09-08-2022, 05:55 PM
(09-08-2022, 04:27 PM)wiperhunter2 Wrote: Thanks for the pic Pat. I'm glad we decided to move over in your direction, we were marking so many shad in the Freeway bay area that I commented to Ira that all the cats had to do was open their mouths and it would fill with those baby shad, seemed to be less of them where you were fishing. We caught several doubles and ended the morning at 12:20 with a double, right in the area where we meet you.I kept a half dozen kitties for a family fish fry. When I filleted them they had indeed been dining well...not only on shadlets but one of them had two pretty good sized crawdads inside. And all of the cats had lots of "visceral" fat...gobs of yellowish white fat deposited when times are good.
The past few years have been good for Willard cats. Predators like wipers and walleyes eat enough of the baby cats...when shad are scarce...to keep the cats from overpopulating. And the adults have been getting plenty of fine dining on all the extra shad not eaten by an overpopulation of wipers. And, as we know, the perch have been doing pretty well too. Looking forward to reducing their population a bit this fall and winter.