TnRiver46

My ornithology professor had a full blown come-apart when I was in college on a birdwatching walk. We came across a rose breasted grosbeak and I’ve never seen anyone so excited 😂. We had no clue it was significant

I do love a good flood storage reservoir, it’s the only reason people can even build (dry) houses in much of my region

@T-Billy , I saw one that apparently got confused and stored several beckets worth of gravel in a crawl space 😂

@thediscochef , you’re a machine

Now @T-Billy , I used to have to tell my customers all the time that a chipmunk cannot harm their property. Why on earth would you have to kill them? They always told me it said on the Internet that they could undermine the foundation of their home 😂. This is why I hate AI and Google. Why did they bother digging footers if they could have just handed a chipmunk a tiny spoon

Shocking….

That’s awesome!!! What a fish

@N Florida Mike got a 7 lber the other day…… I think I will have yall beat when a drum becomes the same as a smallmouth bass. They are evolving closer and closer all the time……..

That’s our favorite meal in the family and nobody has ever had a heart attack. We call it brown plate! Haha I figure if something is going to kill me, having fun fishing then eating the delicious fish I caught would be at top of the list . Sounds way more fun than not doing it and still dying of something

4 in the best. That SOS trout stuff @Flukeflicker mentioned is good, I got my first spool recently and I’m loving it, caught a few 18” SmB and a big drum with it too, held up just fine 6 will work ok 8 is pushing it Im sure we got em with 12 and floating bread chunks when I was little but we tricked them first……

@Fishlegs , it almost got me divorced when it was back toward her end of the boat full Tasmanian devil haha. I almost always catch them with treble jerkbait. Just have to be mindful of their wild energy. I tried netting them before and that’s a non starter 😂 One of the many great things about longnose gar? If they see a lure, they try to eat it 99.9976347 percent of the time

Found this one too, wife claims I tried to kill her with the fish. Same exact spot years apart, we’ve been catching them there since I was a little kid. Probably the same ones, I think they live a century

I’d definitely guess longnose. We get 42-46” ones all summer long, funnest fight there is. They take all your line and jump like a marlin

I believe the limits have changed for the classic also, not sure if that will matter for your picks. It will make weights go up . Formerly in Knoxville events, a SMB had to be 18” to keep, LMB had to be 14” and spots had to be 12”. New regulations state any black bass must be over 15” to put into a livewell. They made this change because you can no longer tell the difference between SMB, spots, and hybrid meanmouth by looking at them

Monster gar! Throw a saddle on that thing and go for a ride

At my old wildlife job, bird feeder was the best money in the game. It’s not just mice. Squirrels, skunks, rats, raccoons, possums, and black bears That being said, we fill up a feeder during winter 😂

Sunscreen, short sleeves, and frogs singing

I always forget about melton hill, I wonder if people are scared to eat the oak ridge fish 😂

Congrats to Anaya, heck of a final day

I do with certain colors of salty worms, mostly brown (which is called green pumpkin haha). It makes it more pale. I was showing my Buddy the difference once and caught one on the first cast, he started stomping on his 😂

I had that red one back in the day

@gim , one of the rowers got me back Friday evening. They went by and one of them was barking like a dog. As with most people, they don’t realize you can hear what they are saying across the water. He then said “I was looking right at the guy in the kayak when I was barking.” Then the next boat that went by said “that dude in the kayak is staring at us.” Which I was, but unfortunately my Jedi mind powers weren’t strong enough to capsize their vessel 😂 Yesterday my wife wanted to go trout fishing so I took her to a local tailwater. I caught two and lost at least two more that were much bigger. She also lost one that was peeling line off her fly reel, would have liked to have seen her get that one into the net. Water was friggin freezing, I think I heard someone say it was 39 degrees. The trout felt like ice blocks

All bodies? They are not all the same so I wouldn’t think so. Pond managers in the south have found that killing small ones helps create larger bass. This might also ring true on small lakes in the north, I’m not sure. But all peer reviewed studies I read in college (not AI collection of fishing magazine articles that have been proven wrong over and over) recommend letting fish reach sexual maturity for a few years before harvesting. How can a big female “spread its genetics” if you eat it when it has only spawned once or twice ? Also, males can spread genetics too so why only kill them? They might have been born from a long line of big girls. What you run into with regulations sometimes is they are driven more by fisherman opinions and politicians and lobbyists as opposed to science. When somebody kills a large bass, it stings us fishermen because now we can’t catch it. A large female bass has laid eggs for a decade, her genetics have already been successfully distributed for 10 seasons. If you kill her as a 1.5 lber, because you assume she is a male, she only got to spread the genetics maybe 2-3 times. I haven’t read many peer reviewed studies from natural lakes up north but I’m sure they are out there. Another thing the head biologists told us when I was working with native brook trout in the Smokies was the concept of consumptive mortality. As fishermen we can go down the slippery slope of flattering ourselves, thinking we are catching most of the fish. 70ish percent of these fish die every single year, regardless of what anyone does with a rod and reel. And that’s referring to a tiny population of fish, not something that is in almost every body of water like a bass. Unless you involve a net, a fisherman with a rod and reel isn’t going to affect fish populations nearly as much as Mother Nature (floods, habitat loss, predation, etc). In my opinion, as long as you aren’t keeping more fish than you can eat, you probably aren’t affecting much at all. The exception is always small ponds, humans (and otters) can actually clean those out Aldo Leopold was onto it many many years ago when he wrote “Sand county Almanac.” Wise use is the way, preservation does not equal conservation. That’s about as close as a blanket strategy I can think of for fisheries management, don’t take more than you need and the rest will work itself out

. Obviously a larger fish has potential to carry more eggs, because they have a bigger belly. Bass don’t actually spawn every year, frequency is lower the older they get (past a certain age). Also, smaller eggs can exist in a female in higher volume, which could potentially lead to a “better” spawn. That is unless, of course, they eat their young, which happens 😂 Every single body of water is a case study. Small lakes it helps to thin small fish because there become too many mouth to feed. In TN, there are no small lakes. Just 300+ million year old rivers. I can’t think of a single place locally that there are too many small bass. The best thing they ever did for SMB here was put an 18” minimum length limit to keep them. Nowadays you can catch 20” smallmouth regularly, that was not the case 40 years ago