80 Fish and Game Warden. [Bull. No. 1. 



deep, circles, pulls, and plunges again and again. How it 

 does make a fisherman's nerves tingle and his heart beat to 

 land such a fish after playing it with bated breath for ten 

 or fifteen minutes on a doubtful line! Here! Here! I have 

 got the fever right now and want to go and fish for a big 

 Channel cat! Don't you want to go along? 



Fishermen say that there are not many of them in the 

 streams any more. Too much seining and too much destruc- 

 tion of the young fish have thinned their ranks. Well, then, 

 let us all work together to protect them and give them a 

 chance to become common in the streams again. They are 

 a hardy fish and do exceedingly well in Kansas streams wher- 

 ever they get started and receive reasonable protection. 



FISHING FOR CHANNEL CATS. 



It was just 43 years ago on the 20th day of March — it 

 happened to be my birthday — that we were fishing on the 

 Wakarusa, near Auburn, Kansas, just below the old stone 

 bridge. We had taken several small fish with a hickory pole 

 and a line made of shoe thread. The cork went down and 

 out of sight. The rule among small boys when fishing for 

 cats was to let 'em take it until they pulled on the pole. In 

 another second there were two of us pulling! We sure had 

 a whale on the line, and how things did hum for a few seconds. 

 What excitement, what see-sawing and pulling. Finally the 

 fish was dragged out on the low, sandy bank of the stream. 

 It was a whale indeed for a boy ten years old; it weighed 

 over six pounds. Just seventeen years and three months later 

 we were fortunate enough to kill a grizzly bear on the head- 

 waters of the Pecos river in New Mexico. The excitement 

 and satisfaction of the occasion was great, but no greater 

 than when the big Channel cat was taken years before. 



Four years after the six-pounder was taken, on the 20th 

 day of March, while fishing in the Wakarusa about two miles 

 east of Auburn, we caught more Channel catfish with hook and 

 line in one day than we could carry. My father came after 

 me in a wagon. The catch amounted to over seventy pounds. 



Ten years later, fishing all night near the mouth of the One 

 Hundred Ten creek, in the Marais des Cygnes river, from a 

 boat that was managed for me by my uncle Hiram Reilly, 

 over 100 pounds of Channel catfish were caught. And so on 

 for hundreds of times this splendid fish that we hope soon 

 to see abundant in the streams of Kansas furnished us some 

 of the finest sport we have ever enjoyed. 



BAIT FOR CHANNEL CATS. 



What did you use for bait? That is a question that has 

 been asked of us many times. A Channel catfish will bite 

 almost any kind of meat or fish bait. Large worms and 

 small frogs are especially good. We usually succeeded well 



