Fish · Black, brown, and yellow
Bullheads
Three slippery cousins with an unforked tail. They stay in lakes that quit on everybody else, and they will eat almost anything that fits.
Where they live: Slow water and soft bottoms — mud, sand, gravel — more common in the southern half of the state. They tolerate murk and low oxygen.
When folks chase them: Late spring into early summer for the spawn, around 68–70 degrees. Night is when they feel like eating. Winter is when their talent shows.
Bullheads are what a lake still has when it has had a hard winter and a harder speech from a prettier fish.
There are three. Black, brown, and yellow. All of them have an unforked tail, which is how you stop calling a small one a channel cat. Channel cats wear a fork. Bullheads do not. They also have no scales, an adipose fin, and a single sharp spine at the front of the dorsal and each pectoral. The whiskers are for finding food. The spine is the part that gets you. (MinnAqua — bullheads, Minnesota DNR — catfish)
Yellow ones wear whitish barbels under the jaw. Brown and black wear dark ones, and the DNR says those two are the hard pair to split. A black bullhead is more evenly dark and has a light bar at the base of the tail. (Minnesota DNR — catfish, biology)
I still mix up brown and black on the tailgate and then nod like I meant to. The fish does not care. My cousin in Worthington would care. He cares about everything that fits in a pan.
What to throw
They eat crayfish, mussels, snails, insects, other fish, eggs, and plants. The lesson’s line is the wide one: almost anything that fits in the mouth. A lot of that eating happens at night. (MinnAqua — bullheads)
We do not have a bullhead tray. A plain hook and something from the bait cooler is a bait-shop errand, not a listing we are going to costume as a product card. When the DNR’s catfish biology page talks about bullheads, it calls them omnivores and important prey for walleyes and largemouth, not a lure commercial.
Rod & reel
No blank length on the lesson. Do not let a page like this sell you a special bullhead rod. The handling matters more than the graphite. Grip a catfish or a bullhead firmly behind the dorsal, thumb and finger behind the pectorals, so the spines are not the part that shakes your hand. (MinnAqua — channel catfish)
Yellow bullheads occasionally pass 2 pounds and, on the biology page, are the one people like for size and taste. They want clearer water than the other two and live in many clear, weedy bass-panfish lakes in central and southern Minnesota, plus slow southern streams. Black bullheads rarely reach 15 inches. Most are 6 to 10. (Minnesota DNR — catfish biology)
Where in Minnesota
Common in lakes, rivers, and streams, more so in the southern half. They like quiet water and soft bottoms, and they can live in murk that other gamefish will not. Black bullheads especially take over warm, fertile water where winterkill has erased the neighbors. The biology page’s biologist line about a black bullhead is the one you remember: all it needs is wet grass. They show up in shallow lakes and muddy streams in central and southern Minnesota, the St. Louis, Red River tributaries, and the Rock River down in the southwest corner. (MinnAqua — bullheads, Minnesota DNR — catfish biology)
Brown bullheads live in the Mississippi, Minnesota, St. Croix, and Red, and the tributaries. Yellow ones want the clearer weedy lakes. None of our lake pages currently list “bullhead” in the usual-suspects line, which says more about our shorthand than about the state. LakeFinder is the place to see whether the lake you mean actually has them.
A winterkill lake is a sad room. A bullhead still being there is the part worth saying without a joke. Kids catch them. Walleyes eat the small ones. The water did not go empty just because the brochure fish left.
Seasons, including the ice
Spawning runs late spring into early summer, when the water is about 68–70°F. The female fans out a saucer nest in the shallows, often under matted plants, a fallen tree, or an undercut bank. Both parents guard. After the hatch the male keeps the little ones in a tight ball until they are about an inch long, and you can still see those schools in the shallows in early summer. The biology page puts the same season as late spring and summer, nests in sand or mud, hundreds to thousands of young near the surface. (MinnAqua — bullheads, Minnesota DNR — catfish biology)
Ice tip: this is the fish that can still be in the lake when low oxygen has wiped out the others. That is not a lure recommendation. It is the DNR’s reason black bullheads dominate winterkill water. Do not march onto bad ice to prove it. The season you may fish them is in the rulebook, not in a shack story.