Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 97, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 July 1904 — How to Dig Your Bait. [ARTICLE]

How to Dig Your Bait.

Choosing a piece of chocolate colored, rich looking soil, the woodcock dug some fifteen or twenty holes in this soil, an inch o'r two apart, with his bill. Then he began a kind of cake walk. He beat the earth with his wings; he rapped it with his bill sharply; leaping into" the air, he alighted, 'stiff and heavy, on his feet. Was the woodcock Insane? Evidently not. For now the noses of many inquisitive earthworms began to protrude from the holes the bird had drilled. The earthworms had heal’d the noise and they wished to know what the trouble was. They turned their heads slowly from side to side. The woodcock devoured them, one by one.

That is the way woodcocks get earthworms to eat, and fishermen may learn a lesson from the birds. If a fisherman will make a number of holes In the soil and then beat upon the earth with his knuckles the worms underneath will come up through the hole# to find but what is going on, and their capture will be easy.