Ambiguous lifer hunting

[MuskieBait]

If you are not familiar with the term "lifer", it refers to a new species entry to a lifelist. It's just a term that lifelisters throw around instead of saying "new species".

I've been searching for my first River Redhorse for the last 4 years. One river in Quebec has a run of spawning River Redhorse with numbers high enough to actually target...so I spent the last weekend fishing just on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River in one of the Ottawa tributaries.

10 hours on the road, $200 spent over the weekend, 3 days, 30 hours fishing, a million of perch later...I got 9 species plus two ambiguous "would be" lifers...but the two are ambiguous enough for me not to confidently count them at all...so in the end, I didn't catch any lifers on the weekend.

You can read about it here...

http://muskiebaitadventures.blogspot.ca/2014/06/ambiguous-lifer-hunting.html

Here are the two ambiguous lifers...

1) A Redhorse with the body of a Shorthead Redhorse and the lips of a River Redhorse...

2) Golden Shiner body and fins but with fully scaled keel...I doubt the Rideau is full of Golden Shiner x Rudd hybrids...really don't know how to call these fish...but for convenience, I'll just say they are Golden Shiners...

Sigh...the hunt for a River Redhorse continues...4 years and counting...

 

[MuskieBait]

Here are the other non-lifer catches...

Yellow Perch (x million...if the perch isn't so ravenous, we would have caught many more other fish. It sucks to cast and have perch grab your bait before the rig even settled on bottom.)

Channel Catfish (x6)

Emerald Shiner (x2...just to see if they were Rosyface Shiner...which is potentially a lifer)

Silver Redhorse (x1)

Sauger (x1)

Mooneye (x5)

Freshwater Drum (x4)

Pumpkinseed (x3)

Bluegill Sunfish (x10+)

 

[Cody309]

Some great fish there man! Well done!

 

[Dozer]

Always look forward to your reports - learn something new every time

 

[OCDComputing]

Very nice collection! Well done!

 

[Shawarma]

I find the lips in the second picture a bit unsettling.

Great report and pics. Always nice to see what's in our waters.

 

[FisherGirl]

I find the lips in the second picture a bit unsettling.

Great report and pics. Always nice to see what's in our waters.

I agree!

Nice post. Love your photography skillz.

 

[MuskieBait]

Thanks guys.

No photography skillz to talk about...just a little understanding of light angle, metering, ISO, F-stop...and a bit of photoshop. I'm still shooting with a Canon Powershot A620 point and shoot bought in 2007. I've taken enough photographs of fish now that I know instinctively how and where to place a fish to get the best lighting, shadow and colour. Then I go home to play a little with the intensity histogram, adjust the saturation a bit, fix the colour balance...and that's basically it.