Fish hatchery

“ The water boils and eddies; the "tuck" net rises to the surface, and one teeming, convulsed mass of shining, glancing, silvery scales; one compact crowd of thousands of fish, each one of which is madly endeavoring to escape, appears in an instant!
The noise before, was as nothing compared with the noise now. Boats as large as barges are pulled up in hot haste all round the net; baskets are produced by dozens: the fish are dipped up in them, and shot out, like coals out of a sack, into the boats. ”

“ But these sea-monsters devour enormous quantities of fish, and the hunters appointed to deal with them are instructed to limit their numbers to the minimum required. Their average increase is to be destroyed each year. If at any time it appear that, for whatever cause, the total number left alive is falling off, the chief of this service suspends it partially or wholly at his discretion.
We now came to the entrance of a vast enclosure bordering on the river, the greatest fish-breeding establishment on this continent, or indeed in this world. ”

“ It seems almost as if the constant catching and destruction of the freest rising fish must be having effect in leaving those only to propagate their species which are either past masters in cunning or which are more coarsely organised fish, that devote their time and energies to bottom feeding and avoid surface feeding, except, possibly, at night; the universally acknowledged fact that fish are far more difficult to catch than they formerly were may thus be explained. ”

“ In the mouths of streams or rivers, they take large quantities, by weirs made of bushes, but the most common method is pursuing the fish into shoal water, and spearing them, or as they lie basking on the surface. During calms, they walk over the mud and sand-banks, in search of flat fish, which are easily detected while lying at the bottom. At night, too, they light torches of grass-tree, and thus see the fish at the bottom, apparently asleep, when they very readily spear them. ”

“ Many waters have been re-stocked with herring as a source of food for more valuable fish.
August comes, and the youngsters, now about the length of your finger, grown tired of the fresh water and the close margins of the pond, find their way to the Run, and follow their parents down its rough bed to a larger life in the sea. Here again hungry enemies await them. In untold numbers they fall a prey to sharks, cod, and swordfish. Yet immense schools survive, and thousands will escape even the fearful steam nets of the menhaden-fishermen and see Herring Run again. ”

“ So in fishing a like comparison is possible—fly-fishing for salmon, black bass, trout, or grayling as against fishing for tarpon and tuna, which are worthless when killed except as food for sharks. In the first case the angler's skill, and his knowledge of its habits, are pitted against the wiles of the fish, with but a weak and slender snell of silkworm fiber between its capture or escape, while in the case of the leviathans mentioned, they are handicapped by being hooked in the gullet, and by towing a boat in their struggle for freedom. ”

“ The government maintains stations which are regularly engaged in hatching fish, keeping them until the greatest danger of their being destroyed is past, and then placing them in various streams all over the country. These fish are always of good food varieties, and are carefully selected to insure the kind best suited to the stream, as to whether it is warm or cold, deep or shallow, clear or muddy, fresh or salt, slow and placid, or swift and turbulent, for each kind of stream has certain varieties of fish that are especially adapted to it. ”

“ Catch a six-pound trout in a quiet mill-pond in a populous manufacturing neighbourhood, with well-cultivated meadows on either side of the stream, fat cattle grazing on the rich pasturage, and, perhaps, actually watching you as you land your fish: it may be sport. But catch a similar fish far from the haunts of men, in a boiling rocky torrent surrounded by heathery mountains, where the shadow of a rod has seldom been reflected in the stream, and you cease to think the former fish worth catching ”

“ Night-fishing is carried on when the river is low, and the night moonless. The poacher, with a gaff and torch, selects some gravelly ford—for there, by a law of nature, the salmon resort, to form beds in the stream, wherein to deposit their ova; and they continue working on the sand, until they are discovered by torch-light, and gaffed by the plunderer. Hundreds of the breeding fish are annually thus destroyed; and although the greater fisheries may be tolerably protected, it is impossible to secure the mountain streams from depredation.—Wild Sports. ”

“ As the season advances, the native crawls upon some rock that reaches out into the stream, and with his coarse but elastic cedar pole, casts the roll of flannel, wrapped round a hook and misnamed a fly, into the seething current; and when the brave fish seizes the clumsy allurement the fisherman contends for the mastery as best he may, occasionally at the risk of a ducking in the stream consequent upon the sudden breaking of his tackle, and accompanied with considerable risk. ”

“ Then comes the leaping and plunging of the captive fish, the wild chorus is changed into yells and shouts, the fish master grows excited and objurgates freely, the culmination being when they dash in and seize the fish by their tails, slinging them into the fish boat where they flap and flop, dance and gape and make a pretty splashing. ”

“ This process is again and again repeated, and we find that the prey is small fish. From watching an hour we are entranced with the beauty of the fluttering, quivering thing as the sun glints from its green and gold vibrations in mid-air. We gain some estimation, too, of the vast amount of immature fish which a pair of kingfishers and their young must destroy in a single season. ”

“ No fish are more defenceless and more readily destroyed than [97] trout and salmon; there are certain prerequisites to the continuance of the species that must be complied with. The fish must ascend to the fresh water to spawn, and if prevented by an improperly constructed dam, will quit the locality never to return. ”

“ They get a coarse sort of hook in the bazaar, rig up a roughly-twisted line, tie on a small piece of hollow reed for a float, and with a lively earth-worm for a bait, they can generally manage in a very short time to secure enough fish for a meal. ”

“ Since the spawning grounds of many kinds of fish are in shallow water, and the fish are at that time most easily caught, it happens that many of the most extensive fisheries are carried on in the spawning season. The delicious little smelts which our neighbors in Maine and New Brunswick send us by the hundred car-loads each winter, packed in little boxes of snow, are always full of eggs—so are the lake white fish, when they are caught, and the shad, and the Potomac herrings, and the cod, and the mullet, and the herring, and in early spring the mackerel. ”

“ The females were invariably driven away, with the same ferocity as other unwelcome guests, from the depositing the spawn to the exit of the infant fish: then old and young disappear into deeper water, and are seldom seen again.
During the winter, I constantly obtained the bullheads from out the seine-nets used in Esquimalt Harbour to procure fish for the supply of Victoria market. Rejected by the fishermen, the Indians greedily gathered up the despised fishes, broiled them over the lodge-fire empaled on a slender twig, then feasted right-royally on the grilled remains of the spiny martyrs. ”

“ The spawn lies buried until spring, and, without any other care, is nourished and brought to perfection, if not disturbed by violent floods, or by depredations from other fish, of which the eel, roach, dace, and grayling, are dangerous neighbours. ”

“ Under such conditions the angler could gather a rich harvest, for the trout takes the bait just as soon as it touches the water, and darts away, making the line “sizz” as it cuts through, breaking again and again until after a desperate struggle he gives up to the inevitable and is landed safely in the boat. Man is not the only creature familiar with this condition and the feeding habits of the fish. ”

“ That our knowledge of the habits, time, and place of spawning, food peculiarities of the young, migrations, &c, of the fish which form the basis of British fisheries is lamentably deficient, and that without further knowledge any legislation or attempts to improve our fisheries by better modes of fishing, or protection, or culture, must be dangerous and indeed unreasonable. ”

“ We frequently fell in with families living in the hollow part of the rocks by the sea-side, where they eagerly watched every opportunity of moderate weather to provide shell or other fish for their present subsistence: if a bird was shot, and thrown to them, they would immediately pluck off the feathers, put it upon the fire without taking out the intestines, and eat the whole ”

“ They are inconstant in everything but what fear constrain them to keep; crafty, timorous, quick of apprehension, ingenious enough in their own works, as may testify their weirs in which they take their fish, which are certain enclosures made of reeds and framed in the fashion of a labyrinth or maze set a fathom deep in the water with divers chambers or beds out of which the entangled fish cannot return or get out, being once in. ”

“ You are apt either to chop him right in two, or miss him altogether, when off he wriggles in the sand and disappears. My young people say it requires a practised hand and a peculiar twist of the wrist, to have any success at all in launce fishing. It can only be done on moonlight nights—the full moon and a day or two after—and they are out half the night. They go about barefoot, which is much safer than soaked shoes and stockings. About midnight they light a fire on the sand, cook all the fish they have caught, and have a grand supper, as they had last night. ”

“ Ali explained that they had witnessed one of the modes of fishing practised by the natives. They watch along the shore, and when a fish comes near enough he is secured by a rapid motion of the net, and it must be very rapid too. Another plan of catching fish is to render them insensible by poison, and then gather them as they float on the surface of the water. ”

“ The spent fish are almost bloodless, and when on their way down to the sea, they are utterly exhausted. Large numbers of dead spent fish are left on the shingle banks after every freshet to the manifest delight of myriads of crows who do the work of scavengers on the river’s bank. ”

“ The setting of hooks and lines is so simple an employment as to render a description unnecessary. The white fish are the principal object of pursuit: they spawn in the fall of the year, and, at about the setting in of the hard frost, crowd in shoals to the shallow water, when as many as possible are taken, in order that a portion of them may be laid by in the frost to provide against the scarcity of winter; as, during that season, the fish of every description decrease in the lakes, if they do not altogether disappear. ”

“ And in four or five hours with one net were ordinarily taken seven or eight; often more, seldom less. In the small rivers all the year there is a good plenty of small fish, so that with hooks those that would take pains had sufficient....
Of fish we were best acquainted with sturgeon, grampus, porpoise, seals, stingrays whose tails are very dangerous, brits, mullets, white salmon, trouts, soles, plaice, herring, conyfish, rockfish, eels, lampreys, catfish, shad, perch of three sorts, crabs, shrimps, crevises, oysters, cockles, and mussels. ”

“ The fishermen collect these little beasts in the woods, and make use of them for fishing; and when they wish to catch fish, having taken the little animals from the shell, they attach them by the middle of the body to their lines instead of hooks, then throw them into the sea, and when the fish think to swallow them, they seize the fish with their two powerful claws and will not let them go ”

“ If the fish are biting well he tears from one end to the other of his long rows of traps, playing a fish here, hauling one out there, setting a trap that has been sprung by the wind or the too eager wriggling of the bait, and on most fishing days, whether the fish bite well or ill, he has to constantly make the rounds of his holes, inspecting his hooks to see if the bait has escaped or been stolen, handling new ones in the icy water and skimming the young ice from the holes across his fishing. ”

“ In completing the investment of their prey, some of the fishermen are obliged even to swim to the outer extremity of the net, where, holding on by the floats with one hand, they strike, with singular dexterity, such fish as approach the edge, in the hope of effecting their escape, with a short harpoon held in the other. ”

“ When the school were discovered near the shore, the fishermen, getting outside of them in their dories, by hallooing, sounding of horns, and other noises, drove them, like frightened sheep, toward the beach. As soon as the hunters were in shoal water they left their boats, and jumped overboard, urging the silly fish on by outcries, splashing the water, and blows. Men, and even boys, waded boldly up to a fish, and led him ashore by a fin ”

“ There are also migratory fish in fresh water, like the white fish, the salmon, trout, and the siscowet, which live in the abyssal depths of the great lakes and swim up into the shallows and creeks in winter to spawn their eggs, and the brook trout and dace, which for a similar purpose ascend from the pools and quiet meadow stretches to the pebble-paved ripplets near the spring sources of the brooks in which they live.
Having, in a general way, classified fish according to their habits, we are in a position to consider the manner in which man has succeeded in exterminating them. ”