Minnows, leeches, or crawlers — why does the best walleye bait change with the season?

The old progression — minnows in spring and fall, leeches and nightcrawlers in summer — tracks both the fish's metabolism and the menu. In cold water, walleye are eating fish almost exclusively and moving slowly, and a minnow's profile and scent match what they are hunting; leeches meanwhile are barely active and look wrong. As water warms past the mid-teens °C (about 60 °F), invertebrates wake up, the walleye's diet broadens to include them, and a leech's undulating swim or a crawler's scent trail on a harness becomes the natural offering for fish grazing flats and edges. By fall the forage base is big young-of-year baitfish and the fish want calories, so it swings back to minnows — the bigger, the better. It is less a trick than matching the season's actual menu.

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