Hello and welcome to Kentucky Afield.

I'm your host, Chad Miles.

Join us as we journey the Commonwealth in search of outdoor adventure.

This week, we're going to head out to Taylorsville Lake in search of a limit of wintertime crappie.

Then we're going to check in with biologists and see how the lake sturgeon are faring.

But first, we're headed out to Henry County for a predator hunt.

Well, Chuck, we're out here in Henry County.

This is your deer hunting farm.

Yes.

Your turkey hunting farm.

Your rabbit hunting farm.

That's it.

Today, It's a little different, though.

Yeah.

Gonna be a little coyote hunting farm.

Yeah, we're going to do a little bit of predator hunting.

Primarily focusing on coyotes.

Yeah.

It's a cold morning.

Got a layer of snow on the ground.

This is an opportunity for us to get out and hopefully if we present an early meal— easy meal, maybe we can get a coyote to come in.

I hope so.

Like I said it's been cold now for going on almost two weeks straight.

Still got a lot of snow on the ground.

So hopefully they're they're ready to eat.

I tell you what.

We probably got about 25 minutes till light.

You█re wanting to move to the very, very back side of the farm, right?

Yeah.

Let's start there and then work our way back to the front of the farm.

We should be good.

The south wind█s going to be coming to the— Okay.

We should have in our face the whole time going in there.

And once you get down there, how far do you think we'll be able to see?

Like for shooting lanes?

It█s gonna be kind of tight.

But, as clear as it is with the snow, we may be able to ge— You know, get a good window, get a little further.

Coyote.

That was close.

That█s a big— that█s a big coyote.

It█s down.

It█s down.

He█s down.

Got another one.

I can— I could hear something That's why— This is the same spot last year I called it a double.

A male and a female.

That was awesome.

Oh, yeah.

That was, you█re talking about close encounters.

You know, when we came back here in the woods, this is not like most coyote sets that I do in the sense that I'm usually set up in a spot that I can shoot 300 yards if needed.

This is tight quarters that first shot— that was an archery style shot, that was 35 yards.

Man you can see the blood trail in the snow from that female.

Oh yeah.

Oh she was pumping blood.

I'm surprised she went that far.

Yeah.

But I had to shoot through a little bit of brush or I might not have hit her as good as I wanted to, but I can see her laying down there.

Yeah, I can see her there too.

So man, that was great.

You put us right here on them.

Like I said, I will tell you this.

You heard the second one and you actually made a motion to cut the volume and you were like, kill that sound.

I hear something running through the snow.

Yeah.

So when I hit that mute button, that coyote was 60 yards or closer.

Yeah, I heard it, but I couldn't tell if it was on the same hillside that male came in or if it was on this hillside we're sitting on.

That's why I said cut it, because I wanted— you know.

And she was right here as well.

Right on top of us.

Man, you made two good shots.

Let█s round our stuff up and get moving.

Wow.

I think it went that way.

It█s over there somewhere.

Well I tell you what, Chuck, this was a perfect switch up to sitting in a deer stand.

Yeah, for sure.

This was absolutely great.

And, you know, I know that you've had a lot of coyotes on this piece of property.

Yeah.

You've been actively trying to manage them.

Yeah.

This is a this is, you know, we had this snow— January, right before the breeding season.

What a perfect opportunity to get out here and to hunt these things.

Conditions were perfect.

You know we've had this snow on the ground for over a week now.

Really cold weather, you know.

You know they're hungry.

And I think I think in these situations we're in right now, I think it's a perfect time to call one in.

Well, it couldn't have worked out any better.

We called in a double and neither shot had to be more than 50 yards.

What a great morning.

It was a lot of fun.

Let█s go get a cup of coffee.

Yeah, let's do that.

This is definitely coffee weather.

Over the last several years, Taylorsville Lake has been putting out impressive numbers of crappie.

And I would say that the wintertime may be the best time to catch ‘em.

We're out here on Taylorsville Lake.

We got two or three days of warm weather.

That means it's time to do what?

What are we doing today Brian?

Crappie fishing, Chad.

Crappie fishing.

I mean, Taylorsville Lake is known to have huge numbers of crappie.

You guys do a lot of fishing together on the bass side, but crappie fishing is something you enjoy as well.

Yeah I spend all winter long up here, crappie fishing.

That's my go to in the winter when we're not bass fishing.

These fish are shallow all winter.

Yeah.

I mean, water temperatures can be in the low to mid thirties and you can still catch them shallow.

Well, I asked Jarrod I said, Hey, I want to go up and catch a couple crappie up at Taylorsville Lake.

He goes, Well I got your guy.

And he goes, If I had to lay a bet on somebody toI run up there and catching quality crappie in a short amount of time it'd be you.

So we'll see how it works out.

Thanks, Jarrod.

No pressure.

No pressure.

Well, you're the boat captain today.

I understand you're the guide.

You're the guy who knows where the fish are at.

Let's go get em.

Let's do it.

Let's go.

Brian, with this wind, do you want to try to pick it up out here, then work in?

No.

Just pick it up on the timber here?

Yeah.

Alright.

Here we go guys.

What do you got?

Well, you might have your first keeper crappie on right there.

This one's a little light.

Nine and a half inches.

Another one on.

That's not a keeper.

I got a bluegill here.

You know, everything's in here feeding on these minnows.

Get a crappie?

Yeah.

I don't think he'll keep.

You got him.

A little one.

Both you guys got crappie.

I'll tell you what the crappie are breeding at Taylorville.

What do we got here?

Right species, wrong size.

1/32 ounce jig heads and then just a tube jig, black and chartreuse.

There you go.

I liked to crappie fish the way I bass fish.

These crappie, you know they'll get up on the mud just like a bass will.

They eat shad just like a bass does.

And this is fun.

This is very typical for Taylorsville Lake fishing.

You know, you get out here, cover a lot of water, catch a bunch of fish.

You know what?

When these fish get up there to where they make that ten inch limit, people will be taking them home.

But the number of fish in here to catch available to be caught is tremendous.

Crappie fishing is really, truly one of those things that you just need to fish them however you feel most comfortable because you can catch fish.

The simple fact is, is you put a bait in front of them and crappie are feeding, they're probably going to eat aren█t they?

Oh yeah they're going to eat.

Finding the right kind of fish that are feeding.

That's where the trick comes in.

These crappie that are 7 to 9 inches long.

Millions of them aren█t there.

Yes, thousands.

You feel some of them, but a lot of them are just knocking a little bit of slack in the line, see a little loop, get knocked up in your line, you know, Hey, better be ready.

There we go guys.

Oh no we got us a large mouth.

Wrong species.

Oh my goodness.

Hey, the bass are biting, too.

If we can't get the crappie to go over, ten inches we█ll try a bass.

That was our first over ten.

Alright, Brian.

We're about out of water, my friend.

Keep going?

You want go out there and see if we can't get on that dead head?

Yeah.

So when we say Deadhead, what we mean is basically what we got right here in the water.

An old tree.

There's the root wod, and it's out there submerged where you can't see it, but the fish still love it.

Any cover will hold them.

That might keep.

Might keep.

We'll go check it.

We'll see.

Hey, guys, We can go home now.

We█ll have to have fish flavored broth.

That█s an eater.

Get him up here.

By George.

He'll eat.

Got him.

Pretty good fish.

I don't know if it'll keep or not.

We'll check it just to be sure.

Oh yeah.

He's ten and a half inches.

Right there█s one.

Got him.

Come here.

Double.

Bringing them in two at a time.

All right.

Welcome to Taylorsville, right.

Home of the white crappie.

Yours is close, Chad.

When you say close, he's literally ten inches and a 16th or an eighth.

Chad.

Jarrod.

Brian, your turn.

Not frying pan worthy.

There you go.

That's a good one.

That should be an eater but will measure him.

He█s ten.

Jarrod's got one.

Good one.

Yeah, real good one.

Nice one.

That is what they call a fish sandwich.

Got it or hung up?

I got it.

You got a good one?

It's a giant.

That's good one.

Don█t even have to measure him.

That's a good Taylorville crappie.

There you go.

We'll take it.

Had two catch 30 to get here.

But hey, I'll take that too.

We may fill a skillet after all.

Got him.

He choked that jig.

Oh yeah.

That one█s taking line.

That█s a big one there now.

That's a tournament fish right there, boys.

That's a tournament fish there, Brian.

It's a good one.

What we got here?

Is this a crappie?

Saugeye?

That█s a crappie.

Wow, That's a good crappie.

Look at that.

Now, that's a good fish right there.

We caught so many fish today.

I mean, I don't know how many we caught.

We may have caught 50 or 60.

It did take til right toward the end to start catching some like this.

Brian, that fish you caught was 13 inches or better wasn█t it.

Yeah, that's a good one.

You know what, guys?

There's no reason for cabin fever when you get out here catching crappie like this it doesn█t get any better.

Now let's go jump in a boat on the Cumberland River and check in with some biologists on how the lake sturgeon are doing.

Well, the Cumberland River in the middle of the wintertime.

I'll tell you what, it doesn't get any more stunningly beautiful than this does it?

It is certainly beautiful down here.

It's a great place to be.

Today, we're doing something that I've never experienced before.

We're actually in search of what is going to be the state's largest fish.

You know, for a number of years now, we've been stocking lake sturgeon into the system and we've got fish that are up above 20 plus pounds and approaching 50 to 60 inches if we're able to get some of our older fish today.

Lake Sturgeon, we've been reintroducing them now back here in Kentucky now since what, 2007?

2007 is our first year class, the first stocking went in in 2008.

So we're committed to a 20 year restocking effort.

So we're getting close to the end of that stocking frame right now.

And so far we've seen pretty good survival.

20 years is a long study, but that's what it takes to learn a little bit about Lake Sturgeon.

And we're going to learn a little more about Lake Sturgeon today.

You're going to pull some data.

Hopefully we catch some and we're going to learn a little more about why we're reintroducing them here in Kentucky.

All right.

Let's get to this first line here and see what we got on there.

It's not like most fishing we wait until we have a fish to put water in a livewell.

With 400 hooks, we feel pretty confident we're going to have one huh?

Yeah these lines are set kind of with the current helps us avoid some tangles.

Also, lake sturgeon, tend to feed as they go up the river, so they'll eat benthic mackerel, invertebrates, things like that when they're younger.

They'll continue to eat that throughout their lifecycle, even even large, you know, 30 plus pound fish.

However, once they get big enough, the gape size in your mouth, how wide their mouth is will become large enough that they can start preying on smaller fish species as well.

So today you're using all night crawlers, right?

Today we█re using all night crawlers.

That helps keep things standardized in terms of the data.

I have to ask you, why this location?

Why here this time of year to try to catch them?

We are kind of looking at their migration patterns as part of the study.

So there are some telemetry studies going on right now.

Yeah, an earlier portion of the study was telemetry.

We've wrapped that up and we've moved on to a monitoring stage to see how these fish are surviving, growing just kind of how our stocking efforts are, whether they're being successful or not.

All right.

Well, good.

We'll see.

We have hey with Nightcrawlers who knows what you may have?

You never know.

About every fish I know will eat a nightcrawler, right?

Absolutely.

And a mud puppy, I already seen that joker.

Yeah, occasionally we do catch them.

Sometimes we have lines with several on them.

For the most part, they're eating nightcrawlers as well.

So we'll catch them and we'll take the hooks out of them or release them.

And most of the time they swim off just fine.

We've called them every year that we've been doing this.

You might catch 20 plus on a line.

Now people need to realize that there's a difference in a mud puppy and another big species of salamander we have here In Kentucky that we're actually trying to reintroduce.

And that's a hellbender.

These are not hellbender.

These are mud puppies.

Right?

Right.

Typically, they're going to inhabit different types of areas.

Hellbenders are going to be more in your Highland streams often These mud puppies are not getting anywhere near to the size that Hellbenders are at maturity either.

Yeah.

Look there, a Channel cat.

Channel cat Matt.

And typical for a channel cat that has been on a line.

He's got that thing twisted and curled as many times as he can.

So you can see they're pulling these hooks now.

They're going to rebate and put these back out to pull more samples tomorrow.

But you can see how they're managing these if you ever pulled trout lines you've probably seen this is a box that just has some cuts in it, and they'll pull each one of these individual hooks and they'll spin that box around and that helps them manage and keep the line from being tangled.

Now, when they go to put it out, they'll go in reverse.

They'll pull them up and bate them back up and pull the line right on out and put it back on the bottom.

Channel cat Matt.

Just popped off.

Quick release.

Actually getting a quick release is speeds up the process today.

So that's a good thing.

Yes, it does.

We got two red spotted newts here that we also got that actually weren't even on the hook.

They had just wrapped around the dropper.

Oh, we got a lake sturgeon.

Im going to need to reach back and get that net.

Here we go.

He█s wrapped up in there.

There you go.

well, there's our first lake sturgeon.

Now this is it's a little bit younger fish.

What do you think best guess?

What do you think this is a two year old fish?

That's probably a three year old fish right there.

Okay.

So you guys are going to check this thing to figure out how do you think it is, Get some measurements, What other data will we be getting today?

Right.

So we're going to take total lengths, uh, fork length, which is essentially to the fork of the tail.

They've got what they call a hetero circle tail.

So the top half of the tail can be a little bit longer.

So sometimes fork length is a little more indicative of growth.

We'll also be weighing these fish and putting a tag in them so that if we recapture them, we can kind of follow them as far as when we caught them, how large they were at that point in time.

We got that long pulled in.

We're going to head on down to our next one and see what we've got on that one.

We got a sturgeon about to surface.

Sturgeon about to surface.

Awesome.

Oh, that's a good one.

All right.

So we're just checking for a pit tag here.

And this one does not appear to be tagged.

Looks like a right seven eight on the scoot removal, fork Length 21 zero.

Total length 24 one total weight two 14.

So we're gonna be putting this pit tag into this fish now that will allow us to track it.

If we recapture it and just make sure that it's in and we've got it in that fish successfully.

So this is a nice example of Lake Sturgeon.

You know, you've got the three rows of bony plates, the dermal plates that cover the skin, and these plates are large and really sharp with sharp keels.

When the fish is young, they tend to get smaller.

As the fish grows and the keels become more blunt.

The interesting part of the sturgeon around the head and the snout or rostrum is they've got a lot of sensory cells, especially on the underside of the head.

These are called barbells, which are just fleshy tentacles hang from the snout and they are covered with taste buds and they use these they drag them along the bottom in search of food, and they'll actually suck in the sediment like silt and mud and screen out the insect larvae.

They extrude the mud and sediment out the gills.

So that's how they feed Their vision is not super poor, but they don't have highly developed vision.

They feed by taste and they rely heavily on their sense of smell.

It has a cartilage skeleton.

They are the most primitive or ancestral of the bony fishes and so essentially they're living fossils and haven't really changed much since prehistoric times.

The cool thing is about these fish is that they are very long live fish.

The bad thing is from a restoration side that this fish, if it's a male or female, may not be able to produce offspring.

For how long?

If it's a female, they don't reach sexual maturity until they're 20 to 25 years old.

So the males are a little bit sooner, 15 to 20 years.

This fish has several more years.

If it's a female, more than that, and before sexually mature, when they do reach maturity, they only spawn on average every four years.

So you've got a low reproductive potential, slow maturity.

All these things are what make them so vulnerable to overharvesting.

If you catch one, we ask that you return the fish back to the water.

But we would also like to have information on your capture date, a photograph of the fish, the location and any other information like the bait that was used, the depth where you caught the fish.

All of this helps us with our monitoring efforts.

We've got another one coming up.

Oh, a real good one.

So this project will go on for the rest of the month, trying to get a bunch of individuals and collect all that data to help you guys manage the species.

Yeah, we'll be continuing to set trott lines at a few different sites here and on the main stem of the Cumberland for years to come.

And it's very cool to get to see a fish that most of us people out here, that are outdoorsman, we don't get to see that.

So thanks for bringing us long today.

Yeah, no problem, Chad.

Very interesting work.

Now let's check in and see who else has been out having fun in this week's ones that didn't get away.

Check out this beautiful largemouth bass that was caught by ten year old Wyatt Ezell.

Nice fish.

Harvey Carter knows how to spend his birthday.

And that's rabbit hunting in central Kentucky with a few buddies.

Nice job.

Here we have Hazel with a hybrid bass that was caught on Lake Herrington.

Nice job.

Daniel Watkins caught this nice muskie while fishing on the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River.

Nice fish.

February is now here.

You know what that means.

It's time to renew your hunting and fishing license.

You can do that at a local retailer or go to fw.ky.gov.

And remember, hunting and fishing on private property is a privilege.

Always ask permission and thank the landowner.

Until next week, I'm your host, Chad Miles, and I hope to see you in the woods or on the water.