Casting Digital Nets

PRIVATE FISH PONDS

Kimball Graphic: As will be sen by an item in another column, State Game Warden Hedrick offers to furnish fish for private ponds upon application to his department at Pierre. While the enterprise and proposition is laudable one, yet the Graphic questions and pratical​ phases of it. Still more does it question the right of the game commission to furnish fry for private ponds at the expense of the public game fund — if that is the intention. It is possible that the government furnishes the fry; we do not know as to that. If so, all very well and good. But even in such a case, if plenty of fish for stocking purposes are available it seems to us that there are plenty of permanent lakes throughout the state that can take care of these fry more profitable to all concerned than by dumping them into private ponds of small areas that in the great majority of cases do not and cannot furnish a proper food supply for the growing rry. It is to be presumed that the game commission makes a careful investigation before furnishing fish for stocking any body of water — it is hoped so at least. Lake Andes was stocked with a tomato can full of little bullheads and an ordinary cream can full of black bass fry originally, and in a few years the lake was so full of bullheads that you could actually shovel them out at places where they sought the warm incoming water from the artesian wells. When the bass got big enough to go foraging they feasted on the bullheads, and it is doubtful if any like lake or body of water anywhere in the world ever saw as rapid increase of big mouthed black bass as happened at Lake Andes. But in teh last few years, both the bullheads and the bass have decreased rapidly, and so persistently and thoroughly is the lake fished that now it is rare a bass is whse enough to remain in his native element past his second year. The large bass are almost extinct.

Well, what we are getting at is this: With so perfect a body of water and food conditions as exist at Lake Andes teh state game commission has a place to dump all hte fry they can spare — though it is such a perfect black bass lake that it is to be hoped they will not stock it with anything else, lest it be bullheads to feed them with. There are a few pike in the lake, but they do not seem to thrive like the big mouths — at least but few are caught. It is passing strange why there are not enough able-bodied sportsmen in Chas. Mix and Douglas counties to see that the lake is stocked every year with bass. If you think that you can't exhaust the supply already there you will find something different mighty soon.