Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Crappie by other names

Douglas in east tn about 30 minutes from my driveway. If you can't catch 100 a day in the cold water months you can't fish, its awesome with the exception of an occational dead year probably caused by overharvest and a bad spawn. Weiss in alabama is killer as well. Reelfoot was one of the greatest and once was the only fishery in the country that allowed commercial harvest of crappie. As far as I know it isn't what it used to be. I have never fished it but I have also heard the bluegills are BIG in reelfoot and the duck hunting in the early season is great.

I had forgotten about that. Used to work with Cajuns in the paper mills and that's what they called them. They also called perch chinkypins.

Specks. End of story.

The hell? We're talking about freshwater fish not speckled sea trout. No matter what we call 'em I'm sure we can all agree they are tasty!

what he said ^

I love Copper River Reds

like Halibut

but I'd trade a freezer of halibut for crappie filets anyday!

That's something totally different

Chinky pins = shell crackers

Specks, strawberry bass, paper mouths, moon eyes. Calico bass, crappie. All the same and one of the very few things I miss about living further south.

Yep. Strawberry bass, ha! Yankees could screw up a wet dream, and do.

Some of the guys were hard to understand. I thought they were calling all perch that. Thanks for the heads up.

We (S. Ga.) always called them white perch. "Crappie" still sounds, er, crappy to me.

If the perch are biting, the specks get thrown back

Caught many crappies in Texas this past winter.
Enjoyed them deep fried after breading, but also used a marinade mixture of soy sauce, lemon juice, and olive oil with a good shake of Slap ya mama. Then grill them in fish grillin' basket on the gas grill for some darn good eatin' as well.

Where?

The genus name Pomoxis derives from the Greek πώμα (cover, plug, operculum) and οξύς (sharp). The common name (also spelled croppie or crappé), derives from the Canadian French crapet, which refers to many different fishes of the sunfish family. Other names for crappie are papermouths, strawberry bass, speckled bass or specks (especially in Michigan), speckled perch, calico bass (throughout New England),[3] sac-a-lait (in southern Louisiana, lit. "milk bag", an alteration by folk etymology from Choctaw sakli)[4] and Oswego bass.[citation needed]

They were always crappie, pronounced croppy as others have said, in the part of OK I grew up in.
Mouth gets to watering just thinking about them this time of the year even though it's been a decade since I've caught or eaten any. Last weekend in April or the first weekend in May was always time to break out the tin boat, noodle rods, 1" mister twister curlytails, and the electric knife. If it didn't rain and muddy up the ponds it was sure to be a bloodbath punctuated by a family wide fish fry with gallons of sweat tea, fried potatoes from Grandmom's big iron skillet, home made jalapeño hush puppies, and sugared peaches over vanilla ice cream. Damn to have a time machine.

White perch in East Texas,, at least in the "old" days. Cajuns call them Sac au lait...sack of milk.

Crappies, anything else is just ridiculous,

Strawberry's, How in the Hell can someone make that kind of association?

Paper mouth Crappies = Big!

Where I grew up in Alabama we always called them "crop-pee", spelled crappie. We also fished for bream which is pronounced "brim" not "breem". My now deceased father-in-law, a native east Texan, while we were fishing on Lake Livingston years ago kept talking about a "gasper-goo". I had no clue what he was talking about. He could not believe that I had done any fishing at all, having never heard of one. One of us caught one and I then realized what he was referring to was what I knew to be a gar - AKA alligator gar. We both got a lesson in dialect. Both southern, but just a bit different.

In Texas they are usually called crappie and sometimes paper mouth. In Louisiana crappie or sac-a-lait. And there are two species - black crappie and white crappie.

I think you best google gasper goo and alligator gar. Not the same critter by a country milE.