Sparrow Lake

Where Sparrow Lake is

Sparrow Lake lies in the District Municipality of Muskoka and the County of Simcoe, with shoreline in the Town of Gravenhurst and the Township of Severn.

How deep is Sparrow Lake?

The deepest mapped contour on Sparrow Lake is 12.2 meters, and the water within that boundary descends even farther. The chart is drawn from 47 depth contours recorded during Ontario’s 1968 survey.

Surveyed Depths

Ontario has surveyed the depths of several thousand of its lakes over more than half a century. Later surveys were conducted by boat with satellite positioning and produced hundreds of thousands of soundings per lake. Earlier surveys were charted by running transects across the water and drawing depth contours by hand.

Sparrow Lake Aerial Photography

Ontario photographs the province from the air on a rolling schedule.

The photograph below is from the SCOOP2023 collection, flown in 2023 and 2024.

Water quality

Ontario’s Lake Partner Program is a volunteer monitoring network. Participants collect a water sample each spring for phosphorus analysis and measure water clarity through the summer with a Secchi disk.

Phosphorus is the nutrient that controls how much algae a lake can grow. A lake with little phosphorus stays clear and supports cold-water fish such as lake trout. As phosphorus rises, algae increase, the water clouds, and oxygen in the deep water falls as the algae decay. The province classifies each monitoring site by its spring phosphorus. Below 10 micrograms per litre is oligotrophic: clear water and low algae. From 10 to 20 is mesotrophic: moderately productive water, with more algae and weed growth than an oligotrophic lake but rarely a bloom. Above 20 is eutrophic: nutrient-rich water, prone to algal blooms and low oxygen at depth.

A Secchi disk is a 20 centimeter white or black-and-white plate lowered on a marked line until it disappears from view. The depth at which it vanishes is the Secchi depth, a direct measure of water clarity. Clearer water gives a deeper reading.

Sparrow Lake has 6 Lake Partner monitoring sites. Two have reported phosphorus for the three or more years the province requires before a status is assigned. All are classified mesotrophic.

The longest record is held by site 5094/5 at Deep Bay, deep spot, sampled over 11 springs to 2025. Its long-term mean phosphorus concentration is 11.51 micrograms per litre, within the mesotrophic band, which runs from 10 to 20. The site’s 7 clarity readings give a median Secchi depth of 4.8 meters.

Water temperature

Ontario’s aquatic resource records class Sparrow Lake as a cool-water lake, with a mean depth of 4.3 meters against its maximum of 12.2.

A lake separates into layers through the summer where it is deep enough. Sunlight and wind warm and mix the upper few meters, and beneath a band of rapid cooling, the thermocline, the water stays cold. A shallow lake mixes to the bottom instead and warms through, sooner in spring and later into autumn.

No provincial monitoring station records water temperature on Sparrow Lake. The province’s longest in-water record is kept on eight research lakes near Dorset, sampled since 1976. A reading is taken at the surface, at one meter, at each meter to seven and then every two meters to the bottom, about every two weeks through the open-water season and about monthly under ice. The record holds 5,240 readings at a depth of one meter.

At one meter the eight lakes track one another closely. On a day when several were sampled, the warmest and the coolest lake differed by about one degree in every month of the year, and a 12 meter deep lake and a 37 meter deep lake read within 0.2 degrees of each other from June to October. The weather of the year, and not the lake, sets most of the width of the band below.

Satellite thermal imagery gives a surface reading on clear days: the Landsat sensors pass over Sparrow Lake every eight days at a resolution of 100 meters. In the province’s record the surface reading and the one meter reading agree to within half a degree nine times in ten in summer.

The water a few meters down is colder than any figure on this chart, in every month of the year.

How depth changes the temperature

The chart below is the province’s record on Harp Lake, 37 meters deep, drawn as the median temperature at each depth for each month over 49 years. In July the water at one meter is 23 degrees, at five meters 15, at seven meters 9, and from 13 meters to the bottom under 6. By October the warm layer has deepened to seven meters and cooled to 11 degrees. In February the whole column sits between 1 and 4 degrees under the ice, coldest at the top.

A shallower lake in the same record warms sooner. Heney Lake, six meters deep, reads about 1.8 degrees warmer than Harp Lake at one meter from January to May, 0.8 degrees warmer from June to August, and the same or cooler from September.

Fish in Sparrow Lake

Ontario’s aquatic resource records name 17 fish species in Sparrow Lake. The province classes the lake as cool water. The record took effect on 1 December 2016, and it compiles what field biologists had reported by then.

Twelve of the seventeen species in the province’s records

• Northern Pikepike
• Muskellungepike
• Walleyeperch
• Yellow Perchperch
• Smallmouth Basssunfish
• Largemouth Basssunfish
• Black Crappiesunfish
• Rock Basssunfish
• Pumpkinseedsunfish
• Bluegillsunfish
• Brown Bullheadcatfish
• Channel Catfishcatfish

Spawning areas

Ontario maps 4 fish spawning records within the Sparrow Lake outline, for three species, all of them mapped areas. Every record is recorded as verified and presently suitable, and none is classed as sensitive. One of the areas is one outline mapped for smallmouth bass and northern pike alike. An outline filed for more than one species is drawn once, striped in each of their colours.

By number of records

By area mapped

• Smallmouth Bass2 areas0.8 ha
• Northern Pike1 area0.2 ha
• Walleye1 area0.9 ha

The federal Fisheries Act prohibits the harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat without an authorization, so a dock, dredging, infill or shoreline work at a mapped spawning area is reviewed on that basis.

Stocking history

Ontario’s stocking records for Sparrow Lake run from 1946 to 1976 and hold 73 releases. Walleye account for most of the fish: 10,545,000 released in nine of the years between 1946 and 1956. The last recorded release was 10,000 muskellunge frys in 1976.

The province’s current stocking programme, recorded from 2016, lists no release into Sparrow Lake.

Eating the fish

The 2025 Guide to Eating Ontario Fish carries consumption advice for eleven species taken from Sparrow Lake, tested for contaminants at a sampling location in Orillia Twp., Simcoe Co. Each figure below is the most meals a month the guide advises for a fish of that length. The advice falls as the fish gets longer, because mercury accumulates over a fish’s life. A zero means the guide advises no meals of that fish at that size.

General population adultsSensitive population children under fifteen, women who are or may become pregnant

Fisheries Management Zone 16

Sparrow Lake lies in Fisheries Management Zone 16. Ontario sets its fishing seasons and catch limits by zone. Zone 16 is the most southerly inland zone in the province and takes in all of southwestern Ontario, with Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo and London. The province describes it as a zone of large river systems, with Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching its large lakes, carrying important recreational and tourism fisheries under high fishing effort.

The figures are the number of fish an angler may catch and keep in a day and have in possession, under a sport fishing licence and under a conservation licence. The rows are the whole zone’s, and they apply to every lake in it. No waterbody exception names Sparrow Lake.

Sparrow Lake Ice Fishing

An ice hut on Sparrow Lake must be removed by March 15. Sparrow Lake lies in fisheries management zone 16, one of the twenty zones Ontario sets its fishing rules by, and one removal date applies across the whole zone.

An ice hut must also be removed before the ice breaks up, whether or not that date has passed. The deadline clears huts from the ice ahead of the thaw and does not close the fishing season.

Registration is required in zone 16 for an ice hut built of anything other than fabric, and for a fabric tent covering seven square meters or more. Registration is free, and the number is displayed on the outside of the hut.

When the ice comes and goes

No ice record is kept on Sparrow Lake. The province’s nearest long record covers eight lakes near Dorset, about 59 kilometers away. It holds a date for every winter since 1975, observed by eye and from cameras set on the shore.

On those eight lakes the median date of complete ice cover is December 7 and the median date of complete ice loss is April 20, a median season of 134 days.

The date the ice forms has moved later through the record: a November 26 average across 1971 to 1980, and December 11 across 2011 to 2020. The date it leaves has moved by less than a day each decade over the same period. The two charts below are drawn to one scale of 26 days, so they can be read against each other.

Ice conditions

No public record reports the thickness or the condition of the ice on Sparrow Lake on any given day. Ontario publishes ice safety guidance for anyone going out on the ice, at ontario.ca.

Getting on the water

Four access marks are mapped on Sparrow Lake: one boat launch, one shoreline access point and two marinas. Two are Ontario’s own records and two are from the Overture Places dataset, and the list under the map says which is which. Boat launch is the province’s class for a ramp; shoreline access is its class for a place the public can reach the water on foot.

Islands and names

Sparrow Lake contains 20 islands in the Ontario Hydro Network’s outline, zero of them over 10 hectares and eight under a tenth of a hectare. One of them lies inside a wetland mapped in the province’s Wetland With Significance dataset.

Official names

Ontario’s geographic names register lists 23 official names on the water and its islands: 14 islands, four bays, three shoals and one rock. A further 7 named points stand on the mainland shore.

Bays 4

• Deep Bay
• Duck Bay
• McLean Bay
• Welsh Bay

Shoals and rocks 4

• Goose Rock
• High Island Shoal
• Long Island Shoal
• Wiancko Shoal

Points on the shore 7

• Ellison Point
• Grandview Point
• Iron City Point
• Joseph Point
• Lauderdale Point
• Monahan Point
• River Point

Communities on the lake 2

• Port Stanton
• Sopher's Landing

Nearby lakes

• Morrison Lake7 km away
• Kahshe Lake12 km away
• Lake Couchiching16 km away
• Riley Lake18 km away

All lakes

Questions about Sparrow Lake

• How deep is Sparrow Lake?

  Its deepest charted contour is 12.2 meters, and the water within it is deeper.

• How big is Sparrow Lake?

  Its surface covers 11.2 square kilometers and it holds 20 islands. Of its 44 kilometers of shoreline, 40 kilometers is the mainland shore and 4 kilometers is the shore of the islands.

• What fish are in Sparrow Lake?

  Ontario’s aquatic resource records name seventeen species, among them walleye, smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, northern pike, muskellunge and yellow perch.

• Is the water clear?

  All two monitoring sites with a phosphorus status are classified mesotrophic, the middle of the province’s three bands.

• Is there a public boat launch?

  Records mark one boat launch, one shoreline access point and two marinas on Sparrow Lake.