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You can guess what happens if a big, juicy, creamy bardi grub happens to drop into Mr Murray's strike zone. No prizes for guessing he'll deal with the tasty grub with great ferocity.
The angler on the other end of the line will soon know when Mr Murray has struck the bait. He'll feel the line get well and truly hammered by the mauling fish as he takes a real liking to your bardi grub.
Often, Murray cod hit your bait so hard they push the bardi grub up the line! And the best time to find out if your bardi bait is working is round late afternoon to dusk and sunrise.
Hooked bardi grubs produces a small 'oil slick' that apparently attracts any fish in the vicinity! Rubbing bardi grubs into dirt also makes for a great berley mixture that works in lots of situations. It can be useful when you're angling at the top end of a structure, a boat or the riverbank.
Keen freshwater anglers wouldn't hesitate to take this tempting and appetizing bait when targeting Murray cod or golden perch (yellowbelly). Unfortunately though, carp are partial to them also so they can be an unwanted by-catch.
The only hassle is finding your bardi grubs (or witchetty grubs as they are also called), the rest is usually a foregone conclusion. Hot fishing action and hook ups are usually assured when you use this great bait.
Collecting this highly sought after native fish killer bait can be an arduous and sometimes frustrating task, but it's worth it if you can round up 20 to 50 bardi grubs that are fresh. You can either use them fresh, or preserve and stored them in the fridge or freezer for later use.
The best time to seek out this prize freshwater bait is during summer when they pupate. But for those fishos who don't have the time to go grubbing, frozen and fresh bardi grubs can be purchased from some inland sports stores for $1.50 to $2 each.
Tools Of the Trade:
The tools required to extract this top bait from their bark-lined tunnels are simple: a grub wire, a spade, a bucket, some water to wash your hands and plenty of patience!
Finding the rusty coloured shells around sugar, ghost, red and grey gums, yellow box, mallee and wattle trees is a sure sign you're in the right spot. The shells tell you the larvae have turned to pupae in their cocoons and have flown, probably during March and April when they emerge from their tunnels after rains.
What you have to keep in mind is that not all the larvae will 'fly' at the same time after rains; many remain in their tunnels and can be captured.
At the river, the best place to search for "grub trees" is on sandy hillocks, which often are some distance away from the riverbank and the immediate floodplain. Otherwise, the eucalypts can be found on travelling stock reserves, in farmers' paddocks, along the roadside or even in the town area. On many occasions, the grub tree is a lone stand.
Collection Tips:
You begin collecting bardi grubs by chipping away the top 5cm of soil, leaves, bark and litter from around the base of the grub tree. Chip in a row, working from the base to the outer overhanging branches.
Once the tunnel caps are shaved off with the spade leaving the perfectly, cylindrical bark- lined tunnels exposed. Sometimes the exposed holes are in staggered rows; other times they can be quite patchy.
As you chip away in rows at the sandy surface be sure to place the dirt and litter over the previous row, leaving no bare patches beneath the grub tree. This practice apparently encourages the bardies to return to the same tree. It also prevents soil erosion and leaving an aesthetically pleasing appearance around each tree.
State Forest managers are often appalled when they see large, naked exposed areas left behind by fishos who have not gone to the trouble of covering over their chipping area.
Only chipping around about one third of the grub tree each time ensures conservation is being observed. This way you are leaving some for next year as well.
By tapping at the opening of the hole with your finger you can listen for a hollow echo that will tell if the larval grub is at "home". If you hear a dull sound it's likely that the larva has turned to a pupa, vacated its hole and flown away.
As the grub wire reaches the bottom of each tunnel (some of which can go down to over 1m!) a half turn is all that is needed from the corkscrew coil to lodge itself into the bardi grub and be raised from its sanctuary.
Don't twist the grub wire too much or you'll end up with lot of damaged bardi grubs! Often you'll retrieve the dark pupa in its cocoon, and these can be used as a standby fishing bait too.
Occasionally you can receive a nip on the finger from a strong set of sharp mandibles; after all bardi grubs can chew through skin as well as tree roots!
Also, be careful not to get body fluids on your hands because you can get a skin irritation from the bardi grubs' tiny hairs. Hence the need to take some water to wash your hands afterwards.
Once, some fisho mates and I were camping at the Murrumbidgee River when several bardi moths flew into our campfire at night. I managed to rescue one of them before they were all burnt alive. I placed it on a hook and cast into the snags, and then attached a bell. The result was a 5kg Murray cod that same night!
Many fishos have a grub wire that has a wide corkscrew coil for large holes at one end, and a narrow corkscrew coil for narrow holes at the other. That's because not all holes are the same size.
There is a commercially made grub wire that utilises a bicycle brake cable (which sells for $20-$25) that has a noose. The idea of this device is simple: the bardi grub is retracted from its tunnel by its head (or sometimes by its bottom!) without being injured and kept alive for some time. I use both devices as each works quite successfully.
If you're lucky enough to be in one of our State Forests when the river roads are being graded you'll be very happy! When the tractor blade scraps the road surface the top 5cm to 10cm of soil is scraped off, thereby exposing the bardi grub holes. However you'll have to move fast because no sooner are the caps scraped off than the larvae are furiously recapping them!
Traditional Ways:
The aborigines collected bardi grubs, but in a different way to us. That's because they weren't using them for food mostly, rather than fishing. If they did use the bardi for bait, they would place them in a fish trap to snare their fish.
The aborigines used the larvae, the pupae and the moth to feed their tribes. The larvae was eaten raw for its flavour and high fat content, or cooked by placing it on warm ashes.
Once the earth was scraped below the level of the ground aborigines would use bulrush stems and hooked sticks to retrieve the larvae, once it had been irritated into biting. The rising to the surface by the pupae made it easy for the aborigines to gather them in large numbers without the need for digging.
Wired for Action:
Now we get to making a grub wire. These are best made from an old car's speedo cable of at least one metre length. At one (or both ends) you need to solder a small coil of high tensile wire that has been fashioned by winding the wire (or wires) around some round steel rod or dowel.
For the 'one end only' bardi grub wire use a 1cm diameter; for a double end make the second coil 1.5cm. It's handy to tie a bit of material to your grub wire to help find it as it can become lost in the bush.
At the end of your day's grubbing, it's handy to give the corkscrew coil point(s)a sharpen with a file so you're ready for next time.
Storing the Grubs:
Unless you're going to use your bardi grubs fresh that day you'll need to preserve them in some way for future use.
I like to blanch 15 to 20 bardi grubs at a time for 30 seconds in boiling water, leave them on the sink to dry for a few minutes before putting them into a jar of brine (salt and water) and placing in the fridge. They should be dated and ready for use when you next go fishing. Stored this way the grubs will stay firm and not lose their colour.
Another mate of mine blanches his bardi grubs for 30 seconds in water, then packs them into Chinese takeaway containers and freezes them. It seems to work!
Other mates like to put their bardi grubs straight into containers of vinegar and water and placed in the fridge, while someone else I know likes to drop them into simmered milk for 30 seconds, before drying them and packing them away in the freezer.
Bardi grubs taken with a "lasso" can be kept alive for weeks in the vegetable compartment of your fridge in containers with air holes inserted and some soil as well. They go in to suspended animation and are the bees' knees when bardi grubs are hard to get in winter!
Another method is to place the live bardi grubs into cigarette packets (that have the silver lining intact) then place them in the fridge where they will keep alive for several weeks. It's sometimes common to find they have spun a web around themselves!
Another method is to wrap the fresh bardi grubs individually in paper, put in a plastic container then placed in the crisper section of the fridge.
Damaged bardi grubs should be used as quickly as possibly to snare a Murray cod, or golden perch. Alternative taken them home and preserved them using one of the methods described above. What ever you do, don't waste your bardi grub, they are too valuable!
FACT BOX
Bardi grubs are primarily stem borers and stem feeders belonging to several species of goat moths and ghost moths, and to the larger jewel beetles and the longicorns common to the Murray-Darling Basin of NSW and Victoria. They belong to the Family Hepialidae.
Large numbers of eggs are laid by the bardi moth and can exceed 18 000. The larvae can take up to 2 to 3 years to mature and pupate within these tunnels. The majority of bardi moths lay their eggs on or close to the same eucalypt under which they hatched; some fly away to lay their eggs elsewhere, however.
Bardi grubs are usually between 5cm to 10cm long, though some giants have been known to grow to 15cm.
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