Do you have any other ideas as to where the fish went? Is it kind of a guess still that otters were there?
CC, it’s the only thing I can come up with. We have a GBH that’s always there. We put up a game camera where he likes to hang out, and we have pics of him with a decent size fish in his mouth. I just can’t see how he would have cleaned it out like it is.
For 7 years, every time I put out food the water would boil. With all sizes of fish. Now we have a bunch of 2” skinny little fish pushing pellets around like 5 yr olds trying to play soccer. The big fish are gone. For the last several years I could walk the bank and see the big SMB take off from the bank as I walked around. We see zero now. I’m not sure I need to spend the $$ to verify my fish are gone. I am going to go back up in a few weeks and try to fish very early I. The morning. That was a 100% success time historically. But nothing is moving on this very still BOW. It used to be pretty fun to see some very big swirls, and know they were hunting.
Really sorry to hear about your troubles Jeff. I know how I felt with our fish kill a couple years ago, and this is basically the same thing. We had our first river otters show up this fall. Our house is right next to our pond and over looks it, so we spotted them pretty quick. It was trapping season at the time, which allowed me to harvest them via .22 magnum. The most remarkable sign they had been there was the scat. It was basically all fish scales, or fish scale 'logs'. I poked one with a stick and it fell apart and seemed to be just scales and not much else. So if you walk the edge, keep any eye out for scat. It will also tell you where they prefer to hang out, which is good to know for later harvest when appropriate.
I got a lot of good advice after our winter kill and some of the best was 'not as many fish are gone/dead as you think'. Beef up your cover, keep on feeding (if you do that) and the fish will go to work on the next generation here in a few weeks.
Keep your chin up, my pond boss brother..
