Outdoors: Redears, bluegills make a good angling pair

KINDERHOOK – As a Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist, Chris Freiburger is somewhat conflicted.

“I’m all about native species,” he said, as we fished on lake just a long cast from the Indiana border. But when it comes to redears . . .”

Redears, as in redear sunfish, flip Freiburger’s switch. They’re native to places to the south of us, but have been transplanted and adapted well, especially in Michigan’s southern two or three tiers of counties.

“I like redears just because they’re bluegills on steroids,” said Freiburger as he reeled in a nine-inch specimen. “They’re a heavier, stronger fish. They wear tough-skin husky jeans. Once you get them hooked, they fight very, very well.

“And they’re just a heckuva lot of fun. You think you’ve got a bass on and you pull it in and it’s a 10 ½- or 11-inch redear.”

We were fishing with pretty simple gear – spinning rods with light line, a hook and a split shot, sitting back from the drop-off and casting up onto the flat.

“Sometimes they can be easy to catch,” Freiburger said. “Other times they’re incredibly finicky. (To me, that sounds like pretty much every fish.) Trying to figure them out is a challenge – often times you can see them, but getting them to bite is another issue.”

Redear sunfish, commonly called shellcrackers in the South because of their dietary preference for mollusks – they’re also called Chinquapins, but why that is I have no idea – are native from North Carolina south to Florida and west to southern Missouri to Texas. They have been translocated across the country for obvious reasons.

“Redears typically run larger than ‘gills,” Freiburger said. “Even in lakes where redears don’t get real big, they’re still eight-inchers. That’s still a bigger fish than most bluegills.”

Shellcrackers seem to co-exist with bluegills in most lakes because of their different habits.

“They’re not feeding up in the water column as much as a bluegill does,” Freiburger said. “They’re down on the bottom picking bugs out of the gravel or eating snails. I like that kind of fishing – jigging along the bottom. It’s a lot more active than sitting there with a bobber waiting for them to swim by.”

Like bluegills, redears are community nesters in the shallows and can often be caught side-by-side with the ‘gills.

“They do hybridize with bluegills and the hybrids don’t seem to get as big as a true redear,” Freiburger said, “but quite often they’re nine- or 10-inch fish when they hybridize. A lot of our lakes have hybridized fish in them.”

Because they are bottom feeders, Freiburger tends to fish them with red worms, often on a drop-shot rig.

“I really think what catches them best is leeches,” Freiburger said. “If the bite’s really tough and I can’t get anything else going, I’ll pick up some leeches.

“I’ve had some success with a fly rod, but less so with a topwater bait than a little weighted fly or a beaded nymph. Getting them to hit topwaters can be pretty tough.”

Freiburger, who occasionally trolls for open-water bluegills, says he doesn’t catch many redears that way.

“The best way to find them is bouncing them right along the bottom,” he said. “They’re in shallow water in mid-summer, July and August, up on those gravel flats feeding.”

When we started, I was using a more conventional bluegill rig – a float with a small fly on a dropper, tipped with spikes. But for every respectable ‘ear that Freiburger caught, I caught a small bluegill. It wasn’t long before I put up the bobber and reached for the split shot and worms.

We simply followed the shoreline with the trolling motor, casting into the shallows. Where we caught one, we usually caught a few, then often went through a slack period before we started hitting them again. We caught tons of them, many of them deemed not big enough to keep – certainly big enough to keep had they been bluegills – because there were so many good ones around. Freiburger also released some large specimens – he’s obviously into stewarding the resource – keeping those he deemed just right for the fillet knife.

“The biggest one I’ve caught was 13 ½ inches,” he said. “I’d say that’s a giant. Twelve inches is big. But you catch a lot in that 10- to 11-inch range.”

As table fare, redears are fine; Freiburger said he doesn’t have a palate delicate enough to detect any difference between ‘ears and ‘gills. I certainly don’t.

We fished until we ran out of bait – we only brought one box of red worms and the container of spikes I brought didn’t seem to turn ‘em on. We had more than 30 between us by that point.

Freiburger said he’s caught redears in about 15 different lakes, mostly in the lower couple of tiers of Michigan counties. A quick check of DNR Master Angler record (for redears that are 10 inches or longer) shows that in 2015 anglers caught nine, from eight different lakes, the farthest north in Livingston County. In 2014, they caught 14, from 10 different lakes, the farthest north in Iosco County.

But that’s just what’s reported. Freiburger caught a small handful of MAs the morning we fished, but he swore me to secrecy.

For the record, the state standard is a 2.36-pound specimen caught from Lyons Lake in Calhoun County in 2010.