Originally Posted By: esshup
First off, are you talking about Madtoms or Bullheads? Lets think about this for a minute. For the birds to transfer eggs, the eggs have to be sticky, right? Plus, those type of eggs are cared for by the parent, fanning water over the eggs to keep oxygenated water constantly washing over the eggs. Plus, those fish typically spawn in some sort of enclosure, be it a hollowed out "cave" in weeds, the bank of the pond, etc. If the eggs are sticky enough to stick to the birds feet, how do they get unstuck, and then how do they get enough O2 to hatch?

I'll bet that if you think back, the ponds that had the "mud-cats" appear in them had water flowing into them from a previous high water event, and my bet is that the fish were washed into the pond from somewhere else. They could have washed into the pond a year or more before you noticed them.


This subject has been argued extensively in the forum over the years. What esshup wrote sums it up quite well. Fish just don't appear out of thin air. I would ay 66% of all fish in ponds find their way their at the hands of man. Either intentionally via intentional stocking or via friendly "backyard biologist" stocking. As in throwing a few fish from the days catch at the local lake into a bucket and releasing them that way... Bait bucket releases are also quite common for some species. The other 32.999% would be through high water events or simply fish swimming upstream. Although a body of water may not seem connected to any other bodies of water, during flood events, almost all bodies of water end up connecting up with other bodies of water in some way. It's amazing how fish are able to find new homes this way. That last 0.001% is the freak events, such as the heron dropping a catch accidentally into a new body of water or the egg stuck to a bird theory. Are these events possible, yes... However, I'd go with winning the lottery over a fish community being established in a fairly isolated pond this way.

I too feel that the seine is the single most effective way to get a good idea as to what you current have in your pond. A 50' net would be preferred, but even a 30' or even 20' net could do the job nicely.