simple, everyday actions that support a healthy, biodiverse, and accessible river system for all people, water, and wildlife.

February: Channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus)

The channel catfish is once again abundant throughout the Chicago-Calumet River system and other local waters. Their presence can serve as a good monitoring tool for river health. Channel catfish prefer flowing rivers, yet can also be found in lakes, ponds and other slow-moving bodies of water generally where bottoms are sand, gravel, or rubble. In 2014, Friends of the Chicago River and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) installed over 400 channel catfish nesting cavities which we co-invented through a grant as one of the inaugural grants from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Chi-Cal Rivers Fund to mimic sunken logs and other habitat that male channel cats use to protect their eggs.

Friends and IDNR also released 277,000 juvenile catfish into the North Shore Channel and Little Calumet River where the nesting cavities were installed. The project helps this critical species repopulate the system after years of degradation limited its breeding success.

Visit our website to read more about Wild River Resolutions and channel cats.