Has anyone seen them lately? We had three in neighborhood growing up and we would raid the catalpa worms for bait. I haven’t seen one in awhile
Catalpa trees……,,
- Thread starter champdawg.sixpack
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I was an adult before I knew they weren’t catobble worms. And no, I haven’t seen the trees or the worms since I was a kid.
We have some scattered across the farm but they are old and the worms apparently don’t like the older trees. Know someone in town that has a younger tree and it has worms all over it.
I thought it was catawpa. Haven’t seen one since my grandpa had one in Vicksburg. Used to get tons of bait from it. He’d freeze them and thaw them when needed.
We would cut them in half. They stayed on the hook very well. All species of fish craved them but mostly Chanel cats
Used to live in the Arkansas delta when I was little. Dad would carry a ladder in the truck bed to get up in a few trees he knew of and drop them so I could put them in the bucket. Channel cats would tear them up. He also built a "crawdad rake" to go rake the ditches on the edge rice and bean fields for bait. We caught everything from crawdads to "rice slicks", minnows, turtles andsnakes. Everything but the reptiles went on the trot line.
There are a lot of things I haven't seen since I was a kid, catawpa trees with the worms are one of them. I grew up in the country and still own acreage out in the country. These things used to be all over the place, now....not so much.
other things that seem scarce or gone:
honesuckle
blackberries growing wild
roley poleys
those orange and black crickets that my grandma called soldier boys
fireflies/lightning bugs
other things that seem scarce or gone:
honesuckle
blackberries growing wild
roley poleys
those orange and black crickets that my grandma called soldier boys
fireflies/lightning bugs
Let me add hearing quail in the wild.
Damn I have not thought of nor seen those orange and black crickets since about 1983.
They were abundant seemingly in the summers growing up in MS
That’s a good list, although we do see several of those around our house.
Fun fact, roley poleys are not insects, they’re crustaceans.
Few weeks back, the lightning bugs were out in force where I live. Can’t remember the last time I saw them before that.
I'm seeing a resurgence of lightning bugs. 6-7 years ago, they seemed scarce. Now I'm seeing a lot more.
I have 500 frozen in my freezer as we type. They are very good for catching Blue Cats. Here is a tip I learned to keep them on the Hook....Tie them on the hook with some very thin elastic bands (like you put in clothing) only cost like 5$ for 100 feet will last you for years. you can catch several with the same worm a lot of the times. Been doing this for years. works very well in fast river water.
I have honeysuckle, wild blackberries, and fireflies around my property. I hate what honeysuckle does to fences but love the smell.
my dad has 4 and there are several on my grandfather's old place that we still on. We still use them for catfish bait.
you have to cut them back every so often. We have cut 25 foot trees back to bare stumps 5 feet tall and they come back and the new growth does attract them better.
ETA: The below is from my tree bug nephew,
if anyone around is spraying a pyrethroid based spray for mosquitoes. This is, or at least what used to be, what cities and counties sprayed for mosquitoes.
Also you need flowering plants nearby for the moths to feed on.
Also if you can get some worms from another tree and put them on your trees they will start to breed there.
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I was in the barber shop a couple weeks ago and reading one of those farm bulletins or newspapers that the MS ag department puts out and there were trees and worms for sale in the classified ads in there if anybody is looking.
I know one thing. There's no shortage of privet hedge.
Dang hadn't thought about those brown and orange grasshoppers in awhile. what about wild plums? used to be everywhere. Persimmon tress also.
yep and the Bob White are nowhere to be found.
yep and the Bob White are nowhere to be found.
Catalpa worm production has fallen prey to armadillos it seems. Armadillos eat grubs, and they've impacted established catalpa worm cycles tremendously.
When I was a boy, the only thing that separated my family from commercial fishermen was we never sold a fish. We'd spend summers filling freezers with catfish and have regular fish fries yearround. My dad planted a little orchard of catalpa trees - maybe 20 trees or so - and kept them pruned so that the worms could be easily collected by hand while standing on the ground. To get worms started on the trees, he found fresh hatches on leaves from trees throughout a nearby river bottom, snapped those leaves off, then brought them to the orchard, propped them among the orchard trees' leaves and let the worms mature all the way through on those trees.
When the worms (I know they're really caterpillars) mature, they burrow into the ground at the base of their trees, become moths, breed and lay eggs on catalpa tree leaves to continue the cycle. Armadillos snuffling along spread throughout Mississippi in the past few decades though, and they eventually wiped out our catalpa worm factory by eating the grubs and halting the cycle.
I jumped a nice covey of bob whites north of Vicksburg on my property last fall. I was surprised to say the least.
They were all around Jackson Street in the 1990's, I think they liked the ivy because once that was removed I never remember seeing them again.
I had a Persimmon tree in my backyard until 2 years ago, it just didn't come back after a winter freeze. It was fun when the persimmons were ripe as the tree would always have some sort of wild animal in it. I saw possum, racoons, and rats. Also, my dog would eat the ones that fell to the ground.
Wild plums and crab apples were the Sour Patch candy of my generation.
When my grandmother passed away we were cleaning out here freezer and there was about a dozen milk cartons full of them in there. I'm not sure how long they were in there but my grandfather passed roughly 8 years before she did. I quickly called dibs and took them home. It took me a few years to use them all but they still caught fish just as if they were pulled from the tree. It was a somber day when I thawed out the the last carton. I thought about not using them but I got a feeling that he put them in the freezer just for me. I spent that day reminiscing on those hot afternoons fishing with him after checking cows at the same farm pond we used to fish.
I still have my dad's crawdad rake. Dang that man loved to fish.
The explosion of wild quail out from under foot is one of the great experiences in nature. They've disappeared from rural setting largely thanks to changes in agricultural practices.
Quail require a series of adjacent environments, and annual or semi-annual burning provides one of the three. Pronounced hedgerows provide another one of the three. With wall-to-wall row cropping getting rid of hedgerows and the discontinuing of small pasture-keeping meaning fields that were regularly burned no longer being burned, the quail habitat just isn't there, even though many areas that "used to" have coveys of quail and that look just like they always did no longer have them.
Quail have lots of enemies - everything under the sun, from fire ants to coyotes to little mites that get in their eyes kills them - so there no one neat answer to "where are the quail," but the loss of habitat has always seemed the most elemental to me.
Mr. Jimmy Bryan has turned a big swath of Blackland Prairie into a wild quail factory and experiment station northeast of West Point - plus it's a really nice place. Check them out at Prairie Wildlife.
They do preserve quail shoots, but they're growing a lot of wild quail too. Scores and scores of healthy coveys on the place. They do a lot of shotgun games there too - if you like skeet or sporting clays but haven't tried helice, you owe it to yourself to take a group of buddies and go do that sometime.
We have 500 acres in Holmes County. Every year, we buy quail and release them. We now have several coveys and several more have migrated and established in the land next to ours. I grew up hunting quail because there were no deer here in the early 70s and we always had several bird dogs.
It's not possible for folks coming along now to appreciate how there used to be no deer. I grew up in Lee County and, if anyone saw a deer track somewhere, it was a big deal. There was no turkey season because there were zero turkeys. All my mentors had once kept bird dogs but by the time I came along in the late 70s, early 80s, the quail were growing very scarce around home.
I have a persimmon tree in my back yard in town. There’s some scattered across the different patches of woods we have. The biggest issue for them is competition from the other bigger trees.
I hate that I can't experience wild quail hunts like my father did growing up.
Jimmy has an amazing place and has funded some of the most progressive quail research through MSU. I've always heard that millionaires make deals on golf courses and billionaires make deals on wild quail hunts. PW is getting close to those prices for their hunts. I know several people that hunt out there and last I heard they are getting away from set birds for wild quail hunts.
Hearing a bobwhite whistle ranks right up there with hearing a turkey gobble because of its (unfortunate) rarity now. Had a covey or two around the family farm in Simpson County several years back but haven't encountered them lately. I just got into a position this year to start a prescribed burn rotation (2-3 yrs) that will hopefully encourage some bobwhite establishment.
You can cut them to a height that lets you pick the worms by hand, just bending the limbs down. You can cut them back pretty aggressively and prune them to suit you. They're pretty vigorous, hearty, fast-growing trees.
One of the interesting off-the-record things I've heard from the folks out there is about the hunters' enthusiasm for wild quail hunting. They've had occasionally-huntable wild quail populations for some time, but it turns out lots of people who say how much they miss hunting wild quail didn't remember how much harder you have to hustle to do that.
Wild quail coveys don't always hold their ground like they do in the Currier & Ives oil paintings - they move, they walk quickly, they retreat - they flush way before a hunter is standing over them. Hunting wild quail is a lot like hunting coveys of wild Comanches, but for the fact they don't shoot back. If a covey is never molested, I'm sure it would be more apt to sit still, but once a covey has been shot into a time or two, the birds get educated just like wild turkeys.
Getting a limit of quail from wild coveys requires a good bit of hustle and giddy-up on the part of the hunters, who'll be shooting faster targets that flush from farther away, that are harder to find and point and a lot of trouble to bring to the bag. No dawdling tolerated.