Can anybody help me with telling the difference between hickory shad, american shad, river herring and atlantic herring. I do not wanna take any river herring by mistake, but would like to get some shad this spring. For the life of me I can't tell the little buggers apart. Also if anyone knows a few good websites with pictures so i can eyeball the differences as well that would be great too. Thanx:kewl:

www.fishbase.com

thanx basswipe it helped seeing the pics, they just look too much the same to me that it's vexing

If it's in a river, assume it aint Atlantic herring.

True enough but a few of the places I fish would be near the mouths of rivers but still in the ocean proper. So if I jig up a few herring knowing if they are ocean herring or river herring about to head upriver would be important.

My experience tells me that Hickory Shad look dramatically different from herring. I am not sure of the difference between American and Hickory Shad but the shad I have caught have a very large hinged mouth unlike Herring that have a regular mouth. Don't know if this helps.

I was fishing with Crafty last year and he caught a Hickory.It was a pretty cool thing to see and was big at least twice the size of the one in the photo.