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FISHING AND LURES.—The primitive method of fishing in the early days soon developed into the same tactics used to destroy the other species of fish. The spear, the seine, the net, and the other destructive devices soon made great inroads upon the salmon. The more modern and sporting method is sport fishing with the fly […]
FOOD VALUE.—The food value of the Atlantic salmon ranks very high, although they lose much of their firmness and flavor if not caught during the early spawning migration. Maine formerly produced several hundred thousand pounds of salmon, but in recent years the commercial fishing has dwindled to a mere shadow of the former figures. And […]
ARTIFICIAL PROPAGATION.—Because of industrial progress, polluted water, construction of dams to prevent free migration to the spawning grounds, and other interferences by man to upset nature’s balance it has been necessary to depend upon artificial propagation to help maintain the Atlantic salmon fishing in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. Many years ago, […]
SPAWNING.—The salmon is truly an aristocrat, spending the winters in the sea and the summers in the cooler waters of the North. The spawning migration may start as early as April and continue until August or September. However, the majority migrate to the headwaters of the rivers during June. They usually leave the depths of […]
GENERAL LINES, COLOR, ETc.—The salmon is built very much on the same general lines as the trout. The fin construction is practically the same as to shape and location on the body; the tail, however, is decidedly forked, more so on the grilse than the mature fish. They are built for speed, and […]
The Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar)
ORIGINAL HABITAT.—The natural habitat of this fighting and leaping fish included the rivers on both sides of the North Atlantic, and is identical with the salmon of the British Isles and northern Europe. Its range on the American coast extended from southern New England to Newfoundland, Labrador, and […]
The Fallfish or White Chub (Semotilus coporalis)
ORIGINAL HABITAT AND PRESENT RANGE.—The native habitat of this particular fish is somewhat confined to the eastern United States and southern Canada. Although it is reported found in only twenty-two of the forty-eight states it no doubt enjoys a much wider range, as some of the […]
The Yellow Perch (Perca flavescens)
ORIGINAL HABITAT.—This fish was originally common throughout the eastern United States and Canada in the states bordering the Great Lakes as far as Minnesota and along the Atlantic slope as far south as North Carolina.
PRESENT RANGE.—Because of extensive artificial propagation this fish is now well distributed in […]
The Crappie or Calico Bass (Pomoxis sparoides)
ORIGINAL HABITAT AND PRESENT RANGE.—The native habitat of the crappie is from southern Canada through the Great Lakes region and Mississippi Valley to the Gulf states and westward to the Rocky Mountains. However, like almost all other fresh-water fish, it now may be found in every […]
The Rock Bass (Ambloplites rupestris)
ORIGINAL HABITAT AND PRESENT RANGE.—The natural habitat of this fish includes the Lake Champlain watershed, the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley, and west of the Alleghenies as far as Texas. The present range through a wide stocking program includes forty of the forty-eight states from coast to coast, […]
The water used in the hatchery must be periodically checked. If too acid or too alkaline, measures to correct the condition have to be taken. The rearing ponds vary, naturally, in each location, so the temperatures of the water, its degree of pollution, whether the volume is constant or not in going through, whether the […]
During the growth of the various divisions of the trout there is activity in thinning out the numbers, grading them and removing individual fish for sampling and laboratory study. This practice has been found to lessen the frequency of disease, the reducing of cannibalism and, of importance to a busy hatchery, the satisfying result of […]
Fish diets are under constant study. So many factors
enter the picture during the growth period that experiments are being conducted unceasingly toward improvements. There is, first, the initial cost to consider, then the compositions of foods best fitted for the growing fish. Preparation procedures, availability of the ingredients, the storage problem, the feed-ability of the […]
Voracious and vigorous, the rainbow is considered the top western trout. It will garner a few additional votes from anglers about the Great Lakes where its "Steelhead" runs up the rivers from the lakes and is giving anglers a taste of a new angle to trouting in that area.
Native to the Western Rockies, principally the […]
“Oh, so that’s a trout hatchery! Nothing tough about raising fish is there? Get some eggs, let ‘em hatch into minnows, give ‘em all the truck they’ll eat so they’ll grow big and fat, then they cart ‘em out to a stream, dump ‘em and we catch ‘em. What’s so all-fired complicated about it?”
The author […]
The Brook Trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) ORIGINAL HABITAT.—The native habitat of this crafty fish includes the territory from Labrador westward to the Saskatchewan and southeast to Georgia.
PRESENT RANGE.—Through fish culture and introduction it now graces the fresh waters from coast to coast in all but nine states, where it is […]
The Pike Perch (Stizostedion vitreum)
ORIGINAL HABITAT.—The pike perch originally inhabited the fresh waters from Lake Champlain, in Vermont, northward into Canada and westward to Minnesota, southward to the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes basin.
PRESENT HABITAT.—ThrOugh artificial propagation and distribution it now inhabits waters of thirty-two of the forty-eight states. The only […]
The Muskellunge (Esox obiensis)
ORIGINAL HABITAT.—The muskellunge, often called the tiger of the fresh waters, is a Northern fish, inhabiting the waters of Canada, the upper Mississippi watershed, the St. Lawrence River, Lake Champlain, and the Great Lakes territory. PRESENT RANGE.—Its range has not changed very much over a […]
The Brown Trout
(Salmo fario)
ORIGINAL HABITAT AND PRESENT RANGE.—Since being introduced into the United States from Europe in 1884 this fish has found its way into the waters of every state except Florida, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas. It has been reported in the waters of some of these […]
The welcome transplant from Europe. Eggs of this trout were sent from Germany by Herr von Behr to Michigan in 1883. Since that time the brown has been introduced to thousands of streams in over forty states.
The brown trout’s faculty, or ability, of tolerating the civilized, warmer and dirtier streams which once were cold sparkling […]
The “Native” trout of the great Northwest, the cutthroat is found in every suitable stream and lake on both eastern and western slopes of the Rocky Mountains, north of, and including the northern part of California, Oregon, Montana, Colorado, the Great Basin of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Washington and extending through British Columbia and Southwest Alaska […]
A quite distant relation in the char group. Resides almost entirely in cold, deep-water lakes. Its appearance is an olive tinged, drab gray or brownish in comparison to its other trout cousins and it sports a sharply forked tail in contrast to the more nearly square tails of most other trout. The lake trout is […]
A relation from the other side of the tracks, to the princely brook trout. Regarded justly, or unjustly, because of its appetite for the eggs of all trout species, as the black sheep of the entire trout clan.
The dolly varden is native to the north western states and Pacific coast from Northern California to Alaska. […]
A close relative of the brook trout, yet a distinct species. First found in Sunapee Lake, New Hampshire. Called the “Eastern Golden.” More of a lake type trout than is the regular brook trout.
The Sunapee remains in that area in which it was first noted which includes New Hampshire, Vermont and lower Maine. The Salvelinus […]
If trout can be regarded as aristocratic (and justly they are) this member of the race is the aristocrat of aristocrats. In this country the brook trout is “Native” to the Eastern seaboard states from the Canadian border to and including the Carolinas, west through Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota and south to include all states […]
NOT THE largest by far or necessarily the most beautiful, or the most edible, is the Salmonidae family of fishes. Regarded generally as piscatorial royalty the grouping includes the whitefish, the lake herring, the cisco, the salmons, the trouts and the chars. Some years ago many writers tied the grayling into the salmonidae picture because […]
Salmon
Among anglers, salmon is a name to conjure with. Salmon are easily the most mysterious and aristocratic of all our American fresh water game fish. Fly fishing for Atlantic Salmon from a canoe in the Restigouche, with virgin forests of pine and spruce coming down to the edge of crystal clear water, is the acme […]
Grayling
While so rare as to be almost unknown in the United States, the Grayling is such a splendid fly-fishing species that I can’t leave it out of this website. Grayling (Thymallus tricolor) are found in the headwaters of the Missouri River in Montana and in the Yellowstone. Essentially a cold water fish, they are […]
Atlantic Salmon
Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) were once common from the Hudson River northward, but now are found in the United States only in a few streams in northeastern New England. In Canada they are now limited, for the most part, to the streams of the Maritime Provinces. They range from ten to twenty pounds on […]
Brown Trout
The third kind you may run into is the Brown trout (Salmo trutta). This is the famous fly fishing trout imported from Great Britain and Europe. The Loch Leven strains of Brown trout come from Scotland, where the world’s record fish of this breed was caught ‘way back in 1866 in Loch Awe by […]
Except that he doesn’t take a fly, the greatest fresh water game fish in America is the Chinook or King salmon. By far the largest of Pacific salmon, the Chinook, fresh run from the sea, fights with all the speed and aerial acrobatics of the
Atlantic salmon. In addition, the average Chinook is about twice as […]
Lake trout (Cristivomer namaycush) are like Land-locked salmon as to fly fishing—only more so. In the summer, they
are found so deep in the lakes they inhabit that deep trolling with copper line is needed to catch them.
For about two weeks after the ice goes out of the lakes—with a water temperature of 35° to 45° […]
These beautiful and gamy fish are only found in a few lakes, and in still fewer streams, in Maine, the Northern New England states and Eastern Canada, especially Quebec.
In the summer, when the water temperature gets above 48°, Land-locked salmon retire to the deep water of the lakes they live in. There you can only […]
Steelhead trout, which are sea-run Rainbows, look and act very much like Atlantic salmon. They are long, silvery fish that run from three pounds up to about thirty pounds, which is not far from the Atlantic salmon size range. Steel-heads take a fly just about as Atlantic salmon do. Both fish live in the sea, […]
Golden Trout
There is one variation of Rainbow trout that is so differently beautiful that I want to describe it to you before passing on to the other trouts. This is the Golden Trout found at elevations around 10,000 ft. in the high Sierra Nevada Mountains near Mt. Whitney. These fish are gorgeous beyond belief. Colon […]
Rainbow or Steelhead Trout
There are three widely distributed kinds of true trout in America. The first of these is the Rainbow or Steelhead (Salmo gairdnerii) —the famous, crimson-sided trout of Western streams which has been so widely transplanted all over the East and Middle West that it has become almost native there. The Steelhead is […]
Eastern Brook Trout
Brook Trout were once found in nearly all of our cold upland streams from the arctic regions of Northern Canada south to the southern Appalachian streams of the Pisgah National Forest and west across the highlands of the Middle West up into Hudson’s Bay. As civilization swept virgin timber from the land, many […]
