Another lake emptied of silvers?

Another lake emptied of silvers?

On Saturday I fished a lake that was primarily a "carp lake" stocked with carp up to mid-doubles with the odd one going to 20, but it has in the past also had a good head of silver fish.

I don't fish this lake often but in the winter it has proved a good water for a decent catch of roach and small bream, that was until last weekend.

We fished from 12:30 till 3:30 and the only positive bite we got was when I hooked and landed a carp of about 8lb.

Now fishing maggot and bread we should have been catching roach all day given the weather was mild

My fishing mate lives close to this lake and he said he has seen cormorants flying over to the lake every day, so we came to the conclusion that the water had been emptied of all the small fish - but the problem is once the cormorants have cleaned out this water they will move on to other in the area

My mate has permission to shoot on this water is thinking of going and "scaring" the cormorants off

How about scaring them to death

thecrow said:

How about scaring them to death

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without a proper licence - I couldn't possibility comment

Club water I fish got the black death, they cleaned the place out in 3 to 4 weeks. Very early in the morning by all accounts. Water in the lake was clear as a bell by the time they finished. You could see bottom and no medium to small fish, only fish that survived were the ones too big for the birds to lift.
Nothing much was left to feed in the water and stir up the debris in the mud.
Club ran ropes over the water with discs on them to stop the things landing.
Re stocking was said to have cost around £3,000.
The shotgun thought is a very good one, but you need the paperwork etc.!!!

Shoot them when there's nobody about. Easy

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Couldn't we get the EE's to shoot them. They can then claim they don't understand the law and get away with it.

Round here we call them "black ducks".

There are a number of pits near me where the black death have been for years.

The lakes still have good stocks of silvers, and Blenheim Palace has had Cormorants since before i started fishing there, thats 40 years ago.

There is no doubt they do untold damage to fish stocks on some waters, but it's not all waters, why ? who knows.

Predation is creating some very different fish stocks to what i was used to up until the 1990s. The most extreme fishery i have fished is a natural stock Beds estate lake that held fine Rudd and lots of Roach as well as Tench, Perch, Pike, and small Bream (to say 4 or 5Ib) into the 1990s, but no carp.

In recent decade or two it has lost ALL Roach and Rudd - there are simply none at all now and none have been seen for at least 15 years. Meanwhile the Tench have got fewer and fewer but bigger and older with no small ones coming through. Ditto with the Bream - both are probably dying out.

The only successful fish are Perch and they basically survive by apparently predating each other - with the largest getting up to 4Ib or so and many going 2-3Ib. The Pike are now skinny and stunted, rarely larger than 8-10Ib, whereas they formerly ran to over 20Ib.

Explanations for this weird stock? Well I am told there has been a cormorant roost of up to 100 birds every winter for about 15-20 years. I figure they wiped out the silvers some time ago and probably still have a go at the Perch. There is also a heronry on an island - but the herons use it as a base station - rather like the Death Star in Star Wars - and wheel-off like cylons (or whatever they were ) to other waters in the area every morning to return by dusk.

The Tench and Bream are presumably kept in check by the Perch. I netted tiny tench in the margins one year but they never seemed to make it to a catchable size. Bream are notorious anyway for dying out over time - having infrequent years where spawning is successful. I have found a few waters over the years which contained a shoal of old large bream mostly of the same age, sometimes with a few older fish from an earlier year class, but nothing smaller and no skimmers seen for years.