To Catch a Crappie, Think Like a Turkey

Trout Whisperer posted on August 12, 2009 11:47 :: 4113 Views

You ever get the chance you should watch a flock of turkeys work over a patch of woods. They glean the forest floor of anything from grouse eggs when in season, to snakes. Acorns, insects, berries or seeds are on their roving menu plan. If they don’t find something they start scratching the earth for worms but they scour the countryside in there walk about circuitous feeding rounds.

Deer nibble here and there and meander around. Rabbits nip at their favorite greens. Ruffed grouse will fly to feed on a specialized diet and I don’t see a lot of mallards in my part of the country suddenly eating perch just because they swim in the lake. Not so with turkeys. If it’s in front of them, they eat it. I found a fish that eats like a turkey. It’s called the crappie.

I like crappies for that very reason. You can hang a worm, minnow, or leech in front of them and they eat it. Fake scented baits, sinking flies or marabou jigs are not safe in crappie infested waters. You find there under water lair in a lake and they bite. No may fly hatch problem. Cold fronts may drive them deeper, but they feed. Hot weather just makes them paper mouths all the more willing to pull your bobber down.

They school up just like a flock of birds too. You get one; cast, there is another right back in almost the same spot. Ten A.M. tom turkey’s mill right across the same open field just about everyday rain or shine. Find a school of crappies and you can come back day after day, almost year after year to the same hole and that’s a fish habit I can sink my teeth into.

It’s not a scientific fact that crappies are more open water acclimated because exceptions occur but just off the weed lines in the deeper water concentrates the crappies where the aquatic vegetation draws the bluegills and sunnies. It’s also been my personal experience that due to this aversion to weedy cover crappies suffer less from White grub and Neascus which seems to be more prevalent in sun fish, bluegills, and perch that really hover in the cover.

Crappies have a delicate fillet. Crappies in my opinion have to be at the top of the table fare with respect to white flaky fillets. You can eat platter after platter and get stuffed on them without all the dressing the big bird requires. It may not be the big bird season, but if you want to catch a mess of crappies, try thinking like a turkey. Folks tell me I do all the time.

The trout whisperer

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