Familiar Refrain: Where Have Bluegills Gone?

Anglers who had hoped to fill five-gallon buckets with 8- to 10-inch bluegills at Sprague Lake this winter are becoming convinced that the bluegill die-off last year was more extensive than first believed.

The die-off, plus extremely heavy fishing pressure, apparently resulted in a crash of the population of mature bluegills and possibly a big drop in numbers of younger fish.

It’s unlikely that fishermen will fill buckets with the jumbo bluegills this year. They will catch some, but probably not nearly as many as they caught a couple of years ago. They should catch fair numbers of smaller fish, those in the 5- to 7-inch range.

We’re using such qualifiers as “apparently,” “may” and “possibly” because no one knows for sure that most of the old bluegills are gone, the result of a disease that killed thousands and heavy fishing pressure.

When fishermen couldn’t catch 20 to 50 jumbo bluegills nearly every time they prowled the shoreline last year, something they had become accustomed to doing, they began to suspect the glory days were over. Most fishermen are optimists, and hundreds of them still thought they’d do well during the winter months.

The results are in. Fishermen pulled thousands of 7- to 10-inch perch through the ice the last couple of months, but only a few bluegills.

I fished the lake six times in December and January and caught only two bluegills, each about 8 inches long. Every time I fished the lake, I asked other fishermen how many bluegills they had caught. Most hadn’t caught even one.

The one question nearly every angler asked was, “What happened to the bluegills?”

When fishermen began reporting seeing dead and dying bluegills last year, fisheries biologist Bob Peck tried to determine what was happening. He saw enough dead and dying bluegills to conclude that the fish were dying from a disease.

What he couldn’t conclude, however, was the extent of the die-off. He could only wait for time to tell the story.

Assessing the extent of a die-off is extremely difficult, particularly at lakes where the water is murky much of the time. Sprague’s water rarely is clear. It was cloudy during the die-off.

What’s the future for bluegills in Sprague? Peck said the population should increase over an extended period, but he added he doubts fishermen will fill buckets with 8- to 10-inchers in the foreseeable future.

As fast as bluegills reach a size fishermen are willing to keep, they’ll go into coolers or buckets. Relatively few will become 10-inchers.

A couple of winters ago, I saw many fishermen leave the ice with 50 to 100 bluegills. Some even bragged that they filled two five-gallon buckets.

When bluegills and crappie populations nosedived at the Potholes Reservoir and Moses Lake, fishermen and resort operators urged the Fish and Wildlife Commission to set limits. Some even wanted statewide limits.

The commission obliged by establishing limits on bluegills, as well as crappies, for the two big waters to give the species a chance to recover. The limit for the reservoir is 25 bluegills or 25 crappies, or a combination of 25 bluegills and crappies. At Moses Lake, the daily limit is five bluegills 8 inches or longer and five crappies 10 inches or more.

Even though most Sprague Lake anglers will take home as many bluegills as they can catch, there hasn’t been serious talk of setting bluegill limits for the lake. Perhaps most fishermen are satisfied to catch perch. Many believe perch taste better than bluegills.

The perch population has exploded the last few years, with the result perch are competing with bluegills for food and space in the lake. The prolific perch seem to be winning the competition.

A few anglers - not realizing that perch are so prolific they can over-populate a lake - want limits on perch. That’s not the solution. If fishermen don’t remove all the fish they can catch, the lake will become populated with stunted fish.

Perch are much easier to fillet than bluegills. Bones of bluegills, particularly the bones of jumbo fish, are thicker and harder to cut than perch bones. Like most fishermen, I’d rather fillet perch than bluegills.

However, like many anglers, I prefer to catch bluegills. When a 10-inch bluegill takes a lure or fly, a fisherman knows he’s hooked a good game fish. Pound for pound, bluegills outfight cutthroat and brook trout.

Fishermen won’t have much choice at Sprague Lake. The only way the make-up of the fish population can be changed is for the Fish and Wildlife Department to dump a few thousand pounds of rotenone into the lake and start all over again.

That’s not going to happen. Fishermen will have to be happy with what they catch.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Fenton Roskelley The Spokesman-Review