Don't insult Esshup by listing me in the expert category alongside him.
I'm about as far removed from that description as it's possible to get.
What I saw in your photos that said crappie to me, was the general coloration, the yellow eye color, and the fact that the markings continued up onto what was left of the tail and fins.
No, you are not as far from that description as it's possible to get, because you are a thousand times closer to it than I am.
You have obviously done a lot of fishing and looked at a lot of fish. I have looked at a lot of fish but they have been ocean fish and looking at them under the water, not at the end of a fillet knife. Till about a year and a half ago I didn't give squat about a RES or BCP or LMB or BG or FHM nor would I have even recognized those acronyms. So I value your judgment when it comes to pond fish ID.
I keep thinking about the fish that highflyer had a picture of from his Texas get together. We all stood around and watched as he sorted out BCP into the "bait" bucket to be destroyed and in went a fish with a red ear tab. (OK, FireIsHot did some work, the rest of us just gawked). We all looked at it and highflyer exclaimed a BCP/RES cross, and threw it in with the rest of the "trash" to be taken out of the pond. Well that is what it looked like for sure laying there amongst all the other BCP that was in that container (although I had never heard or read of such a cross nor had others). We thought we had something of a "special" fish that highflyer did not want as his breeding stock in his pond, and took a little ribbing from the post thinking it was a cross that could not happen. But it sure did, from visual indications only, look like a BCP with a red opercular tab. Likely, in retrospect, highflyer threw away a perfectly good pure RES.
Also look at some of the recent posting of catches of RES. Look at the upside down fish of Jignpig's above earlier in this thread. Don't they visually look like some BCP markings? They do to me, but I have not looked at that many BCP so don't trust my own interpretation of visual indications. It seems like to me the RES can be all over the place in the visual markings category with some having the vertical bars like BG, others not, etc. But then I have simply not had that much experience with even visual id's on pond fish., so I defer to others that have.
I just keep coming back to what I read about BCP having long gill rakers.
