Use catalpa worms for top of the line bait to catch bream, catfish
I grew up in a fishing world — hunting, too, to be honest — that was seriously focused on bringing home something to eat.
People ran trotlines on the river and filled up ice chests with as many fish as they could hold, and I never saw a fish fillet that didn’t come out of a box until I was out of college and fishing alone on Lake Livingston.
Because things were so heavily weighted toward catching lots of fish and taking them home, there were bait houses in town, out on the water and even along the highway. People raised their own red wigglers, picked up nightcrawlers after it rained, and raided webs and wasp nests for caterpillars and larvae.
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I can remember more than one clapboard Panola County house that burned down when people tried to burn out a big old wasp nest that was hanging under the eaves of the building. Folks used to wrap an old rag around the end of a cane pole and poke it up against those giant nests to force the adult wasps away so they could raid the larvae out of the nest.
And the first time my granddad stopped and bought a bucket of redfin minnows at a bait shop/gas station/country grocery store at River Hill in Panola County, I couldn’t wait to stick a gold hook through the back of one of them and catch some big old white perch. We called crappies white perch.
But the top of the line fish bait, good for big bream, catfish on a trotline or goggle eye in a slough off the river, had to be catalpa worms. Country folk bastardized that into “catava worms,” but that didn’t change their effectiveness.
The worms are actually the caterpillar form of the catalpa sphinx moth, and they grow in a huge web well up into the tree, usually starting in mid-June and running into early July. That would mean they’re growing now if you happen to have access to a tree and can get them out of the web and into a bait box.
Old-timers always placed the worms in neat layers covered in corn meal and placed them in the freezer. Then all it took was to haul them out and rig them up. The worms would thaw out on the way to the lake or pond, and you just worked them up onto a hook and dropped them into lake spots.
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The first fish I caught on a catalpa worm was a really nice goggle eye that grabbed the worm the instant I dropped it down against the trunk of a sweet gum tree that was standing in shallow water in a private lake I was fishing. He gave me a good old time before I could land him on the rotted old cane pole I was using.
After that I went tree to tree along the banks of that lake without catching a single other fish. That was OK, though, because that was one of my dad’s favorite fish to eat and he got a kick out of it when we brought it home. Nearly too big to scale and fry whole, I remember chowing down on that fish since I got first dibs having caught it myself.
If you can find a catalpa tree around your neighborhood it would be worth it to ask your neighbors for the right to pull down any webs you see up in the tree and save those caterpillars for your next fishing trip.
Maybe go to Lady Bird Lake or Lake Austin, both home to some pretty good bream fishing, or Fayette County Lake, where there are good bream beds in the shallow water between the shoreline and the grass beds that grow around the lake.
You’ll be glad you did.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Catalpa worms are best bait for catching catfish and bream
