Increased environmental variability driven by climate change threatens species adapted to seasonal climates. Understanding whether changing environmental cues influence life history phenology and the importance of environmental characteristics on recruitment could inform population vulnerability. We used a 57-year time series of walleye (Sander vitreus) spawning, adult abundance, age-0 recruitment, and environmental data from Escanaba Lake, Wisconsin, USA, to examine: (1) cues driving walleye spawning phenology; and (2) critical periods for age-0 walleye survival, including whether critical periods have changed over time. Walleye spawning was driven by an interaction between water temperature and photoperiod, potentially explaining previous research showing an inability of walleye to track increasingly early ice-off timing. We observed no consistent temperature or precipitation critical periods for walleye recruitment either in the full dataset, or when examining these relationships in different time periods. Our results suggests that walleye may be limited in their responsiveness to changing spring thermal environments owing to reliance on photoperiod cues, and their recruitment exhibits interannual context-dependencies, complicating attempts to accurately predict age-0 recruitment using predefined environmental variables.