Thought we would check out the fish in the pond today. They have turned off the feed for a week now and wanted to check out their body condition. First picture is over last year in July.

Picked up this huge creek chub. Must have been in the first stocking of minnows.

There is a shot of the new house under construction too. Yep habs fan too.

I don't think the fish are lacking. Other than cutting some up I really wonder what they are getting to eat. They are totally off the feeder just the minnows and shiners eating the feed.

Cheers Don.

One more of the perch today.

Chubby suckers. Nice.

Great looking yellow perch. They are doing well in your pond. A couple of those creek chubs you are calling chubs are big common shiners and likely the same ones spawning in your pond's waterfall. CJBS could verify the ID.

Are these good to have? They are multiplying like crazy.

They really like the feed from the feeder.

Cheers Don.

The saying,"Short like a beer can" comes to mind when viewing those YP. Beautiful spread you got there DON!

Question asked: "Are these good to have? They are multiplying like crazy." At this point you don't have much choice whether or not to have them. Generally they do not reproduce in ponds. Many pond owners would like to have your 'problem'.

Several ways I think to deal with this. Shut down the water fall or run it a lot less during shiner spawn season to minimize shiner spawning which is where we think the shiner successful spawning and hatching is occurring. Add some predators to help eat a lot of the the young and older shiners. The brooder shiner in the picture is pretty big thus SMB nor WE may be able to fully control your prolific shiners. You could also manually remove shiners (traps, nets, seines)and see if you could get something for them at a local bait shop. A good part-time job for your kids.

Another feature that tells us the fish are shiners and not chubs is they are slab or flat sided when viewed from the front. Chubs will be round in cross section. Chubs also do not have the large, obvious diamond shaped scales. The shiners are growing fast on high protein fish food. Once they get to 3+" long the perch will pretty much ignore them as food items. However you will catch some YP using 3"-4" the shiner as bait since the big shiner is an easy catch tethered to a bobber. It takes a pretty good sized YP to eat a 4" common shiner.