Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire hey Poohbah.............

if you were familiar with our lake you would understand my confusion......while its a big damn lake, the salmon are fairly concentrated in certain spots cause they like the deep cold water.....the surface water is usually way to warm which is why you always catch them between 45 and 90 foot and the places with that are the old river channel and off the face of the dam which is actually a pretty small portion of the lake so the diets of all the fish should be pretty darn close to identical......

How about late fall, winter, and early spring? Do the salmon spread out when the water cools down?

Trout and other fish love eating scuds too. My grandmother had a prefernce for eating trout with dark red flesh that had dining on "freshwater shrimp", they are actually amphipods and not really shrimp.

Here is a common type of scud that can be found in Nebraska and across North America. (Hyalella azteca)

well good point.....its just not that diverse of an ecosystem system cause its a man made lake that backed up into badlands where the soil was high in minerals and ultra low in organic matter so everything is eating the same stuff.....

unless the Corps does what they should do and make the lake fluctuate up and down about 15 feet or so over the course of 5 years so that bank vegetation gets flooded and incorporated into the system, the whole thing becomes pretty nutrient starved and we loose alot of the base of our food chain as we are close enough to the mountains that high quality organic silt is not flowing into the system, inorganic soil(clay and sand) is....without the bank flooding there is no place for bait fish to spawn and no extra organic matter for the production of phyto and zooplankton for the bait fish to eat....

The salmon in the picture looks well fed, it's been eating something.

Maybe bait fish that are eating scuds?

after being between 20 and 40 foot low for over a decade the lake is at capacity now and huge amounts of bank vegetation got flooded over the last 3 years.....things are real good right now and will be for another year or two than if nothing changes or the water level only goes down it will start to go down hill again....