How to Create a Pond Habitat for Trophy Bass | Living Rural: Pond Management | YouTube

[Music] do you love trophy bass you better show the bluegill some love stay tuned hi i'm greg grimes i've been in the fishery management field for 25 years and after working on thousands of clients ponds one thing trophy bass always have in common that is they need to have a lot of bluegill and that means having the right habitat today let's talk about on the trophy bass management let's talk about habitat well the most important things is protecting your forage baits people think about bass habitat and that is important but we want to really have as much food as we can for the bass and that really means bluegill so we need to protect those bluegill we need to promote the bluegill so it's the most amount of bluegill we can have for the bass to eat when we're talking about bluegill we want to build up their numbers as high as we can so first of all maybe using a supplemental feeding program is one thing you want to consider that's going to boost the bluegill numbers up tremendously so again we want to have as many bluegills we possibly can so that means we need to have really good spawning habitat a bluegill specifically will spawn multiple times throughout the summer months not in every individual species but all bluegill will spawn throughout the entire summer so a lot of energy is lost in building a nice bed for the eggs to get laid in so they got a hard substrate the gravel substrate is going to save them a ton of energy that then can go into egg production which results in more bluegill surviving more bluegill thriving and growing up to then feed the bass so what's important is getting those bluegill spawned at a high number and then protecting those bluegill way to protect those bluegill are jumbled up concrete big rocks fallen trees are great don't take the fallen tree out because it's providing a place for the bluegill to hide in if a beaver took down a tree for you maybe we'll consider leaving that in there we try to put a lot of this cover close to the bluegill bed so that we're maximizing the growth rates of those bluegill one example is that it takes a hundred small little bluegill one inch bluegill to equal one four to five inch bluegill so that energy that it goes into catching all those hundred little bluegill is going to be vastly more than just eating the one larger one in addition to any natural habitat artificial habitats there's some really great products on the market mossback in itself has three or four different lines of product they have a safe haven which means there's more limbs so it's going to provide more hiding places for the bluegill they have a trophy tree rootwad kits is what we do a lot of because we can they're shorter so we can put those in fairly shallow water close to the spawning habitat they've actually have a spawning habitat but so you can put pea gravel in that those different mossback products another line that we carry honey hole they've got a honey hole grass on the whole reed and honey hole brush those are shredded pieces of lack of a better word plastics so they're going to last forever that's one of the big advantages of the artificial habitat like a christmas tree is great but it's only going to last a year or two and just completely falls apart so we can use artificial habitat to protect those fish then there's artificial habitats for bass as well the trophy trees in particular you can stack two of those up so you can cover a large part of the water column one thing you want to think about when it comes to bass habitat is break that lake into sections so we have all the spawning habitat we have hiding habitat but we really want to have travel we want to create a travel pattern those bass to a loafing area to an area where they can hang out so you've got a hump a ridge a break a channel a ditch you can connect those with some type of habitat that's going to allow better bass growth grass is another habitat that's naturally occurring in some lakes i didn't mention that but we look at this specifically on grass you want to have 10 to 20 percent of that lake in some type of cover if it's barren if you just have a little bit of structure against one shoreline or something up into the lake that's not going to cut it again put the lake into a grid pattern make sure you have some of that habitat throughout the entire water column but then again try to achieve a 10 to 20 coverage rate all the research shows that once you get into 40 coverage say for instance you've got a submersed grasses which is also habitat and it starts to take over and it gets a higher percentage it's going to provide too many places for the bluegill to hide in so the bass can't feed efficiently so break that up try to hit that 10 to 20 percent coverage area then you're really starting to hit home with all your habitat features [Music]

Channel: Exmark Manufacturing Inc.

Views: 99,214

Rating: 4.5373354 out of 5

Keywords: trophy bass, trophy bass habitat, bluegill habitat, greg grimes, artificial pond habitat, natural pond habitat, supplemental feeding program, backyard pond, creating a pond habitat

Id: FZav5YxlK3Q

Length: 5min 6sec (306 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021