Night Crawlers for Fishing

As strange fetishes go, it's hardly in the league with putting silk stockings on sows, but I have to confess that I enjoy fondling night crawlers.

Well, that's not true. Actually, I enjoy the results of impaling them. Night crawlers are nature's finest fish bait. There is nothing that slithers, swims or crawls even in the same league as the night crawler!

I know I kept Missouri's Master Angler records for nearly 20 years and more than 4,000 anglers can't be wrong. "Night crawler" appeared more times as the fatal lure than anything else. Not "worms," which could mean common garden variety earthworms, but "night crawlers" and there is nothing on earth a night crawler could be mistaken for.

They are to the average garden earthworm as a python is to a garter snake. It takes a big, mean fish to subdue one, which is why night crawler anglers catch big, mean fish. 

On the other hand, you rip a chunk off a night crawler and dangle it in front of small fish and they go into a feeding frenzy, probably a fit of revenge. Night crawlers are as close to a quarter stick of dynamite as you can get and still be legal.  

Dirt is what I had under my fingernails from digging in a bait can a long time before I had chenille there from tying woolly worms. Purists scorn those who use bait as "pork chop fishermen," but Izaak Walton readily resorted to the worm when all else failed.

Back in the mid-1600s, Ike wrote, "there be also of lob-worms, some called squirrel-tails, a worm that has a red head, a streak down the back and a broad tail, which are noted to be the best, because they are the toughest and most lively, and live the longest in the water; for you are to know that a dead worm is but a dead bait, and like to catch nothing compared to a lively, quick stirring worm."

Night Crawlers: A Great Bait!

Ike's lobworm sounds suspiciously like a night crawler to me and if there is anything a night crawler does well it is quick stirring.

Country churchyards are an excellent place to find night crawlers stepping out after a shower. But a country churchyard, in the dark of the moon, with a ghostly wind sighing through the cedars, is spooky for even the most disbelieving. It wouldn't hurt to wear garlic and carry a cross. You never know...

A favored method of bringing night crawlers to the surface is to drive a metal stake in the ground and beat it with a hammer to create vibrations, either pleasant or unpleasant (no one knows but worms and they ain't talkin').      

Walton's lobworm is described as "a big fellow" and Charles Chenevix Trench, a delightful English angling writer, says a mixture of "mustard and warm water is said to bolt them like rabbits." There are more than 2,000 species of earthworms in the world, but the three most common in the United States are night crawlers, manure worms and the ordinary earthworm.

Though earthworms have more than twice the percentage of protein as a T-bone steak, I doubt any of us are going to be ordering "worm filet, medium rare, with a baked potato" any time soon.

Now I want you to consider this scene: You are in a country churchyard in the dark of the night banging a metal stake with a hammer when a sheriff's deputy pulls to a stop and fixes you with his spotlight.

"Whut you doon, boy?" comes a commanding voice, probably from just behind the muzzle of a .357 magnum.

If you can think up a better excuse than, "Just calling worms, sir," you'd better do it or buy your bait at the shop.