He's hunted them for 28 years, and when he's on the lake pulling in nets full of those wriggling brown, black and yellow prairie catfish, business is good. Reed, a solid man in his mid-50s whose open face belies a sly wit, is one of a dying breed. They do keep a low profile, and that's good,'' said Dave Friedl, area fisheries supervisor for the Department of Natural Resources in Detroit Lakes. For instance, commercial fishermen stay away from Minnesota lakes during the fishing opener. People might not realize they're pulling in bullheads,'' he said.
Reed works virtually year-round.
In the winter he loads bullheads into a pickup truck on frozen lakes, and he has nets set in several lakes during that brief stretch when the bullheads are running after the ice comes out and before the fishing opener. He doesn't fish in July, when the heat makes bullheads sluggish, and he doesn't work weekends in Minnesota during the summer. On a day out recently, Reed and his helper, Dick Piechowski, pulled in about 6,000 pounds of wriggling, slippery bullheads from nets set a week earlier in Lake Sallie, a few miles southwest of Detroit Lakes. The few game fish entrapped with the bullheads were plucked out and released unharmed. But almost all the fish were bullheads, mostly brown with a few of the black variety thrown in.