I have bowfished for alot of years and shot alot of fish, but my question is- ARE THEY GETTING SMARTER???????????????????

I was up at my cabin bowfishing the last couple of days and I was fishing the SNY, which is a drainage creek for the levee district, 76 miles long and drains around 1 million acres..
There was a drainage tile coming out of a set of lakes that had tons of duckweed in it, these Grass Carp were feeding on it, I shot a couple and the rest got wise, if I even just drove past they would scatter, the last one I resorted to all camo and snuck in ,crawling to get the shot...

They had me pegged!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Has anyone else run into this?????

when i was shooting grassies from my secret spotafter about the 3rd day they were getting more spooked and hard to get within range. they seem to have excellent sight. darn grassies.....

Part of the problem is that, in their native environment, I believe that avian predators were historically very hard on Asian carps, especially bigheads and grass carp, that often feed on or near the surface. So they are very tied into things going on above the water's surface, more so than most fish. The other thing is that carps are truly among the smartest of fish. I can guarantee you that my tagged fish are REALLY hard to recapture. They tend to remember being caught in a net, dragged out of the water, sliced open, various foreign objects jammed inside of them, then sewed back up. They don't want it to happen again. When I do recapture a fish, usually I have caught most all the other fish from behind that wingdike first. And I get most of the natives before I get most of the Asian carps. Asian carps rarely just blunder into a trammel or gill net, especially not a multifilament net (you have to use monofilament). Most native fish just don't know what a net is and just swim right in. I think Asian carps have been fished really hard in Asia for a lot of years (Chinese are good fishers) and have the net thing superimposed on their genes. They know what a net is before they ever see one.

(all that said, the smartest fish in the world isn't as smart as a retarded mouse. But they are superbly adapted to their environment, so they seem smarter to us.)

Oh yeah! Grassies have incredible eyesight. You might catch 'em snoozin once or maybe twice, but after that they are VERY wary.

Unless they're up in grass when the water comes up and they're concentrating on eating, they're very difficult to get near. However, when the water's been low for a long time and rises up into the weeds, I've run over them.