The birds will show you where the fish are. They question they can’t answer for you is what the fish are eating. Anglers pour enormous effort into finding a blitz, running the boat toward wheeling terns or sprinting down the beach toward breaking fish, then tie on whatever worked last week and start casting. That may work, but when it doesn’t, the answer is often right there in the water, catchable by a quick sweep of the net.

The gap between finding fish and reading them is where most people get stuck in the fall. Striped bass, false albacore, bonito, and bluefish will eat almost anything over the course of a season, but inside a single feeding window they tend to lock onto one forage type. As one longtime guide puts it, they feed “exclusively on one item until full, often switching to something else on the next feeding cycle, which is usually tide driven.” A freshwater striper authority is blunter about the consequence: size selectivity is “the most common hurdle for striper anglers.”