Largemouth bass have adapted to and have thrived in a great variety of waters; they do best when these environments offer moderately clear, moderately warm water with plenty of oxygen. But they turn up in freshwater, brackish estuaries, mucky prairie lakes, and stone-walled mining pits. They thrive among alligators in tropical lakes and in water that’s frozen over five months a year.

This adaptability is one of the most attractive attributes of the largemouth. Wherever you are, a bass isn’t far away. Thanks to stocking, they occur in every state but Alaska, absent only in the Rocky Mountains and some arid regions of the Great Plains.

Locating and catching bass within these various waters depends upon understanding details of the kinds of structure and cover each offers, and how bass relate to them––the subjects of the next two chapters.