Our pond seems to me to be kinda like a forage heaven (or haven) - we've got a lot of shallow flooded creek areas and lots of vegetation as well as a ton of limbs and blowdowns and a couple of very large but no longer active beaver lodges. There are many places in our pond, near the creek inlet ( an area that is more than an acre), that are basically "unfishable" so, we had very high hopes of getting what it seems like we are getting.
I should have mentioned that we also seem to have had an excellent LMB and bluegill spawn. Before the added forage, we had been judiciously culling every LMB under 16". We caught so few BG that we didn't cull them at all thinking that we should be reducing predation and trying to maximize BG forage.
Now, we're thinking about switching our culling to remove the larger LMB (if we ever catch one) because we think they are probably stunted beyond help and that we should be letting our smaller (and probably not stunted) LMB have plenty of room to keep growing.
We do have minnow traps (see my previous post) and we have been catching golden shiners in them as well as a few baby BG.
BTW: as near as we can tell, we don't have any catfish. we've put out trotlines and jugs baited for catfish but we haven't seen a single one. That's just fine with us!
Please continue commenting - I have no doubt that we could be making some mistakes so, you can't hurt my feelings by pointing them out.
