Catch this in the bud

This malaphor of course involves the idiom “nip it in the bud” (preventing something bad from happening), but what is the other idiom being blended?  At first blush it would seem to be  “catch this” (seeing or listening to something) but I suspect the speaker mixed “the early bird catches the worm” (success comes to the earliest) with “nip it in the bud” as they both describe preemptive or proactive actions.