Training my Bluegills has been fun and rewarding. I'm teaching them to react to all birds.
popcorn_smiley :thinking2:
Hilarious!
Gorgeous spot, too, man I'm jealous.
I've got a hole in the ground in the back corner of the pasture... I won't call it a pond yet, because it's not holding water (and that would mean I failed at digging a pond, but I successfully made a heck of a nice hole in the ground!) But that's about what the vision in my head is.
I grew up with an attempted pond hole in the backyard that dad had dug when they dug the basement for the marlet mobile home i lived in from 7 years old until I graduated. It was red clay and a mess, but I learned to swim in that hole. I guess that was probably what drove me the rest of my life to want a pond. Need a pond. ffsmiley
That's very funny!
Man, I want a pond to swim in... My pond currently, after Hurricane Helene brought some water up my way, has got a puddle that is maybe 8'x8' and probably 20" deep. Not even worth taking a picture of.
Are you throwing grain to the fish?
We were feeding some commercial fishfood, but its to cold now, so I quit about a,week ago
With a bigger pond you can train bigger fish. ffcool
The locals leave the Giant Trevally around the harbor alone for the tourists, and even feed them.
If you can eat them, I'll take 2 please. smiley_smug01
Yeah, good eating, and good sport fishing. Fish over 100lb aren't unusual.
This reminds me of a report I read on a group raising seam bream which were a very expensive/valuable fish. They had them in an enclosed tank and fed them daily and rang a bell or sounded some kind of alarm. As they got older/larger they took them out in the open ocean and anchored them in a net type enclosure for a while and continued to feed and sound the alarm at a certain time. Then they freed the sea bream to forage on their own but rang the alarm and fed them a token amount every day at the same time. After a while the bream had grown to marketable size mostly from the feed they foraged for in the ocean. Then one day they rang the alarm and the fish returned and they re-captured them. They apparently recovered a ridiculous amount something like 95% of the fish they freed were recovered. I would have thought predators would have taken many more than that.
We had about a 3/4 lb bluegill in a 55 gallon aquarium in Albany GA and my son would go catch crickets and grasshoppers and dangle them over the aquarium and the bluegill would ease up just below the surface and there would be a splash and the bug would be gone. One day my son jerked his hand back in anticipation and the bluegill missed and jumped out of the tank on to the hardwood floor. My son tossed him back in and the fish was real woozy for several hours but eventually regained his equilibrium and lived a long time after that.
I hope you continue to enjoy them and Cedar learns to catch them on command.
Once larger fish get a respectable size they tend to be the apex predator in their part of the pond / reef / ocean. The GTs are considered Apex for the reef areas, once they get to that size anyway. Similar for the Longfin Eels in the back creek, once they get to 3 ft long there is nothing except humans that can eat them. So while youngsters are naturally shy and nocturnal, large ones have little natural fear, but only 1 in a thousand? makes it to that size.
And yes, the myth of a 3 second memory is just a myth. I've kept Oscar Cichlids, which are a fairly large predatory aquarium fish (if it fits in their rather large mouth, it's food). They were smart enough to recognize me as the one that fed them, and ignore any other human that walked up to the tank. They soon learnt to jump for food.
Giving them the quick bird to react comes from us sitting out there and having them come up to watch us, and they do. Like squadrons lined up just below the water. We noted that if a bird flew low across the pond, and they do all the time, and the whole top of the pond would erupt. Quickly sticking your hand up in the air does the same thing.
Like throwing grain to them. :wink_2:
You came up with the bird thing after practicing with ATT I bet. ffcheesy ffcheesy ffcheesy :wink_2:
What happens if you wave a hot frying pan over the water? musteat_1
Ill try that next fall. They probably won't see it for ice here in a couple weeks