Pumpkinseed?

[Quillback]

3 hours ago, Flysmallie said:

Mudcats is what we called them in Oklahoma. 

There is also a minor league baseball team called the Carolina Mudcats. Been to a few of their games. 

And who could ever forget Mudcat Grant?  

[Johnsfolly]

3 hours ago, Flysmallie said:

There is also a minor league baseball team called the Carolina Mudcats

You have to love minor league team names. In grad school, I loved going to Scranton Wilkes-Barre Red Barons games in PA. My dad used to go to the Savannah Sand Gnat games down in Georgia. Going to those games may put a new meaning to shagging flies !

[MOPanfisher]

6 hours ago, Johnsfolly said:

Pflieger is the MO fish go to book for me. Except now I go to Robert Hrabik who is currently revising the Fishes of Missouri. I'm with you @MOPanfisher in terms of the scientific names. I think that folks on here would have an difficult time trying to figure out whether it was Lepomis megalotis from Lepomis gibbosus, which is what started out this whole discussion that we highjacked from @Seth Clarkson !

Hijacking threads is frowned upon.  Or maybe the norm, can't remember.

[Flysmallie]

2 hours ago, MOPanfisher said:

Hijacking threads is frowned upon.  Or maybe the norm, can't remember.

I thought it was mandatory. 

[fishinwrench]

Certain ponds and city lakes in my home town had bullheads in them.  The rivers and creeks never did.  I always wondered where bullheads came from and who the heck would purposely stock them.   

If we were catfishing a new pond/lake and caught a bullhead we would never catfish it again.  We wanted channels/ flatheads, and if bullheads were in there it seemed like catfishing was pretty much a waste of time.   

[MOPanfisher]

We used to catch bullheads everywhere.  We had a small quarter acre or so pond by the house and purposely stocked it with them.  Dad would ride his lawn mower over and feed them floating fish food every day.  For months after he died they would surface and go nuts looking for food every time I mowed the grass around the pond.  And we around around bunch of them, minutes from the pond to the skillet, skinned and fried whole instead of filleted.  Darn tasty little rascals.  I haven't seen one anywhere in years or I would stock it again, lots of little kids caught their first fish out of that little pond.  It has dried up and been cleaned out a couple times since it had them in it.

[Johnsfolly]

16 hours ago, fishinwrench said:

We wanted channels/ flatheads, and if bullheads were in there it seemed like catfishing was pretty much a waste of time

Maybe it was the size of the lake.

Back in Missouri I would catch yellow bullheads in a local lake and it also has decent channel and blue catfishing as well.

 

[MrGiggles]

5 hours ago, MOPanfisher said:

We used to catch bullheads everywhere.  We had a small quarter acre or so pond by the house and purposely stocked it with them.  Dad would ride his lawn mower over and feed them floating fish food every day.  For months after he died they would surface and go nuts looking for food every time I mowed the grass around the pond.  And we around around bunch of them, minutes from the pond to the skillet, skinned and fried whole instead of filleted.  Darn tasty little rascals.  I haven't seen one anywhere in years or I would stock it again, lots of little kids caught their first fish out of that little pond.  It has dried up and been cleaned out a couple times since it had them in it.

There is still a local pond close to me that has them in it. Just an old cattle pond. Have never caught anything else out of it but 8" bullheads.

The little ones make excellent bait, from what I've read.

[Flysmallie]

The ponds in southern Oklahoma would have both. We never kept any of the mudcats but did catch and keep some nice channels mixed in. 

[Al Agnew]

When I was a kid my buddies and I would do overnight fishing trips on upper Big River, hoping to catch catfish, even though upper Big is not much of a catfish river.  We generally caught about 50 bullheads for every channel of flathead we caught; in fact, most nights if we caught one channel cat it was a better than average night.  

A friend has a lake that's over 100 acres and 70 feet deep at the dam, that his family (who owned a heavy construction company) built on a small wet weather creek.  You wouldn't have thought there were any fish in this creek, which was mostly dry except for occasional pools that were not much bigger than a bathtub.  They stocked it with the usual, including channel catfish.  A few years passed, and they had MDC come out and electroshock the lake to see what they needed to do to better manage it.  Nobody fished for catfish in the lake, and the owners just fed the channel cats around the dock all the time.  I was there when the MDC people came to shock it and helped them do it.  What they shocked up more than anything else were bullheads.  By the thousands.  Nobody had a clue they were there, nor how they got there.