Don't Give Up On Shad Just Yet

 

Has shad died off this past winter? Sure. It was supposed to happen, and will again some winter down the road.

Will it affect your ability to catch fish this summer on Lake Keystone, the Arkansas River, and other area lakes? Probably, but maybe not in a negative way.

Hold off on your crying and moaning at least until early June when the first extensive fish catching reports will begin turning in the evidence of the extent of the die-off damage. It's possible as I just suggested, the die-off could work in your favor. Maybe. 

Shad, two species, are the forage base of several different sport species found all over Oklahoma. Those two shad species would be both the gizzard shad and the threadfin shad. Without those two shad species swimming around in Oklahoma lakes (and rivers), fishing as we know it, all of it, and I'm talking about the fishing industry, boats, tackle, marinas, etc. as I am anything else, would not exist. Without food to eat, shad, gamefish cannot exist. 

To be sure, gamefish forced to eat bluegill, snakes, crawdads, grasshoppers, worms and other nematodes will not totally disappear, but their numbers will be noticeably reduced because of the reduced available food supply the swarming schools of shad provide. In order to winter and then reproduce well in the spring, gamefish need lots of body fat. Maybe we all do. 

Of the two, gizzard shad are much the larger, growing up to a maximum of sixteen inches long. They are the true native shad of Oklahoma, and were found historically all the way from the coastal Atlantic Ocean all the way to the upper Missouri River, and from the Great Lakes all the way down into northern Mexico. 

The threadfin shad, which maxes out at about nine inches long, is the true native shad of the southeastern corner of the U.S., say from Florida, through Alabama, to about the middle reaches, only, of the Mississippi River. 

In your hand, other than an obvious size difference (and not even that in the fry stage), the differences between the two species are very slight and not easy to detect except upon close inspection. The top half of a gizzard shad's body will have a grey, deep blue, or purple cast to it; the threadfin a light green, almost chartreuse cast to it. 

Both species will have a noticeable black dot right behind the gill plate, although that of the gizzard shad will be so light as to almost disappear.

The mouth of the gizzard shad is positioned in such a way as to suggest it lies under the chin, or at least where a chin would ordinarily be, and that of the threadfin is positioned right on the end of the face where a mouth out of right, according to Conrad, ought to be positioned. 

Of the two, gizzard shad are native to our part of the country; threadfin shad are not. This simple fact, more than anything else, probably accounts for the huge shad (threadfin) die-offs that seem to hit our country about every ten years, about how often true artic cold comes to this country. Threadfins were never intended by God to be cold-weather-country fish. When artic spells leave, the threadfins start rebuilding their populations, and thank goodness they do. 

One of the most provident things the country's cartel of fisheries biologists ever did was to transplant threadfin shad from the southeast into the nation's growing number of manmade lakes all over the country back in the early 1950s. It was a noble experiment successful. Threadfin shad were bountiful reproducers and provided a food supply for gamefish more conducive, size-wise, to their use. Fishermen all over the nation benefitted, but comes attached with them that vulnerability to severe cold. 

I'm 69 years old, and have seen the above mentioned cycle three times. Each time the threadfins eventually re-assumed their bountiful numbers, and the gizzard shad, as might be expected, never seemed to either gain or lose theirs, or at least not noticeably so. 

I mentioned at the top of this piece that a shad die-off may not affect your fishing this summer in a negative way. I'm betting if the die-off did occur to a significant degree, that gamefish the state around will be more interested in a crankbait that resembles a live shad than they they are usually. Maybe. That's what I was hinting at. You can bet I'm not throwing away my shad bait artificial lures. 

Both species spawn beginning in late June, right on through the middle of July. The schools of newly hatched fry begin showing up in front of my house at the backend of Baker's Branch about the second week of July and are there in droves until the first two weeks of August when they begin to take on greater size and ego (perhaps) and begin to filter farther out into the main lake, never disappearing totally from the branch. 

Lots of bait fishermen know this, and its common for me to watch anglers casting bait nets from the rip-rap along Highway 51 in front of my house, and emptying their wriggling catch into white, five-gallon buckets. Sometimes I do it myself, so productive of battling gamefish of any species is a nice fat shad, lip-hooked, and cast into "the lion's den" as it were. I like to fish live bait. 

In the heat of the summer, I commonly take my dogs daily to the water for a swim. You can tell they purely joy in the feel of the cooling, healing waters. They "fight", chase, and maul one another without drawing blood, and when we are done, everybody heads back to the house cooler and happier than we once were. 

By July the shad schools are beginning to swarm on Baker's Branch where we swim, as pleasant a scene to me as is a field of ripening corn to a dirt farmer in Iowa. Both of us are looking at a harvest. Many times, as experiment, I have clapped my hands once, loudly, to check the effect on the massive schools of inch-long baby shad just beginning to find their way in life. 

Many times, as far out into the water as 20 yards, my handclap has caused a surface-cruising school of babies to shatter skyward like a thousand pieces of molten silver shot hot from a giant crucible. How do they do that? I don't know. 

I don't know if they hear the handclap, or feel its vibration somehow through the air, but it interests me, anyway. The dogs don't know what I'm doing, and will always look, at least briefly, in my direction expecting a command to follow I suppose. 

The school of shad fry? They reassemble quickly, nervously, into the eternal, apparently aimless motion of the baitball, going who knows where, protected by sheer numbers, only, from all the things that want to eat them. 

Swallows returning to Capistrano? You can have that. I'll be watching the water in front of my house all summer long. For me, there's a lot depending on it.

Copyright © 2014 Conrad M. Vollertsen