As we continue in our live fishing bait series we find ourselves touching upon some other wonderful live fishing bait that all true fishermen are sure to find useful.

This first one I remember using alot as a boy because they were so easy to hook. In fact, I have even had them hook themselves on a baitless hook. I kid you not.

Bluegills, they have a blueish gill flap with a black lobe. The bluegills and other sunfish, often called bream, are well distributed in North America.

Mottled Sculpins, known to some as mudlers or bullheads, have large pectoral fins and they live in mountain streams of the West and many eastern states and Canada.

Yellow Perch are most commonly found in the northern United States and Canada. They are identified by their yellowish tint and have 6-8 dark bars running top to bottom on their sides.

Rainbow Smelt are iridescent with silvery sides and adipose fin, a pointed snout and long narrow body. They have large teeth. An ocean species, although they have been stocked in many inland lakes in the northern United States and Canada.

Whenever you are buying live fishing bait avoid buying baitfish with damaged fins, reddish snouts or fungus growing on the body. Fungus grows as white cottony patches wherever scales and slime have been rubbed off. This indicates the have been handled too much.

You should also watch out for any with bulging eyes and blackened heads, as this too are signs of disease in most kinds of baitfish. But moving along…

Lets take a few minutes to discuss some other live fishing bait. For instance, did you know there were eight different kinds of common fishing worms?

Probably the most commonly used is the Nightcrawler, big and juicy, how can the fish resist them. But there are some others that may not be so well known to you by name.

We use many of them perhaps without realizing their different names like the Leaf Worm, Garden Worm, Red Wiggler, Gray Nightcrawler, Grunt Worm, and even the African Nightcrawler.

So you see there are numerous worms that we use for our live fishing bait. So with that said I will pause until the next post where I will continue with Live Fishing Bait -Part – 4. Be sure and check it out as I am sure you will enjoy it.

There are a lot of live fishing baits in this world and they all are broken down into many different categories. For instance, you are not likely to use a one inch minnow as your live bait if you are fishing for sharks in the ocean.

So you see there are some restrictions to what live baits you use and where you use them. Some baits are only available in certain areas or during certain times of the year, while others are simply not useful for one kind of catch, but extremely good for another.

We want to discuss things like minnows, and other baitfish, as well as things like crickets, frogs, toads, leeches and worms, crustaceans, salamanders and all sorts of flying insects.

Minnows are used for numerous reasons. Some minnows are chosen for their size, shape, activeness, sex, flash or color, even taste and smell. With so many decisions its a wonder anglers ever have time to get their bait in the water and this is just the decisions regarding the minnows and we still need to figure out our hook. But we will save that for a different topic.

Lets quickly go over minnows so you can identify them and perhaps even learn why some are chosen for one catch, but not the other. We will now identify the most popular thirteen minnows at your local bait shop.

Minnow Identification:

1) Fatheads, sometimes called mud-minnows or tuffies, have a short first ray on the dorsel fin and live in lakes and rivers throughout most of North America.

2) Creek Chubs look similar to the hornyhead chub, but have smaller scales and a dark spot at the front base of their dorsel fin. A very common stream minnow usually found in eastern North America and thrives in gravel bottom streams east of the rockies in the United States and southern Canada.

3) Bluntnose Minnows are more rounded at the nose than the fathead and have a dark band from the tail to eye and they live in the eastern half of the United States.

4) Horneyhead Chubs, also known as redtail chubs, have a lateral band that extends to the tail and they prefer gravelly streams from Wyoming to New York, south to Arkansas.

We will pause there and pick this up in our next post, so be sure and check back for Live Fishing Bait -Part – 2. I would strongly suggest you bookmark the website, or take this opportunity to sign up for my free RSS feed.