When Will and Mary Primos put their Rivers Run Ranch in Mississippi up for sale in 2015, the whole outdoor world knew someone deep-rooted in conservation and wildlife management would have to be the new owner.
Primos, a famous hunter and entrepreneur who developed his empire of outdoor products via experiences and television shows, built his Mississippi Delta ranch in the same framework. It was part of his business. He converted more than 1,400 acres of the approximately 2,850 acres of land from farmland to wildlife habitat. Known for Boone and Crockett whitetail deer, the property has also been a haven for uncounted thousands of migratory waterfowl over decades. Toss in some upland game bird management, and you have a recipe for quite the wildlife sanctuary.
The ranch is just north of Belzoni, famous for catfish farming in the not-too-distant past. Today, thousands of acres of what used to be catfish farms are lying fallow in the federal CRP programs. For someone like me, it's more than a little bit weird to drive by catfish farms with ponds grown up in willow and cottonwood trees, with brush, surrounded by high fences for game. It wasn't that long ago Belzoni was considered the catfish capital of the nation.
Rivers Run Ranch is anything but fallow. Bought by Brett Gottsch, a second-generation cattleman from Omaha, Nebraska, he kept the Primos vision alive in his own way. Primos had built and managed an 11-acre lake on the property, just behind his hunting lodge, a short distance inside the gate. That lake, built in 2007, served a good purpose. It grew some big bass and crappie for the table. A blessing in that part of the world is fertile soils and shallow groundwater. Primos Lake had reached its peak and was showing signs of decline. Throw in the fact that the lake was leveed all the way around to build it above natural ground level added to Gottsch's next line of decisions. He pondered the idea of draining the lake and renovating it. Not long after he bought it, the area received record rainfall. Gottsch's team had a dose of reality. That area, flat delta, was inundated by a long-standing federal government plan to manage water in the Mississippi River drainage area. What that means to you and I is a series of downstream levees that hold water away from the mighty Mississippi to keep it from flooding downstream, especially New Orleans. That plan's unsung hero/victim is hundreds and thousands of acres of Mississippi lowlands flooded with backwater for months.
So, what does that have to do with Rivers Run Ranch, you might ask? The existing lake levee was just low enough to receive backwater floods that topped the levee 2 of 3 years. The risk of flood waters encroaching made it impossible to manage the fishery. Gottsch thought it through and decided not to renovate the existing lake. It made sense to him to build a new lake behind the area where he planned to build a new hunting lodge. He figured out that building a new lake would have advantages. First off, he'd have two lakes. Secondly, he could build a new one, elevate the levee beyond the maximum flood stage, and create a bass fishing haven from scratch for less than it would cost to renovate the existing lake.
That's precisely what he did.
Being a good businessman, Gottsch did his due diligence, found the right people in the planning stage, and then executed the plan. The earthmover took advantage of excellent clay, built a levee at the proper height, and rearranged areas to eliminate shallow water. Slopes were perfect, the lake was built with an infinity look, and Gottsch and his team built the best fish habitat possible, adding gravel spawning beds, some dense structure for baby fish to hide, and then excellent bass habitat for fish to congregate. Another well-thought-out plan was to gently slope the lake bottom west to east toward the natural drainage and add a channel with an acre sump. A drain pipe was installed in case they want to drain the lake and harvest fish at some point—or to restart the lake a decade from now. Excellent thinking.
When the new 8.8-acre lake was full of water, Gottsch stocked with standard fare species, fathead minnows, bluegill, and redear sunfish, although he stocked more numbers than "normal" to speed up the process of developing the food chain. Those forage fish were stocked in October 2020. Fish were fed to expedite growth rates. The property manager, Alan Evans, made sure the lake held a healthy plankton bloom with timely fertilization—significant in that part of the world—and the forage fish were thriving.
On July 1, 2021, a mix of Florida strain and F1 "Tiger" bass fingerlings were stocked. The lake was left to itself to do what lakes do. Projected growth rates for those bass were to hit 10-12" by fall 2021, and then a year later, see some bass ranging between IV2 and 3 pounds.
Mid-summer, a few hours were spent tossing some baits to see how well the bass were growing. With chores around a ranch that size, the lake was mostly left alone, other than keeping it fertile and making sure the feeders were maintained.
Food plots and wildlife management pulled most of the manpower and focus for Rivers Run.
When the discussion turned to the lake, Gottsch and his ranch hands were puzzled they'd not caught any bass, even though not much effort was spent on it. They chalked it up to plenty of food and not enough time to go fishing. Besides, the lake wasn't ready for prime time yet.
Fast forward a year later, and the lake seemed overloaded with forage fish. They could see hundreds of bluegills ravaging the fish food, and all along the shoreline fish were teeming.
Bass fishing ramped up, but not one fish was caught. Zero, nada, none.
Brett was concerned something wasn't right. He was right. An electrofishing boat was summoned, and it didn't take long to find out that the young bass stocked survival rate was not only dismal, it was zero.
How can that happen? Who knows? There's a variety of reasons, and pondmeisters need to be aware. Those baby bass, about 2-3" long, were stocked in the heat of the summer in the south, early July. They were captured at the hatchery, held in concrete vats for a few days so their digestive systems could be cleaned out, then graded, counted, and loaded onto a truck for the most-of-a-day trip to the lake. Fish were transported in cool well water, then had to be correctly tempered to the lake water before being released. That whole handling process is a series of steps, and if any of those steps are compromised, the fish will also be compromised. They were stocked into a lake with water temperature in the mid-80s, approaching too hot to handle fish. For the sake of argument, let's say that the whole process was perfect, and the fish hit the lake in excellent condition. Was there enough larger bluegill in the lake to eat that many baby bass? Maybe so, maybe not.
Nonetheless, not one bass was captured.
Maybe they were stocked into the wrong lake. Everyone shrugged their shoulders. Who knows?
The conundrum went from "Where did the bass go?" to "What do we do now?" The lake was a lemon...and they needed to make lemonade.
The decision wasn't hard. They decided to stock advanced bass large enough to immediately feed on the predominant size ranges of bluegills. 10-12" young bass were stocked to replicate what nature may have grown had things gone by the book...whatever that means in today's world. Their consulting biologist pondered whether to stock larger fish than that, but the team decided to take advantage of such a well-developed food chain by stocking what the existing forage fish population needed.
It was a good choice. 10-12" bass with a gene pool similar to the failed stockings were added within a few days.
So, you might ask, how is it turning out?
Gottsch employed American Sport Fish Hatchery to evaluate in fall 2023. As you can see from the images, these bass, now only 18 months old, far surpass what a "properly" stocked lake would produce. Some of the bass exceeded 130% relative weights.
Threadfin shad were stocked to help bolster the food chain as the bass are growing, plus to fill an open niche and help keep the plankton bloom in check. One of the management issues has been dense blooms. Shad help by filtering plankton.
Biologists expect bass growth to continue to exceed standard expectations.
It looks like Rivers Run managers, with the help of their consulting biologists, have taken a lake that could have been a real lemon and turned it into lemonade with bright corrective stocking.
They can't wait to taste the results.
Reprinted with permission from Pond Boss Magazine
