Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Can Anyone Tell Me What This Little One Is?

Thank you Bill. That's exactly the same length I got but using the width of my last 3 fingers.

Today I finally began seeing BG and LMB in my favorite pond. We've been having nights in the 50s until the last few days and only now have I been able to observe the BG and sample them. I did that rather casually using width of my hand (where the fingers meet the palm) as a guide. That width is 3.5".

No fish were that small. The smallest BG was 4". The most numerous BG were between 4" and 5" in length and I caught BG up to about 6". The pond does grow BG up to about 8" in length. For whatever reason, the water has never produced an LMB > 18" and a 16" LMB is a really good one in that pond. Year after year, the predominate size of BG is 4" to 5" until there is a good hatch of BG and for a time there are examples that are smaller. I see examples smaller than 4" going into Fall and by Spring ... smaller BG appear to be gone and no longer contribute to samples.

As for why I asked the question ... before I started measuring small BG (either by tape or surrogate) ... for reasons I can't explain ... my tendency was to underestimate the length of a little BG just eyeballing it. Anyways, for most of my adult life I have used the full length of my hand as a measure of 7" and so often I would use my hand length to casually judge lengths of decent sized BG. It's something you can do without much handling before releasing. But for little BG, using portions like finger length and widths is handy (pun intended).