Last weekend I went into full-on hobo mode in an attempt to add black buffalo and blue sucker to my lifelist. I've been trying for years to catch these two! Friday after work I drove 5 1/2 hours to the spillway below Lake Wappapello in southeast Missouri. I slept in my car with the seat leaned all the way back, and woke up to a beautiful sunrise with steam rising off the discharge water. I had enough food, water, and bait so that I didn't have to leave the spillway the whole weekend.
I didn't have anyone to take photos, so I practiced using the timer delay on my camera with the first fish I caught. It's really not that hard to do as long as you get the camera to focus correctly. I ended up with a lot of photos like this by accident, haha.
My first fish was a channel cat. The photo turned out perfectly so I was ready for a buffalo or sucker.
The bite was slow, so I went back to my car to grab some food. When I came back to the top of the stairs leading down to the water, I saw my rod bouncing hard and my rod holder tilting precariously forward. I ran down the steps, grabbed the rod, and brought in my lifer black buffalo!
Sometimes black and smallmouth buffalo can be hard to tell apart, but as they get larger their differences become more pronounced. The first thing to look for is the slope of the back between the head and the dorsal fin. It's steeper angled on smallmouths and relatively horizontal on blacks. Blacks have a more streamlined cylindrical profile compared to the high backed more compressed smallmouths.
Mouth angle can be difficult to tell with buffalo because they can extend their lips straight down like in the photo of me holding the fish, but when their mouth is "at rest" it should be at an angle for blacks and horizontal for smallmouths.
Though not always true, black buffalo usually have much bigger, fleshier lips than smallmouth buffs. If you look at the lips and feel somewhat horrified but also a little turned on, then you may have a black buffalo.
The buffalo bite continued, and I caught several that may be juvenile black buffalo, or possibly hybrids with smallmouth. Notice how the back angle is slightly more sloped than my first fish.
The next one is a pure smallmouth. Notice the angle of the back, the shape of the head, and the size of the lips.
These are not big juicy black buffalo lips.
Towards the end of the day I switched from bottom fishing nightcrawlers to a white curly tail jig. On my first cast I hooked into a nice bigmouth buffalo.
Bigmouth buffalo are easy to ID because their mouth points forward. It's pretty common to catch them on lures below spillways.
Besides the three buffalos I also caught a bunch of 5-10 lb common carp. Most of them were caught on corn.
Nightcrawler pieces were constantly being picked up by small drum and bluegill.
Besides the bigmouth buffalo, I also caught a couple of white bass on the white curly tail jig.
I actually saw quite a few blue suckers, which were the other species I was hoping to catch. They would come up to the surface and breach like a dolphin before diving back down. I tried to put my baits where I saw the highest numbers of them breaching, but they never hit.
To finish off the post, here's one of the many minks that hang around the spillway looking for fish to steal.
