![]() ![]() The fish are beautifully designed for getting those meals. Sheepshead feed almost exclusively on mollusks and crustaceans - barnacles, small oysters, surf calms and a variety of crabs and shrimp - when they can catch them. "You're going to find them where their food is."Īnd sheepshead's favorite foods, unlike the shrimp, mullet, bay anchovies and other forage targeted by speckled trout and redfish and the other missing-in-action sport fish, don't really move around with the seasons. "Sheepshead are very predictable fish," Fisher said. But arguably the best sheepshead fishing of the year can be had during February and March. There are reasons for that."Ī major one, as stated above, is that fishing for other inshore species when water temperatures are in the 40s and low 50s can be hit-or-miss, mostly miss. "And this is the time of year you see a lot of them out there. "There's a sub-group of anglers - a fairly narrow one, but certainly not insignificant - that targets sheepshead," said Mark Fisher, science director for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's coastal fisheries division. And it doesn't hurt that sheepshead are, to many palates, one of the finest food fish in the bays. They are abundant, easily located and more than willing to play the game with anglers. Here in the heart of winter, when speckled trout and redfish and flounder and most other inshore marine fish targeted by anglers are lethargic and scattered, hard to locate and even harder to catch, sheepshead are everything those other coastal fish are not. Those stripes give the sheepshead its other common, and equally unflattering, name: convict fish.ĭespite their less-than-charitable name and appearance, sheepshead have a fan club among Texas coastal anglers, especially this time of year. Then there's that body covered with thick, hard scales, silvery and tinged here and there in a not-attractive green and sporting on its flanks a half-dozen broad, vertical black stripes. Just behind those snaggled, buck-toothed incisors are a row of flat molars set in a mouth/throat thick with powerful muscle. There are those incisors on top and bottom, looking for all the world like the front teeth of a sheep … and not unlike those of a human who hasn't taken dental care very seriously. That mouth and what's inside are responsible for the fish's ungracious name. ![]()
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