Not everything can be bought, not everything is available at any time of the year, day and night. This mainly applies to natural, live bait. A nature connoisseur will quickly find out, where and what bait can be found. Such an angler cannot be distracted then, while on holiday the worms taken with them will greet him with a foul smell.
For example, I have already fished with great success using grasshoppers as bait. Determining their whereabouts is not difficult. All you have to do is prick your ears and you know, where in the "grass squeaks".
The warmer and nicer the weather, the easier it is to find these agile insects. On cool and rainy days, they hide like this, that all searches are fruitless. Places covered with thick grass turn out to be especially "hunting", which gives them a good shelter. You can talk about great happiness, if such a colony lives in the vicinity of a water reservoir. It is enough to make her run towards a lake or stream, and the horses falling into the water can only be picked up.
The search for earthworms is a separate chapter. I could tell a long story, how often I searched for them without success and how much effort they cost me. Compost cannot be found everywhere, manure or rotting plant residues, guaranteeing easy living conditions for worms or earthworms. In dry weather, we'll find them soonest, where the humus is covered with a hard layer of earth and under the well-trodden paths between garden beds. Plump garden soil, sand or gravel are less interesting places. Earthworms do not hide as deep in the ground as worms, but they are less "efficient" in fishing due to their high hardness. This can also be an advantage, but only in cases, where we have grounds to judge, that the small fish will nibble on the bait from the hook before the larger fish have time to notice it. We also have good chances of finding worms in the marshy area, at the shores of water reservoirs, under rotten boards and under stones. The so-called eel is an excellent bait for eels, which can be found in the swampy and peaty banks of rivers.
Catching worms at night with a flashlight is also effective. When approaching rosewoods, we move very carefully and be careful, so that our bait does not get directly into the beam of the flashlight (this causes her to run away immediately). In the absence of rainfall, the area of our night search should be poured over with water. The addition of suds or formalin to the water and pouring it over the soil causes the worms to come to the surface almost immediately. The most effective, however, is catching worms at night after natural rainfall. Then they crawl out of their burrows to the surface of the earth in mass because their "home" has been flooded with water. I was also a witness to successful trapping of worms using electricity. However, I advise against using this search method, there were fatal accidents at the same time. However, there is no danger when digging worms. After hitting the ground and shaking it strongly both ways, the spade also brings good results. Break the soil lumps into small pieces. All you need to do then is pick up the worms lying at your feet. In worm-poor areas, especially in the mountains, where you can unsuccessfully dig "whole mountains", I limit myself to searching in decaying cow 'mines'. Their edges should be slightly loose from the ground, and the center is light and dry. It often helped me in a difficult situation, because inside I found "lively" worms, in the place where the "mine" meets the ground. The most famous worm here is 3 cm larva, the so-called "red worm".
