When the first birdfood baits were discovered way back when Noah was a lad, Haiths® was right there at the front when it came to sourcing ingredients. Of course, you all know about the discovery of Robin Red® but I doubt as many of you have heard of such classics as Nectarblend™ , PTX™ and Prosecto™ . These birdfoods have since become firm favourites of the bait trade and a great many proprietary base mixes are now formulated with one or more of these ingredients in the recipe. Indeed, Mark McKenna of Baitcraft fame was fulsome in his praise of Haith's® products in his definitive bait series in Carpworld entitled Bait: It’s a Four-Letter Word.
After Robin Red, Nectarblend is probably our most popular birdfood ingredients; not surprising when you consider what is in it. Just look at this list of ingredients:
- Bird Food Supplement (our own development).
- Dried Egg Yolk.
- Micronised Soyabean Meal.
- Niger seed.
- Yellow Egg Biscuit.
The dried egg yolk and yellow egg biscuit are very useful in this recipe as they allow you to make boiled baits without using eggs. Eggs, as you probably know, have a buffering effect on acids so even if you include a strong acidic trigger in your attractor package, its signal will be partly obscured by the buffering effect of the eggs. By using Nectarblend in your mix (or any of the other similar products, namely Softbill Food or Red Factor) you can entirely do away with eggs when making your bait so this acid trigger remains strong.
In fact, you can actually make a bait using nothing other than Nectarblend. To make a cheap and effective bait follow these simple instructions:
- Grind down 500g of any Nectarblend to a fine powder using a coffee grinder.
- To your bowl of broken eggs add your favourite flavours, and other attractors.
- Now blend in the ground Nectarblend biscuit to form a paste.
- Roll out into boilie sized balls of paste then boil them for 2 minutes
- The resulting boilies will have a potent attraction from the flavours and a reasonably good all-round nutrition.
Prosecto:
In this day and age the emphasis is falling more and more upon natural ingredients, and what could be more natural than dried insects? Prosecto for fishing is as its name suggests rammed with these! But that’s not all. The recipe contains a whole host of carpy goodies. Look at this little lot!
- Bird Food Supplement
- Blue Mawseed
- Dried Flies
- Fishmeal
- Hempseed
- High Protein Crumb
- Honey
- Mollasine Meal
- Maize Oil
- Puppy Meal
- Soyabean Meal
- White Rusk
Given that recipe I am sure you don’t need me to tell you just how effective this classic birdfood can be when used a part of your base mix. Here is a simple recipe for reliable birdfood bait that contains both Nectarblend and Prosecto (to say nothing of our flagship brand, Robin Red).
- 350g Nectarblend
- 50g Robin Red
- 100g Prosecto
- 5ml Cranberry Nutrafruit
- 25ml Multimino-PPC
- 1ml Sweet Cajouser
- Place the dry ingredients in a strong polythene bag then mix them together by shaking the bag vigorously.
- Now break 4 large eggs into a bowl and add the Cranberry flavour, sweetener and Multimino-PPC.
- Gradually add the dry ingredients to form a stiff paste. Roll into paste balls of the required size then boil for 120-150 seconds.
This is a bait that carp can eat a huge amount of. In fact, they can almost become addicted to it to the extent that carp have been known to show signs of red coloration on their bellies due to eating so much Robin Red. I suggest that a initial introduction of two mixes is not too much and will confidently add a further 100-150 baits after each fish.
PTX:
Another all-time classic is PTX, which we suggest you include at between 25-30% of the overall base mix. It is a molasses-rich, sweet-smelling ingredient that can add taste and the crunch factor to any birdfood recipe and is particularly good when included in a fishmeal recipe, as fishmeal is included in PTX’ s make up. It contains:
Bird Food Supplement
Fishmeal
Honey
Mollasine Meal
Maize Oil
Soyabean Meal
White Rusk
So there we have it: Nectarblend, PTX, and Prosecto Insectiverous are all tried and tested boilie making ingredients from the Haith’s stable, and these specially formulated birdfoods can create a low cost, yet nutritious bait with a long catching life.
Finally, if you are fishing on a budget you can make an expensive proprietary base mix go that little bit further by substituting, say, 4-6oz of ground Nectarblend or PTX for the same weight of the base mix.
A good fish caught on Enervite-Gold, a base mix containing Nectarblend and PTX.
Written by Ken Townley
