For the Birds – Find the Birds, Find the Fish!
By Frank Sargeant, Editor
from The Fishing Wire
Searching for the birds may seem a roundabout way to go bass fishing, but from now through March, it’s a highly successful tactic on many lakes in the southern half of the nation.
Diving gulls
An assortment of sea gulls migrate into this region each winter as cold drives them south, and many settle on the larger freshwater impoundments due to the large shad populations. The birds know how to take advantage of the feeding behavior of largemouths, white bass and stripers–they watch for striking fish from aloft, then swoop in and grab injured baits from the surface.
During a major flurry, they may form what some anglers call a “white tornado” of birds whirling over the school. Find one of these events and throw any sort of shad-imitating lure into the midst and it’s instant fish.
But even when there are only a few birds diving–or when there’s a flock sitting on the water–the birds are well worth checking out. Often they rest right above the school of bait, just waiting for the bass and other species to go to work and drive them to the top where they can get at them.
Anglers with sonar can ease up to areas where birds are resting and graph the depths below to see if there’s a large school of bait under them. If so, these spots are well worth fishing, because the birds don’t often hang around bait that does not have some predators close by to push them to the top now and then.
Two bass at a time
Though topwater lures are usually not thought of as winter baits, they can be effective when fished around bass feeding on bait schools. Noisy lures like the One-Knocker Spook, Sexy Dawg and Pop-R can all be effective at times.
More often, though, sinking lures are a better choice, and suspending baits like the Rapala Shadow Rap can be ideal. Swimbaits–jig heads with long soft plastic swimmer tails, can also be effective, as are “rattlebaits” or lipless crankbaits.
And, if the fish are deep, heavy-weight lures like the Rapala Jigging Rap, the Hopkins Spoon and other lures that can be jigged vertically do the job.
The nice thing about finding fish under birds is that the bass may not be on the usual “community holes”, and so are more inclined to feed than those that see 30 or 40 lures a day.
Fishing around cormorants does not seem to work, it should be noted. Cormorants are able to dive below the surface and chase the bait like predatory fish, and this seems to run the gamefish off–maybe because the cormorants are not above latching on to smaller bass when they get the chance.
Fishing under gulls, however, is frequently productive–when nothing else is working, it’s often a great way to put fish in the boat.