FrankTroutAngler
Active member
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2009
- Messages
- 323
Frank,
I've been standing in the Tully and watched a heron eat 4 fish in the 11" - 15" range in a single feeding. He had to work a little extra to get airborne but did it easily. If they feed like that every other day, that's a ton of trout that go missing and there might be 15-20 resident birds below the lake. Kind of amazing there's even fish in there with the amount of damage they do
I once saw a GBH eat a trout that was probably 15" long from the Little Juniata River. After catching the trout it flipped it up in the air and caught it head first and gulped it down in one gulp. Then it had the audacity to wash it down with a sip of water.
I was trying to be extremely conservative in my estimates about GBH's to avoid getting pummeled on here. I'm not at all surprised to hear that you saw one eat four nice trout for dinner.
In all honesty I believe that there are more than 15 GBH's on Spring Creek in the summer, too.
One thing I think a lot of people don't know is that GBH's congregate along Spring Creek each autumn before migration. They congregate in the posted section above the sewage treatment plant that's upstream from where Spring Creek is along Rock Road. (The STP is more or less along Trout Road.) I recall being there around Thanksgiving one year before it was posted and I flushed approximately 75 GBH's from the willow trees. It was quite a sight. Just imagine 75 GBH's flying down to Spring Creek for breakfast and what that would do to the trout population.