Our Services
Applied Fisheries Science
Quality fisheries management is more than just putting fish in a pond and hoping something sticks. It’s a delicate balance of the entire ecosystem: maintaining healthy water, encouraging beneficial aquatic plants, creating habitat mosaics for prey and predator alike, even managing fish health, reproduction, survival, and growth. All this plays its part in creating your own dream lake, whether it’s a half-acre pond or a 6,000 acre reservoir.
Lake Assessment
The first step toward becoming a successful lake steward is to understand what’s below the surface. Let our state-of-the-art electrofishing boat and water sampling equipment provide you with a full picture of your fishery and water health. Just like a medical doctor draws labs, measures your vital signs, and asks about your symptoms, we diagnose and treat what is ailing your lake. From nuisance algae blooms to stunted fish and leaking dams, we develop data-driven management plans to overcome obstacles and help you achieve your goals.
Fish Stocking
Stocking big fish is of course a part of what we do at Blue Wing Outdoors, but we also make sure there are plenty of prey for those fish to eat. Fish are incredible hunters, and a lot of our clientele are surprised by how little food there actually is in their lake. Behind every trophy is a lake teeming with food and diversity.
Clean and Healthy Water
Water quality is one of the most overlooked components of a healthy lake, and it’s also what can ruin a lot of good work. We could bore you with pages and pages of all the elements of good water conditions, but that’s what our YouTube educational series is for. If that’s too much watching and learning for today, maybe water quality and its importance is best summed up by “don’t drink downstream from the herd.”
Aeration and De-Stratification
During the dog days of summer and the just as brutal gray days of winter, Oxygen can get scarce, and all your hard-earned big fish can get stressed. Aeration and de-stratification is important to maximizing the livable space in your lake, and it’s also great for keeping your lake beautiful during the stagnant summer algae blooms.
Fish Habitat
While prey stocking is a very responsive and quick way to get the food population in line with the predators, it’s important to have a good base of prey species, and just as important for them to have places to hide. Most of the reservoirs in the United States are over 50 years old. They follow a predictable aging process of sedimentation, loss of habitat, and nutrient accumulation. We continue to develop cutting-edge tools to rehabilitate aging ponds and lakes, and we map your lake to identify needs and develop strategies to put habitat back to work for you. Your lake needs the fountain of youth, and we know just where to find it.
Lake Design
The human mind likes clean, orderly, and perfect. Unfortunately, there isn’t much benefit to that when it comes to the designing of a lake for fish and recreation. The easiest time to create the lake you dream of is before it’s full of water, and Blue Wing Outdoors will make sure there’s no shortage of habitat packed into it’s shorelines. As Brian would say, “the bottom of a lake needs to look like a bomb went off”, with jagged rock outcroppings, cedar trees, weedbeds, Mossback Fish Habitat, and whatever other places a bluegill or shad would love to hide. In addition to a place to hide, it’s important these fish have regular access to food, so our designs set the stage for ongoing management to meet client goals.