Bird food baits by Brian Mills

Ken Townley has written some fantastic pieces on these types of baits before, but this is my view of bird food baits…

The four bird food bait recipes I am about to give range from cheap to expensive, and all contain both or one of each Haith’s Nectarblend and Red Factor.

The first is a bait that I would use when I’m in need of plenty of bait or visiting a water that is full to the brim with carp (an ex match water would be a prime example) or when fishing a river for carp where, no matter how much bait you apply, the fish will not be staying around that long before moving onto pastures new. This simple mix is…

Base mix 1:

50 % Nectarblend or RedFactor
50 % Semolina

The Nectarblend or Red Factor are left unground as this helps with flavour leakage. In fact, all the following baits and all the baits I’ve ever made using these two superb ingredients I have never ground them down. In other words, they don’t require grinding.

Base mix 2:

The next recipe is one that I have posted on Haith’s Baits Facebook page  before and is a little bit more advanced than the previous one as, it does contain some fish meal, Robin Red and a few other goodies.

25% Red Factor
20% Nectarblend
20% Semolina
10% Robin Red (or any of the following: Robin Gold; Robin Orange; Robin Green)
10% Fishmeal
10% Lamlac
5% Liver powder

I will be honest here and state that I have never used this bait with the new range of Robins as, when I was using this bait only Robin Red was available. Also if you wanted to be different again omit the Robin Red and add Grandad Ted’s poultry spice.

To break down the inclusion of the last 3 ingredients: The fishmeal adds some food value, the lamlac adds solubility, nutrients and vitamins and the liver powder has always been a great carp attractor.

Base mix 3:

The next recipe is what some people will call an “in vogue” recipe as, it does contain nut meals, but I was using this recipe four to five years’ ago now. The recipe has changed slightly due to the fact that, if making this base mix up today I would use Haith's CLO and not the CLO I used back then (and also the use of peanut meal instead of flour).

20% Nectarblend
20% Red Factor
15% Vanilla meal
10% Lamlac
10% Semolina
10% Tigernut Flour
10% Peanut Flour
5% CLO

The combination of the vanilla, nut meals and lamlac give the base mix a sweet, nutty, creamy smell all of its own - add some of Nutrabaits’ creamy super sweet and you could almost eat the base mix yourself!

Base mix 4:

The origins of this base mix go back a lot of years (in fact over thirty) to when the majority of anglers were using milk protein based baits. The water I was fishing at the time was only dawn ‘till dusk fishing and - even though the baits were only boiled until they had a thin skin on them - I still felt that they were holding in the flavours for far too long. So I looked around for some coarse ingredients to open up the flavour leakage and this is the bait I finished on…

25% Nectarblend
20% Red Factor
20% C.L.O
10% Lactalbumen
10% Rennet Casien
10% Acid Casein
5% Crushed Hemp

The CLO I used back then was the Sluis version but today it would be the Haith’s baits’ CLO version as, it is such a great product. The reason the ingredients are shown as percentages is to make it easier when making test batches and large batches.

For example, 25 %, if making a kg, is 250gms. For 10kg it’s 2.5kg

Written by Brian Mills