This story, “Getting the Bait’s a Bail,” appeared in the May 1970 issue of Outdoor Life.
The morning sparkled as bright and shiny as a new dime. The river was clear and purling along, its voices blended with the gentle stirring of tree leaves and the song of a cardinal up on the hill side. The day could not have been better, except for one thing: the trout had showed not even a casual interest in our offerings.
The river was loaded with outsize rainbows and browns. We knew they were there. We had seen many and had tangled with some of them before. But as far as we could tell, not even a fingerling had risen out of the depths to look at a fly, and our variety of lures, fished from top to bottom, had received not the slightest response.
“There’s one thing that always stirs them up in this stretch of river,” my partner said when we paused to rest and do a bit of head-scratching under a towering hemlock at the water’s edge.
“Why haven’t you trotted it out before now?” I asked.
“Don’t have none on me at the moment,” he said with a wry smile, “but I believe they’ll work.”
“What?”
“Spring lizards,” he declared. “The baby size, about two inches long.”
“You mean the real, live variety?”
“That’s the ticket,” he said. “We can get ’em a hundred yards or so above here, where a spring branch pours into the river.”
At the mouth of the creek we leaned our rods against a tree and shucked out of our fishing creels, shoulder bags, and nets. My partner carefully removed the con tents of his tobacco can, folded the tobacco up in its paper wrapping, and buttoned the package into his shirt pocket.
“Flat tin can is one of the best containers I know for most live bait,” he commented.
We took off up the brawling spring branch on our hands and knees, turning over small rocks where the flow of water was thin, digging around in patches of debris at the tails of shallow eddies, pawing through clumps of decaying leaves.
The creek was full of spring lizards in sizes from six inches down to a pair of eyes and a wiggle. We kept only those that were one to two inches long.
This bait hunt was the first interesting action we’d had all day. Anyone coming suddenly upon us would have concluded that we were a pair of escaped lunatics. One of us would pounce on a lizard and make the water fly as our quarry scurried for the safety of a rock heap or deeper water. Then we’d go through a series of gyrations in trying to hold the slippery salamander in one or both hands until we could force it into the narrow opening of the tobacco can. Often the slithery little creature would escape and have to be corralled again.
“I haven’t had this much fun on a fishing trip in a long time,” my companion admitted after we had snared one lizard three times before getting it into the can.
I glanced at him. His face was muddy, his clothes were as wet as if someone had dunked him in the river by his heels, and one sleeve was half torn off (he had snagged it on a sharp rock).
“You look as bedraggled as if you’d been in a fight with a giant catfish,” I said, laughing.
“You ought to see a picture of your own self,” he retorted.
My fingers hurt, and I examined them. They were red from the cold water, and the rocks had ground the nails down to the quick. We had collected half a can of salamanders, but we decided to indulge in the plea sure of adding a few more before we went back to the river.
That afternoon we caught some nice trout on the live bait. But I don’t remember the details of the fishing so vividly as I do the two or three hours we spent on our spring-lizard hunt.
I must admit that taking a fish on an artificial lure gives me a smugger sense of satisfaction than I get when I score with live bait. I am no purist in a strict sense of the word, for I use every artificial device from a dry fly to a bunker spoon. I keep five tackleboxes stocked with every type of casting and spinning lure from topwater chuggers to jigs. Each tacklebox is specially outfitted for a particular type of lake or pond or river. My half-dozen flybooks and flyboxes hold dry flies, wet flies, nymphs, streamers, weighted flies, and bass bugs — all of many styles, patterns, and colors.
But though I devote 98 percent of my time to the use of artificials, at certain times and places no fly or lure seems to do the job, and that’s when live bait pays handsome dividends.
One especially attractive season of the year is mayfly time. In spite of the name of these insects, they hatch in one form or another (there are some 1,500 species l during allof the warmer months.
Fish and fishermen go slightly wacky when a mayfly hatch is on. The nymph, after having lived for from several weeks to several years on the bottom, wriggles to the surface, fills its alimentary tract with air to help split the skin down its back, and comes out of the shell as a winged insect. In one day’s time the reproductive organs mature and the mayfly mates in a wild aerial dance, usually within 100 feet of the water’s surface but sometimes soaring as high as 1,000 feet.
After mating, the female descends to skim the surface of the water and de posit from a few hundred to more than 4,000 eggs, which sink to the bottom and attach themselves to debris, there by starting the life cycle all over again. The mayfly — from the time it leaves the bottom as a nymph until the mature insect falls exhausted to the surface after its mating ritual offers a prime morsel to feeding fish.
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Once, I was on an arm of Jackson Lake in middle Georgia when a tremendous mayfly hatch began. I had only my fly rod with me and was bass bugging one of the coves. Fish suddenly began feeding all around me like crazy, and when the flies began to collect on the willow trees hanging over the water, I realized what was going on.
I threw the bass bug several times without getting a strike. My only imitation mayflies were at home, but I did have a tiny hook in my kit. I replaced the bug with this hook, paddled ashore, and filled a tomato can with live insects. From then on I got a strike on every cast. I caught bream, crappies, catfish, and bass as fast as I could lay a fresh mayfly on the surface. The largest bass weighed 3½ pounds. All fish taken were literally stuffed to the gills with mayflies; some had their stomachs and mouths so full that they couldn’t even swallow.
I might have done as well with imitation mayflies. But I never could have had more fun than I did with the real ones.
Every Southern mountain man and boy who wets a hook for trout knows about stickbait. This is the larva of the caddis fly. It lives inside a case made of sand grains, small sticks, or other de bris, or it may even build a tube or tunnel on the bottom side of a rock, depending on the species. At the height of the caddis-fly season the small shallow ed dies of a trout stream will often be loaded with larvae living in twiglike homes that are quickly recognized by a practiced eye.
Fishermen tip their wet flies with these larvae, which are usually around half an inch long. Many an angler I know, before he ties on his first fly, will search the eddies along a stream edge and collect a canful or pocketful of stickbait.
No one has ever told me whether sight or scent attracts a trout to this tiny worm impaled on the point of a hook. I do know that the caddis-fly larva is a most productive way to at tract an outsize rainbow, brown, or brookie that would not otherwise be interested.
When I was a youngster in middle Georgia, one of the finest natural baits in our smaller streams was the penni winkle. At least, that’s what we called it. The spelling is my own. I have never been able to find that word in any dictionary or fishing literature.
Only after many years did I identify this creature as the larva of the stone fly. We knew it as a brown grub two to three inches long and so tough and rubbery that no fish could easily pull it off a hook.
We spent countless hours scratching through piles of wet leaves and other sodden debris in the streams, collecting canfuls of penniwinkles. We fished them in deep quiet coves or river eddies and could always count on this grub to produce a sizable mess of catfish and occasionally a very active bass.
In these small streams we found other types of baits too. We carried along an extra container for crayfish, and some times almost every pile of rotting vegetation and collection of rocks around the riffles produced one or two of the tiny crustaceans. In a trickle from the spring behind the house, we rigged a spot to keep the crawdads alive for later use in a smallmouth stream that I knew. And the very smallest crayfish were choice tidbits for trout.
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It is not strange that those expeditions for bait are more vivid in our memory than the actual fishing produced by the worms, lizards, crayfish, and such. The scratching around in leaf heaps, overturning stones, and pouncing on the creatures we found were adventures themselves, and back in those days we used natural baits at least three-fourths of the time. Even if a bait had been on the market and if we’d had the money to buy it, finding our own was as much a part of a fishing trip as catching fish.
“Do bass eat frogs?” an old angling partner asked me not long ago.
“Why that question?” I wanted to know.
“I’ve never found a frog in the stomach of a bass,” he said, “and I’ve operated on a good many largemouths.”
“Well sir,” I said, “if they don’t eat frogs, they stay mighty mad at them. The sight of one will drive an old large mouth crazy. Whether they’ll swallow a frog I don’t know, and it’s possible that after they chomp down on one they spit it out. But they do chomp down, and that’s for sure.”
I’ve caught some of my biggest bass on live frogs. But first of all I had to catch the frogs, and that in itself was an experience.
As every frogleg gourmet who works for his own fare knows, the most lucrative time to collect a meal is at night. The best way to collect fishing-size frogs is with a light and a small-mesh long handled net.
I am not enough of a “frogologist” to pick up a peeper and be able to identify it as a member of the family Hylidae. But then, I am sure that no bass can either — or cares to. I do know that a variety of frogs — cricket frogs, chorus frogs, bullfrogs, leopard frogs, and such — live under aquatic or semiaquatic conditions and do a fine job of filling the bill as bass bait.
Other creatures such as snapping turtles and, in some parts of the country, water moccasins have the same design on frogs, and on a warm summer night the collector has to be very careful as to where he puts his hands and feet. For fishing with live frogs, someone devised a harness that would let the bait swim unhampered. I found only one problem with this rig: the harness is heavy enough that it taxes the strength and endurance of the amphibian and eventually sinks him.
I have had my best live-frog action on the surface, by sliding a hook through the skin behind the head and casting the bait close to a lily pad or other floating object. The frog swims to it, climbs on top, and sits there awhile. Then I pull it into the water and let it swim again to the object.
Any bass within a dozen feet of this action can see the movements of the frog. If none comes to investigate, I try another likely spot.
Man carries on a running battle with insects. He fights them in his garden, on his crops, around his flowers and shrubbery, and in the wilds when gnats. mosquitoes, or flies descend upon him in swarms.
On the other hand, man occasionally cultivates insects — or environments that produce insects. One such instance oc curs when a fisherman plants a catalpa tree to grow a crop of worms for bait.
Of the approximately 100 U.S. species of sphinx moths, so shaped and with such speed that they are sometimes known as hawk moths, one species pre fers the leaves of the catalpa tree. This insect lays its eggs on the catalpa leaves. where they hatch out and spend much of the summer feeding on the foliage of the home tree.
The larva is one to three inches long and generally green, though various species may have other colors. It has a vicious-looking but harmless spine on its tail and is often known as the horn worm. This worm, tough and elastic, is difficult for a fish to pull off a hook.
An angler may be as jealous of his catalpa tree as he is of his favorite fishing hole. When he’s ready to go after bream, catfish, or crappies, he knocks a hatful of worms off the tree leaves with a long cane pole and collects them from the ground. As season’s end nears, he often gathers cartons of the larvae and places them in the refrigerator, where they remain in a state of suspended animation until the fisherman is ready to use them.
Every bream fisherman swears by his own special choice of larval bait. I had a friend who scorned all fish except the bluegill and all baits but the drone larvae of the honeybee. His most-court ed acquaintances were owners of apiaries who always kept him supplied with the immature drones.
“You can recognize the cells containing drones,” he said, “by the little bump on top. They’re best if you wait until just after the head forms. Then you sort of shave them out of the wax apartment with a sharp knife.”
He did not say what the other bees in the hive might be doing while he’s evicting their relatives, and thus far I have been too much of a coward to find out. But he sure believes in the honeybee drone, and he proves his faith by the exceptionally large bluegills that he shares with his friends, including me. Another cane-poler of my acquaintance lives even more dangerously. His choice of larval tidbits comes out of the nests of yellow jackets. While most other humans avoid these fiery-tempered little creatures, he seeks out their homes, which may be built under various conditions but usually have their largest apartments underground.
If an army of defenders swarms out, he may immobilize them by a generous dose of ether, one of the lethal insect sprays, or by saturating the ground around the nest with gasoline and liter ally burning the colony out of house and home. Then he collects larvae by the handful or hatful, depending on the size of the apartment.
“Sure,” he says, “these treatinents always leave a few unhappy jackets buzzing around, and I get stung plenty of times, but it’s sure worth it for the kind of fishing I get.”
Other bluegill anglers swear by the grubs of wasps or bald-face hornets — both of which make paperlike homes of varying shapes and sizes, and neither of which will relinquish their domiciles without some show of resistance.
One especially fine bait in this general category is the bonnet worm. It is known and highly prized by many of the Deep South swamp fishermen who know where and how to find it.
The bonnet is a type of water lily whose leaves thrust above the surface of the water. The worm’s hideout is in the top of the stem where it joins the leaf. A small opening at this spot indicates that the stem has been invaded. The “swamper” peels the stem back to find a slender worm that is irresistible to any of the panfish cruising around the bonnet patches.
One of my favorite natural baits on a trout stream is the hellgrammite, which is the larva of the dobsonfty. It is a vicious-appearing little creature that looks a bit like a scorpion but is nonpoisonous, though it can bite. The hellgrammite is aquatic and often found clinging to the underside of a sub merged rock or in a pile of half drowned debris.
Only once have I seen this bait abundant. The best haul I ever made came after I accidentally flipped over a flat stone on a small sandbar bordering a trout stream. A hellgrammite was bliss fully reposed there, and I began to examine similar rocks on the bar. Every other stone produced one of these creatures.
The stream held rainbows, small mouth bass, and Coosa bass, all of which had rejected my artificial offerings. The hellgrammites turned the trick. Hooked through the tough prothorax shield and fished in swirling eddy waters, they paid a most-satisfactory dividend in all three species, the largest fish going 2 % pounds.
The hellgrammite’s tough body kept it from being immediately mutilated, and each larva was good for several fish before it was chewed out of commission. Several times since then, I have looked for hellgrammites under similar circumstances and have found a few. But I soon discovered that the skunks and raccoons knew about the sandbar hotspot too, for at the height of the season many of the sandbar rocks had been flipped over before I arrived on the scene.
Earthworms, nightcrawlers, garden hackle — whatever you choose to call them — these lowly tillers of the soil were probably among the first living creatures that man used for bait after he had developed that form of the fish hook with which we are familiar today. Worms are the first bait used by most rural youngsters and many urban ones as well.
As a youngster I dug up enough acres to have kept the family in fresh vegetables. But I suppose they were just as satisfied that I supplied the makings of many a fish dinner instead.
I learned early that though you might have to go to certain places at certain times of the year to collect such baits as crayfish, catalpa worms, and penni winkles, earthworms are nearly every where and you need only know how to find them.
At a reasonably early age I threw away my worm shovel. That happened when an old Cracker friend showed me the art of “grunting” worms. When I asked if I could dig for some fish bait around his place, he hitched up his suspenders, spat a stream of tobacco juice at a lizard that was looking us over
from the top of a fence post, and declared, “Wal now, diggin’ fer them is work, and I’m agin that. But I might be talked into helping ye grunt a few.”
He picked up his ax, found a piece of plank a couple of feet long, and sharpened one end. Then, putting the ax over his shoulder, he strolled with me leisurely down to one corner of the pasture. There was hardly a square foot of ground there that did not have two or more worm casts in it.
The farmer drove his sharpened stake into the ground until it was tightly set. Getting down on his knees, he scraped the broad side of his ax against the top of the board with an action that made a rumbling noise and caused the earth around the stake to vibrate.
I’m sure my eyes popped when big worms began to crawl out of the ground in a 10-foot circle around the peg. There were so many that I filled a quart can with them.
“Let’s try another spot,” I suggested.
He regarded me with one eye half closed.
“Ye got enough there now,” he said, “to last ye two fishin’ days. There’ll be more here when ye need ‘um. They ain’t goin’ nowhars.”
Since then I’ve grunted many a worm on my own. It may be effectively done with metal on wood or wood on wood. About the only requirement is that it be done in a low spot, preferably damp, with an abundance of worm casts. Best results come when the ground is warm and the worms are close to the surface.
Many minnow fishermen I know prefer to get their own bait. When I was growing up, we would take baitfish with a seine made by splitting open a burlap bag to form one long strip and fastening the ends to poles. This seine took many a chub and stone roller out of the small shallow creeks around home.
Seining the old way for minnows is illegal in many states now, so minnow fishermen have devised several types of traps in which to catch their bait.
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One that I have found effective is a simple glass jar, in either half-gallon or gallon size, with a large mouth. A wire funnel leads from the mouth down into the baited jar. Minnows are able to find their way through the narrow funnel opening to where the bait is but can seldom discover the way out.
Another effective trap is a hoop four or five feet in diameter and covered with a fine-mesh net. Breadcrumbs are sprinkled on the water around a dock until minnows learn to congregate there to feed. When the angler is ready to catch his bait, he lowers a foot or two under the surface the mesh-covered hoop, which is suspended from a hoist or arm rigged to the dock. He sprinkles the breadcrumbs at the regular time. And when minnows collect to eat the breadcrumbs on the surface, he simply raises the net and picks up the baitfish. Getting fish bait can be delightful. Sometimes it’s more relaxing and enjoyable than the fishing itself.