Photo by MIKE SEARLES.

While most of us do most of our fishing during daylight hours, everything from crappie to catfish -- with the exception of some of the more colorful sunfish -- feeds and prowls more by night. All three of Oklahoma's most popular catfish species -- blues, channels and flatheads -- share that trait.

Which may not be good news in January or February when it's 20 degrees and the wind chill's down around zero. But it should be welcome indeed in July or August, when daytime temperatures often top 100 degrees; the nights then are obviously much more comfortable.

Can you go after catfish in the daytime during a hot Oklahoma summer? Yes, of course. But can you catch them even better at night? I think sometimes you can. And it's sure more enjoyable than fishing under the blazing sun.

My nighttime catfishing began almost before I can remember. Growing up in Enid in northwest Oklahoma, I had an uncle and a brother-in-law who were both avid catfishermen. My uncle liked to run trotlines in a couple of creeks; my brother-in-law and his family liked to fish in the tailrace and stilling basin at Great Salt Plains Lake northwest of Enid.

I saw the sun come up many mornings as we fished throughout the night, running trotlines or tending baited lines at Salt Plains.

Years later, while teaching at Oklahoma State University and living at Stillwater, I used to spend Friday and Saturday nights in the summer camped on the shores of Lake Carl Blackwell or Lake McMurtry, or camped near the mouth of Stillwater Creek where it flowed into the Cimarron River near Ripley.

I had a lot of great nights on Stillwater Creek, filling my stringers with channel cats and the occasional flathead -- but not every night was productive. I recall one night on Stillwater Creek, swollen and muddy after two or three days of rain. Set up beneath a bridge to stay dry, with four baited lines set out in the current since before dark, I hadn't caught a single fish. I'd gotten a bite or two, but well after midnight, I still had nothing on the stringer.

About 2:30 or so, a pair of clearly intoxicated young men, talking and laughing loudly, pulled up and parked at the opposite end of the bridge. I gathered from their conversation that they'd stumbled out of Ripley's one and only bar and discovered a big crawdad in a puddle at the edge of the street. They grabbed the crawdad and decided that as they had bait, they'd go fishing. They had one fishing pole between them.

With some difficulty, they finally managed to impale the crawdad on the hook, and one of them lobbed it into the creek directly across from my baited lines. Those drunks won't do any good, I thought smugly, 'cause the fish just aren't biting.

But the ripples had hardly died away when the pole in the guy's hand jerked sharply toward the water. For a second I thought that he was going to fall off of the steep bank and into the creek, but he managed to sit down in the mud to keep from falling. They both began yelling excitedly as he cranked the handle on his big spincast reel. Eventually he pulled a channel cat that must have weighed 12 or 13 pounds to the surface.

The lucky tipplers had to walk downstream and pass the pole around a couple of trees before making their way down to a spot at which they could climb down to the water's edge to grab the big catfish. They took their fish and left; I soon packed up and left in disgust.

I remember more fondly the summer nights I spent running trotlines or limblines or watching rods at the water's edge.