You won't believe this. On Saturday we saw more birds than I can ever remember at Lavon and they were scattered over a large area. Oh boy we thought, this is our lucky day. Despite large silver slabs, small slabs, white slabs, jigs, traps and everything we could think of we caught not a single fish. There were birds from the camping area to beyound the island and we could see small fish coming to the surface all over the lake. They looked remarkably like trout feeding on flies. Sometimes you could see the tail splash as they went back down. The birds would hover and occasionally get one, but they weren't doing real good either. The depth finder showed tons of what looked like layers of small fish that were so thick the depth finders would alternate between 15 and 35 feet at times.
As the evening came on the wind died and I said it looks like they are feeding on flies! With the smooth surface I began to see insects all over the surface and the fish continued to rise over more than a mile of lake. When I scooped them up, they were ants with wings! I believe they were fire ants which had swarmed and been blown in the lake. There must have been an ant for every four square yards. When I put on a 1/8 oz jig with a tail I could feel them pulling on the tail but never did hook one. For all you wiseacres out there, no they were not chocolate covered ants. I believe we witnessed another rare event in nature that few have ever seen. And, no there was no alcohol or drugs on the boat either.
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Make a joyful noise-go fishing

I've had some fun days at Lewisville for sandies using a weighted float with a #10 to #14 hook and a TINY plastic grub. Cast the bobber out & slooooww retrieve and the improvised jig would get sandbass on almost every retrieve. Can't see any reason why flyfishing wouldn't work as well.

They are called flying ants. Very common up north but they do show up down here. It is a great hatch for trout up north.
Johnny

sounds to me like you found a school of
Big gizzard shad eating termites, but JMO
tight lines
-Brian

It could have been shad eating ants. I flyfish RH and have seen large mayflies hatch in April/May and the sandbass will eat'em. Never seen ants. I have caught giz. shad with my flyrod and used for bait to chase hybrids!

That is interesting. I didn't know shad would eat flies! Incidentally, I know what termites look like and these were not termites. They definately were red to dark red ants with wings just like the fire ants I saw swarming out of my garden in late spring. I'm thinknig maybe the unusually hot weather caused them to swarm again or just caused an early swarm. If shad eat flies that could have been what we saw, altough it doesn't explain the pulling on my 1/8 oz jig tail unless of course there were some small white bass there also. I though shad would only eat plankton.

6"-12" shad want large plankton. Those small ants must have looked like an easy meal.

It's pretty late in the year for ant swarms so blame it on global warming ! I've seen these ant swarms many times and the fish will eat them. There are reports of fish dying from eating too many fire ants.

Wow! I know that fire ants inject formic acid when they bite so I did wonder if that could hurt the fish. If so, there will be a lot of floating fish bait on Lavon as they were gobbling them up for at least several hours after we noticed them. The way the birds were acting, I believe they were probably there all afternoon.