GIANT BLUEGILLS

How to Have a Pond with the Most-Catchable Big Bluegills

EDITOR'S NOTE: Barry Smith of Montgomery, Alabama, a longtime fisheries biologist, co-owns American Sport Fish in Pike Road, Alabama, one of the largest private hatcheries in the Southeast, with his partner Don Keller. Smith and Keller have developed several breeds of fish that landowners enjoy stocking in their ponds. This week we'll talk with Smith about the giant bluegills American Sport Fish stocks.

Question: We want to talk today about how to keep our coppernose bluegill populations at a rate where they're catchable but without a lot of little fish yet plenty of big fish. How can we do this?
Answer: One of the things to do when you're growing trophy bluegills is to keep a lot of bass in your pond because the bass will feed on the small bluegills, which means the big bluegills will have more food available to them. And typically when you can catch a 3/4- to 1-pound bass, you know that most of the bass in your pond will weigh in the 3/4- to 1-1/2 pound range. And one of the reasons that we like to see bass in that range with these bluegills is because as you crowd those bass, they'll control the numbers of small bluegills and allow more food for the adults, which in turn, makes the blue gills grow faster.

Question: If we stock 1,000 coppernose bluegills in our pond in October, when do we need American Sport Fish to come back to the pond, and how many bass do we need to stock?
Answer: We usually recommend coming in at the end of the spring in May or June and stocking 100 bass per acre in addition to the 1,000 coppernoses already there. Oftentimes, if we really want to produce trophy bluegills we may up that number of bass for stocking to insure that we're crowding out the smaller bluegills, to keep that reproduction down on that group and make the original stock grow faster.

Question: When can we start catching these bluegills? If we stock coppernose bluegills in October, what kind of fish will we have by that summer?
Answer: If you stock them in October, by the end of the following summer, you may have coppernoses anywhere from 1/4- to 1/3-pound in size. Then into the fall, these coppernoses possibly may weigh 1/2-pound. You can start fishing for these coppernoses whenever you want. Many books say don't fish a pond for a year, because then you won't fish for the bass until they've had a chance to reproduce. However, with bluegills, you can begin harvesting them whenever they get to the size that you like.

Question: When can we reasonably expect to be catching a 1, a 1 1/2- or a 2-pound coppernose bluegill from that original stock?
Answer: I think you can reasonably expect to catch a coppernose bluegill in the 3/4- to 1-pound range in about three years with really good pond management. Now you know as well as I do that a 2-pound bluegill is very rare in the wild and requires a lot of money and expenditure to get a bluegill of that size. One thing that you need to realize is that this original stock of bluegills is what will provide this fishery for you. These fish may stay in your pond for five or six years. So, we recommend that you don't harvest large numbers of these bluegills every year.

Some books say that you can harvest 120 to 140 pounds of bluegills per acre. And you can, if you just want to harvest fish that will be 6- to 7-inches long and will weigh 1/4-pound each. But if you want achieve big bluegills, then you can't harvest those numbers. We recommend that you only harvest 50 coppernose bluegills per acre per year. Then you'll have enough reproduction to replace that number and still have a good population of good-sized coppernose bluegills.

To learn more about American Sport Fish, you can write the company at P.O. Box 20050, Montgomery, AL 36120, or call (334) 281-7703.

TOMORROW: HELP YOUR FARM POND PRODUCE BETTER