How Bass Move With The Seasons (4 of 12)

Tom: To understand the environments bass live in at different times of year, I went right to the expert, my friend, Dave Phillip. Dave has spent his life studying bass professionally as a biologist, and also chasing them with a fly rod.

Dave: Large mouth and small mouth bass are similar in a lot of ways, but they do have some subtle differences. In the springtime, as the water warms, they move into the shallows, one, to warm up so that they become more active, and they look for food items as well that are also trying to warm up. So minnows and frogs are along the banks in the springtime and they're looking for those. They also are moving into spawn. As the water temperatures warm up, they're done with spawning.

Small mouth tend to move into deeper, cooler water, more so than large mouths. Although, both you could get along the shallows at dawn and at dusk, the large mouths hang out in the lily pads and the weeds and the shallows all year-round in the sticks, et cetera. So they also tend to go into different types of water. Large mouths like darker, weedier, warmer water. Small mouths like cooler water, either flowing streams, or in deeper water off of rocky points. So in the heat of the summer, you need to look in deep water for small mouths, sometimes shallower water for large mouths. Back in the fall, then they'll get more active in the shallows and move in and feed heavily, getting ready for winter.

So they can be off deep points, feeding on minnows, following minnows up at night into the shoreline, et cetera. So it depends on the time of the day, the time of the season, which species you're looking at. But you'll still be able to catch fish.