Hi All; Good afternoon from south-central Minnesota. I just came across this forum a few days ago while researching ideas for our pond. I’ve been impressed by the experience and knowledge while reading/researching here, also subscribed to PB. I’m hoping that you can provide a little guidance as I explore managing this pond. Guess I’ll jump right into it. I hope that you forgive this lengthy post out of the gate.
The primary question that I am coming to is “what can/should I do to improve this pond”. The background… I own a piece of a 12 acre unmanaged pond which crosses 3 other property owners with no public access. It is about 6’ deep at the deepest spot. It has a short <2’ dam/road crossing at the outlet end with no known drain pipe. I’m not sure how much of this body of water has been manipulated in the distant past. It appears the road crossing could have been raised the 2’ to make it passable rather than an intentional attempt at a dam. The pond has water flowing at the inlet end, runs the length and over-tops the road crossing as the outlet. This area is in a valley/flood plain off a significant Minnesota river. In the 10 years I have been here the river has flooded through the pond a couple of times. I’d say the pond has a flooding occurrence once every 5 years. For the most part I hadn’t been looking at the details of this pond until last summer when I got interested in developing it as a fishing hole. I suspected to only find carp and a few bullhead. I tried some fishing/trapping last fall/winter and was astounded at what was in there. GSF, LMB up to 15”, BH, short-nosed gar, BG up to 6", YP up to 10”, Big mouth buffalo, CGC, NP @ 21”, redhorse and I just found a 8” GSD today. Also not knowing any better, last summer I stock 100 BCP & 100 HBG.
Before finding this number of mature(ish) fish I was concerned about winter-kill with the shallow depth so started dissolved oxygen monitoring late last summer. DO ranged from 6.5 ppm @ 8:30 AM to over 10 ppm a few weeks later. There was no significant algae bloom last summer. Currently late winter with significant ice cover DO is still over 10 ppm as best I can tell. pH was around 8.0 give or take. There is still a good outflow happening late winter. We’ve had droughty conditions for the last 3 years with no significant decrease in full pool which tells me this pond is normally spring fed. This pond sees only occasional fishing pressure when one of the neighbor's kids/friends visit.
My assumptions… the variety of fish in the pond have come from the river when it flooded in years past. It hasn’t flooded in the past 4 years so the current fish population is mostly naturally reproducing and growing i.e. the current large fish didn’t originate from the river. It is primarily spring fed. There has been limited winter and summer kill due to oxygen deprivation as evidenced by the fish ages over the last few years. There apparently is a good forage base for the predators.
My goal with pond is to provide reliable meat producing sources which are not necessarily species specific but primarily BG, BCP, YP and LMB. Oh and the LMB are a blast to catch on a lazy afternoon.
My thoughts to improve this pond… excavate a hole down to 12’ with a long-reach backhoe, add some additional structure around the pond and get rid of as many of the rough fish as I can.
The variety, size and quantity of fish in this pond tells me mother nature is doing just fine on her own. Now back to the original question... what can/should I do to improve this pond?
I’ll stop there since this is lengthy as an intro.
