The Doctor and I began our strange experiment by taking the cows out of our fishing hole. It was a poor move as it was a scorching mid-summer day, and an old bossy with half of it covered in cold mud came to the water’s edge and groaned in protest. But he had to go. We couldn’t keep him standing on one of our best bass holes.
We had business with Bass. I call them pasture bass because that’s where they feed, in water six to 36 inches deep at the edges of pastures. But it was not what you might think. We were there to catch bass, of course, but we had another, more important mission that I’ll tell you about in a minute.
We spent most of that morning catching frogs: big, small, brown and green frogs. The doctor, whose full name and title is George H. Wegman, MD, sometimes growled and threatened to go trout fishing. But he stuck with me, just as I stuck with him sometimes when I was tempted to go somewhere else. Now he was growling about my wedding system. The grass, he complained, was biting his bare feet, and the black mud seeping between his toes was giving him a strange sensation. But I had rejected the waders. In that heat you’ll make a shoe sweat in 100 yards.
“Why do we have to do this today?” he asked.
“Because by tomorrow there won’t be enough water in this pasture to wet the frog’s stomach,” I told him. “And besides I have to find out about frogs and bass.”
The water at the edge of the Wisconsin swamp was warm, but became cooler as it deepened. This helped. Cool the blood, I told the doctor. He said I was crazy, the blood doesn’t run hot unless a man is sick, and then told me to keep quiet. He stood silently and kept listening. “Think I heard a bass working where that fence comes into the water.” We both listened. I saw the crowd moving. “He’s over there,” I said, pointing. The doctor nodded.
I dug out the pile of frogs I was carrying in one of my wife’s old silk stockings, shook them out as they climbed up my wrist and arm, and closed my fingers on a nice thick sock. I waited for the bass to show their position again and then I threw the frog a couple of feet in front of the swaying stem. When he caught the frog, the sound that Bass made was like a cork being released from a jug.
I dug up another frog and threw it to the bass. It was a big, strong, green frog and it must have started swimming as soon as it came into the water. We couldn’t tell—the grasses were too tall—but they telegraphed the fish’s movements. As soon as the frog hit the water, it started moving, swam a dozen feet and stopped for maybe five seconds. Then there was that pop again.
“How many frogs will you feed him?” The doctor asked.
One more,” I said, putting my hand in the stocking. The next one was a brown one, and it must have landed right on top of that bass. Scared, the fish moved 15 feet away as fast as a snake’s tongue. He came back slowly. It took maybe five minutes, then at once we heard a splash and a “glug.”
“Now it’s your turn,” I said to the doctor.
He removed a weedless hook from the large bottom guide of his spinning rod and let it swing toward me. I caught hold of it and gently placed the hook on the lips of a small green frog.
“When he hits,” I instructed, “give him a few seconds before setting the hook.” The doctor looked at me the way a child looks when you tell him something he knows.
“And don’t fall right on top of him,” I warned.
“Take care of your frogs,” he said, and tossed a small green frog over my head.
It landed about three feet from where we had seen the last movement, but the line extended across the crowd and we heard sounds that sounded as if the frog was dangling its hind legs in the water.
This did not cause any hindrance in the bass. He took it quickly. The doctor waited, then he got harder and harder. Bas tied a bundle of leaves into a vase.
I ran to help and startled Bass into two cartwheels. The frog flew away, but the hook remained and so did the line. Soon I had a fish with gills. It was about a two-pounder, but we didn’t care about the size. That’s why we were not there. I hit Bais on the head with the doctor’s knife. He stiffened, his tail started shaking and then he became still. I cut it open and took out her stomach.
“It’s empty,” I said, holding it.
“I don’t believe it,” said the doctor. I handed her the stomach, and she expertly turned it inside out. There was nothing in it.
He suggested, “Maybe another fish came and took the frog I put in.”
We walked over to where Doc had set up the bass and wandered around in the crowd. I found a cut frog and handed it to the doctor.
The doctor said, “Every bone in his body is broken.” Almost all his skin had also come off.
“What do you think?” I asked
The doctor said, “Maybe it’s the same frog I hooked the bass with.” She handed it back to me, and I noticed that what little skin was left on it looked brown. The doctor had inserted the green frog.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “let’s try again.”
The doctor put the bass in the trout basket he was carrying. We went ahead 100 feet.
“I still think bass eat frogs,” said Doc.
“So do I, but why do we never catch a bass that has a frog in its stomach?”
“This may be because their digestive systems are able to decompose the frog very quickly,” the doctor said.
“The one you just caught didn’t have time,” I said.
The doctor said, “There might have been two bass there.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure anymore. All my life I have been convinced that bass eat frogs. Like many other fishermen, I have caught hundreds of black bass on baits that look like frogs or frogs.
Then Jim Shell of Neenah, Wisconsin, told me one day that he didn’t believe black bass eat frogs.
“Have you ever found a frog in a black bass?” he asked.
“Why, sure. Everyone has.”
But I wasn’t sure and I kept thinking about it. Did I ever find a frog in a bass’s stomach? Yes, last summer. But that frog was the one I was using for bait.
I stuck to my guns for a week. The bass had to eat the frogs. Why, frogs were the best bait in the world for largemouth. When they won’t take anything else they will take a frog. What were bass doing on pasture ponds and banks if they weren’t hunting frogs? Didn’t they always come to the coast in late autumn to fatten the frogs?
did they? The more I thought about it the less convinced I became. In fact, I don’t recall ever experiencing very good largemouth fishing in late autumn.
I wrote to Jim about it, and he wrote back: “Years ago I met an old Mississippi commercial fisherman who agreed that frogs were the No. 1 bait, but he said in all his experience he never found a frog in the belly of a black bass. I found bass a lot of things, from mud-hen (coot) chicks and feathers to rods, rocks, crabs, bullheads, Even dogfish and perch, but no frog or part of it. Frog.”
Even after that I wasn’t admitting anything – not publicly, anyway. But I started doing a little discreet investigation. The first thing I did was call Dr. Edward Schneeberger, head of fish management for the Wisconsin Department of Conservation.
“Bass eat frogs, right Doc?” “well now. . . .” There was a long pause. The doctor is a cautious man. “well now . . .” he repeated. “Bass eat almost anything and everything.”
“I know, but about frogs – do bass eat frogs?”
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think they do.”
This helped. “Sure, bass eat frogs,” said the doctor, “at least I think so. Haven’t you ever caught bass eating frogs?”
We fenced like this for a while longer. I had obviously lit some fire of doubt in his expert mind as well. So I went to the big book.
“The largemouth,” it wrote, “will attack almost anything… but its favorite foods are minnows, worms, insects, frogs and crawfish.”
There it was in black and white. But during that time I got a half-dozen letters from fisherman who agreed with Jim Shell—bass don’t eat frogs. I was astonished.
So I went bass fishing. My wife, Doc and I caught and landed 13 bass. Everyone’s stomach was empty except one. And there was a perch in it.
The next day I asked the question to William Dickenson, curator of zoology at the Milwaukee Public Museum, but he declined to do so. He went to the Illinois Survey of Natural History and quoted from his book on fishes: “…the stomachs of 16 black bass were examined, there were no frogs in any of them.”
This also did not solve the question. I went fishing again and caught seven bass. One had two crawfish in its stomach, another had a rat in its stomach, one had a rat in its stomach, and the stomachs of the remaining four were empty.
I was pondering these findings as I headed toward the pasture fence where the doctor and I had seen movement among the crowd. I threw a frog, but nothing happened. I threw two more. Which is the same. We went to that area. Our “bass” turned out to be a muskie that swam right between my legs.
While the doctor was laughing, I heard a fish splashing at the edge of the reeds where lily pads spread out in the water. I fed him five frogs before I got there with Doc’s hook.
It was a big fish and it troubled the doctor. It jumped twice, made a sound and wrapped the line around the stem of a pad. The line remained intact. I got soaked up to my neck because of that bass, but the water felt amazing.
By the time I managed to get the fish from slipping through the swamp to a finger higher ground, it was dead. I cut it open and examined its stomach. No frog.
“If they’re not eating frogs, what are they doing?” I asked the doctor.
The doctor said, “Maybe the bass hates frogs the way the mongoose hates snakes.”
“Then what about northern pike? Or trout or muskies or catfish? They’ll all be hit by frogs.”
Both of us were cooking by then. The sun was drawing water from the marsh so fast that you could almost see the level drop. We left the water to get my spinning rod, which I had propped up against a tree, and quickly made our way back to the lake shore. I went into water up to my neck. Calming down, I followed the dock to the marsh. “Let’s try another one,” I said.
We listened, watched and cheered until we found the second bass. We fed it four frogs and threw in a fork along with the fifth. The doctor immediately nails the fish, but it gets entangled in the weeds and his line breaks. As we walked towards the bass he heard us coming and tried to jump, thereby swallowing two frogs flying in the air.
I dived on the bass, finished it and opened it up. Its stomach was empty. By the time I did this, Doc was back with the two frogs he had spat out. They were skinned and mashed. It was hard to believe that he could have been so disfigured in such a short time.
“Maybe that’s your answer,” said the doctor.
“What?”
“When you hook a bass, whatever food is in its stomach comes out.”
“What about other things you find in the bass?”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s stop feeding the fish, and try to catch some instead.”
so did we. We collected five nice bass so we had something to hang on the fence for a photo. Then we left as the cows stood at the edge of the marsh looking into the cool water with longing eyes.
Read Next: Best Frog Bait for Bass
While we were lying in the hammock next to the hut, I told Doc that I thought I’d write to maybe 20 or 30 hotshot bass fishermen to see what they had to say about whether bass eat frogs.
“Why stop at 20 or 30?” The doctor asked.
“what do you mean?”
“I mean write a story about it for Outdoor Life. Then you’ll spread your problem to over a million readers, most of whom probably know a lot more about bass fishing than you do.”
I scoffed at my knowledge because, for once, the doctor had something. I wrote the story. Now that you’ve read it, what do you think? Do black bass eat frogs?
This story was originally published in the July 1953 issue of Outdoor Life.
