Moving Panfish from P2 to Neighbor's Pond

 

This is one of my favorite all time videos....  from Jason doing his cast net spin, Mark being "lid man", and me grabbing fish and kerplunking them into the buckets...   it's perfect.  And the look on the huge tilapia's face after his flip at 5:17 :D

 

 

Our Overgrown Hungry Panfish!

The adult panfish (tilapia) have advanced to a new level of "interaction" - note the crowd surfing behavior and BIG mouths.  I think they're evolving and growing arms and legs... uh oh....

MOVING FISH!

Rain storms a few days ago left us with some weird thermal inversions in our big pond that caused the water to have a drop in O2 level, this made it very difficult for our panfish to breathe.

Hundreds of fish were laying at the surface of the water, gasping for air. In desperation we rigged up two oscillating sprinklers and ran them 24/7 to add some air back into the water.

TODAY, MONDAY JUNE 25 2018

Our very good friends Jason Werle and Steve Dolbow came over first thing Monday morning, Jason brought his cast-net, in short order we captured 250 tilapia, put them in Home Depot buckets and transferred them to our outer pond as their new home. No fish gave up their lives.

In addition our neighbor David came over with some 55 gallon trash cans, we gave him another 200+ fish for his pond. Tilapia love to eat algae and David was in the market for some of these fish because he had an algae bloom starting. The fish we gave him will take care of that algae in short order, they love it as a food source.

NOW WE WAIT

Was it enough to pull out almost 500 fish from the big pond? Will this help the O2 level for the remaining fish?

Time will tell.

Thank you to everyone for their help with this move. Because all present love the fish we did not lose a single life in the process of moving them.

Panfish Flying at P2

What are We Going to Do With All These Tilapia?

We literally have hundreds of tilapia right now, swimming around in schools in the afternoon begging for Ol Panfeesh food (Ol Roy).  So as we watch them, we wonder what we're going to do with all of them.  We know they hibernate in the winter, but still, that's a LOT of fish.

As we ponder our recent visitors (anhinga, great blue heron, large white egret), we are gently reminded why they visit... it's the snacks!  Here's an anhinga (not ours) having a delicious fishy treat.

HUEY EATS A PANFISH

The pictures say it all.

MEMORIAL DAY RACON ENCOUNTER

On Friday night of Memorial day weekend Mary finally got her chance to pet a raccoon who we quickly named "Kitty". 

Kitty was very small, about the size of a softball. He was sitting on our window sill outside. It looked like his mom had accidentally left him there. He was acting sick but after we gave him a bowl of water he quickly sprung back to life and wolfed down a few black oil sunflower seeds. After playing with him for four hours we closed the window and in the morning he was gone.

We've since seen a mama with three babies and we think Kitty is one of them. He appears to be doing fine, one of the late batches of racon babies this year.

Lessons learned:  

1. Raccoons are NOT soft, not even the babies

2. When you add water to a dry raccoon, they get bitey

Feeding the Panfish