Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What the heck are spoonbill - and why do they taste like swordfish

Never had spoonbill OR swordfish.
More of a Rocky Mtn fried oyster man!



Wouldn't mind the opportunity, though - even though I'm not a fisherman - haven't been fishing in 20+ years.
Might be good eats.

Mountain oysters yeah ....

They swim up the Missouri and Yellowstone in the spring in North Dakota, and Montana to spawn, the last one I caught weighed 77 pounds 30 some years ago. I took it to the south side tavern in glendive and won a 6 pack for fish of the week.

All the bass fisherman were talking chit about them, so I was only using their meat in fish soup.

Once I grilled them ... DAAAAMMMNNNNNN !

I’m going back to get more of them before season closes..

I have caught several of them. One year the river was out over the fields and it was late for flood and warm. Algae was growing in the fields and as the water dropped the paddlefish were stacked up in the ditches eating the algae. I tied on a big treble hook and cast up in the swirls in the mouth of a ditch and snagged 12 from 10 to 25 pounds. I let them go. My dad told me to go back and catch 5 or 6 then run home and clean them quick before they start spoiling. I went back 3 days and snagged a mess till the fields dried up. They are boneless and are decent to eat. They were fun to catch on a bass rod. Especially the bigger ones. We have a size limit and daily limit on them now. Back then there was no limit or restriction on them.

They make good caviar out of the eggs too.

The one I saw was on the Osage arm of Truman, on east of the put-in at Osceola, IIRC. I've always mainly fished for bass but that is more catfishing territory down there, as opposed to up by the dam. I used to fish Truman a lot, but haven't for several years.

When I was in college, and starving and poor, we'd rip anything out of the water we could.

Sacramento River stripers, shad, cats, bass, salmon, hell, even carp...

Oroville large mouth bass.... Almanor small mouth bass....

Butte creek even had small mouth and suckers....

Black Butte: channel cats and bass......

The good fish we'd fillet and cook up proper.

The trash fish we'd smoke, shred, and make fish tacos, fish patties, or make some nasty fish jerky.

We weren't too picky....

They are tons of fun to catch. Another beer drinking sport for sure. But there are better tasting fish in the mud hole. A lot of people love eating them.

I made caviar out of some of the Egg’s and the wife refused to eat’em... I have a pound or so in the fridge now, that will probably go to waste.

On the Dakota side of Gavins Point dam they have a hatchery for spoonbills. The little ones are cute as the dickens. Their bill is bigger than their body. When our kids were small they liked to go down by the holding ponds and play with them. You stick your fingers in the water and wiggle them and the little spoonbills will come up and nudge your hand. Kids always wanted to take one home for the aquarium.

Miami, OK city park, when the spoonbill are running, every red neck within 50 miles converges there to have war with 4 ounce weights, big ass treble hooks, and 12’ poles. Shoulder to shoulder. Opposing sides. Once Imin a while those 4 ounce weights come untied. Zing....

Oklahoma DNR made it illegal to keep eggs. They’ll collect your fish on the water. An hour later you go to their cleaning facility. Give them your receipt, they give you your fish filets. They keep the eggs and sale them overseas for caviar. One year it out like $10 million in their Fish and Gane department for building ramos, campgrounds, etc.

My sister in law and her ex boyfriend are big into it. They rent a cabin for a week in Table Rock. Biggest they’ve caught was 99 pounds. I caught a 40 lb one with them once.

n episode of meat eater they caught one. Cleaned it by chttting the skin around base of tail, spinning tail to break the cartilage, then pulled the spinal column out by the tail. They just slabbed it up in steaks then.

I bleed them out while they are hanging over the side of the boat, and steak them head to tail once we are out of the water, put them on ice and get them home.

If you are keeping eggs I’m pretty sure you have to keep the entire fish and not clean it at the lake... if you clean them at the site you can’t keep the eggs you have to toss them.

Sturgeon, two species, over in coastal rivers and those that connect to the SF bay. Nothing up here in the Interior.

Paddlefish are only found East of the Rockies in Mississippi drainage. Wife and I have both worked with them at various times in our careers.

Very cool species of fish, related to each other.

Geno

This is one of the best threads since all this COVID crap started.

That sounds familiar, but if I'd known Sturgeon and Paddlefish were related, I'd forgotten it. They're all over these parts but I've never fished for them.

Dinosaur fishes, been around a long long time..........but one has to believe in that, otherwise they've been around 6000 years or so. But that's enough to start another thread.

Geno

Regardless of the actual age of the earth, 6000 years is still a long time.

Heard there were a lot of them in the Red River in Louisiana until they built the lock and dams, now not so many.

One condition the Fed’s had when they built the Truman lake damn and Lake of the ozarks dam was that they had to build a Hatchery so the spoonsbill wouldn’t be impacted.

Now we have more of those suckers than you’d think possible.

It became a windfall for Missouri, because the eggs are worth $30 an Oz. ... so when a female has close to 10 lbs of eggs... well lets just say the hatchery is the only legal group that can sell the eggs - so they will clean your fish for free and keep the eggs and sell them.

At the end of the day, they payed for the hatchery, and then some... this is also why Oklahoma has rules about how many eggs you can keep.