You can’t make this stuff up: A fishing lure that looks like a baby bird

OK, fishermen use some mighty strange baits to catch bass — lures designed to look like mice, frogs, snakes, just about anything that falls into the water.

But Aaron Martens may have come up with the ultimate fish story when he talked about what he was trying to imitate when he competed in the Bassmaster Elite pro tournament last week at Lake Havasu in Arizona.

He pulled into thick shoreline vegetation and he flipped a bait designed to imitate baby blackbirds.

“The birds fall out of their nests and the bass eat them,” Martens told BASS reporters. “I don’t know why people don’t believe me. Birds are definitely part of their diet.”

It’s hard to argue with success. Using a heavy green-pumpkin skirted jig with a plastic trailer, he punched holes in the heavy vegetation and came out with bass. He won the four-day tournament with 68 pounds, 9 ounces of bass and brought home the first-place check of $100,000.

Martens said he has used the pattern for 25 years, and it has paid off many times in the past.

“I’ve caught them in California and had them spit up full-grown blackbirds,” Martens said. “Maybe it’s such a good pattern because so many people don’t believe it.”

This story was originally published May 14, 2015 at 3:22 PM with the headline "You can’t make this stuff up: A fishing lure that looks like a baby bird."