
You finally did it. After years of dreaming about it, you finally pulled the trigger and purchased your acres of land in the country. Your retirement playground awaits. There are deer, turkey, wildflowers, and an excellent site to build your dream home. Hidden in the woods, there's even an old pond with the potential to be a pond paradise. Yes, it doesn't get any better than this.
The pond hasn't been managed for years, maybe longer. It's rather brushy right up to the edges, and the shoreline is a dense mixture of buttonbush, cattails, and water primrose. The water is tea-colored but clear, and you can see abundant small bass cruising the shoreline. This will be good. Just a little management, you'll have your own private Lake Fork.
As college football analyst Lee Corso always says, "Not so fast, my friend." These neglected ponds are notoriously difficult to restore to their old glory, especially without a significant investment of time and money.
First, let's define what we mean by an old, neglected pond. A pond constructed and stocked five years ago and managed until the landowner passed away a year ago is not what we are discussing. Such a pond likely would respond well to some tweaking. We're talking about a pond that is decades old, ignored, under or unfished, and likely in such poor condition that recovery likely requires a complete overhaul.
So, where should you start?

Before you invest in any action, it is essential to do your due diligence. First, define the pond's watershed and estimate the watershed-to-pond surface area ratio.
This will determine if the pond has adequate runoff to stay full or if there is too much that excessively flushes the pond.
Depending on your region and land use, the pond might need anywhere from less than 3 acres (extremely wet areas) to more than 100 acres (Arid areas) of drainage for each surface acre of water. Woody brush in the water or exposed shorelines may indicate issues with water level fluctuation.
Pay attention to nearby land use. Agriculture fields have more runoff and sediment transport, which can cause turbidity and loss of depth and may wash in nutrients and pesticides. Forested land provides cleaner water but less of it, and the trees may make water more tannic. Decomposing organic matter, such as leaves and pine needles, produces tannic acid that stains the water and decreases pH.
Next, learn as much as you can about the history of the pond. Talk to previous owners, if possible, and property neighbors. Was fishing ever good? Did the pond historically hold water? What management was consistently applied? They may be able to provide insight into the problems with, and potential of, the pond.
Next, inspect the levee. Often, the levee has not been consistently mowed, and brush or trees have grown up on the downstream face. These can be removed if small, but if trunk diameters exceed 5-6 inches, the integrity of the levee is likely compromised, and trees should be left in place. Other concerns with the levee may include erosion gullies and bank undercutting, leaks and seeps, muskrat damage and beaver activity, and damage to water control structures and overflows. In these cases, it may be best to rebuild the levee at a significant cost completely.
If the levee needs to be rebuilt, you absolutely should commit to a complete renovation. Starting over allows you to optimize all aspects of the habitat, water quality, fish community, etc., which is the closest thing to a guarantee of success you can get in pond management.

But let's assume the levee is okay. Next, you should do a visual and chemical inspection of the pond. Are there issues with algae or plants that can be resolved without heavy equipment? Is there evidence of excessive sedimentation or organic matter buildup? Check the alkalinity of the water or soil and the soil nutrients to see if the pond needs to be limed or fertilized. These ponds often tend to be tannic and acidic, which causes productivity to be very low and fish to be stressed. In tannic ponds, a heavy dose (up to 5 tons per surface acre) of crushed agricultural lime can help.
Now, you should get a boat on the pond and check the depth. Make a rough map of the topography to understand the habitat. Calculate average depth by taking many depth measurements around the lake and dividing by the number of measurements. Poke the bottom to see if it is firm or soft. If it is soft, is it primarily inorganic sediment, or is there a lot of leaf litter and other organic material? Too much of either/ or may indicate that renovation is the best course of action.
Finally, it is time to check the fish population. One of my pet peeves is when a landowner calls me, saying, "We just bought a place and want you to come tell us what we have in the pond." I ask, "What are you catching?" to which they respond, "We haven't fished it."
Seriously?
Take a rod to the pond and fish with a mixture of lure sizes and types. You can get an excellent idea of the fish population by taking a bunch of casts, which some of us consider a lot of fun! Do this several times to ensure you are getting a representative look at the fishery. You may just find that you do not need an Extension agent or consultant to make a site visit. With good information on what the bass and bream look like, we can often provide recommendations over the phone at no or reduced cost.
Most of the time, these neglected ponds are underfished, may have undesirable species, and out of predator-prey balance. In the southern states, this usually means ponds have transitioned to being bass-crowded. Neglected ponds are not harvested adequately, so bass tend to overpopulate, deplete prey populations, and grow slowly. If this has persisted long enough, the bass may even be stunted.
The terms crowded and stunted are often used interchangeably, but I prefer to think of crowded as a predator-prey dynamics issue, while I think of stunted as a genetic result from long-term crowding. In other words, too many bass that deplete prey is a crowding issue, but if it lasts too long, it can alter the population's genetics. And once genetics is altered, you need to kill out the pond and start anew.
Even when genetics have not been affected, it is tough to recover a bass-crowded population. Harvesting as many bass as possible and bringing population biomass down is the potential remedy. However, reducing the bass population won't help much unless there is something for the remaining bass to eat. You could try to restock adult prey and reduce predator population size, but it is tough to reestablish balance even then.
Most often, the issue is either too few bass are removed to see an effect, or more likely, the fish are replacing themselves quicker than growth or condition can respond. Obviously, if you remove 10 bass from a population of 1,000 (1%), you should not expect to see much difference. But when you take out 300 (30%) and nothing changes, something is clearly going on. That something is called recruitment; young fish are taking the place of the fish you have removed.
It may help to remove most of the bass in the fall. Removing fish in the spring makes space for young bass produced during the spring spawn to recruit to the population. Thus, they simply replace the bass you remove. If you wait until the fall, you allow predation to take care of most of the recruits before you reduce the population. Thus, young fish are less available to take the place of the fish you remove. But this harvest pressure needs to be maintained consistently year after year.
Even with diligent harvest year after year, these efforts are often unsuccessful in restructuring the size structure of bass. If this is the case, you will either need to change direction on your management objective or just bite the bullet and do a complete renovation. Alternative management options for bass-crowded ponds is an article topic for another day, but if you are still set on better bass fishing, it is time to form a plan for pond renovation.
Dr. Wes Neal, Extension Professor at Mississippi State, serves as State Extension Fisheries Specialist and is passionate about educating the public on small lake and pond management. He is an avid researcher on farm pond management and sport fish genetics. Wes is the lead editor of Small Impoundment Management in North America, the only textbook on the subject. He loves to hunt and fish, wes.neal@msstate.edu.
Reprinted with permission from Pond Boss Magazine