114 THE LIFE OF THE SALMON 



with food is found in the fish taken during the 

 months of April, May, and June. A careful ex- 

 amination was made as to the nature of the food, 

 and a detailed table is given on pages 77 to 80 of 

 the report referred to. Herring remains figure most 

 largely, while other fish reported are sand-eels, 

 whiting, and haddock. In a considerable number 

 were found crustacean remains, in a few fish marine 

 worms, while amongst curious oddments — and these 

 are interesting when we recollect the nature of the 

 salmon fly — we have a caterpillar, four feathers, a 

 leaf of a beech tree, moss, blades of grass, and 

 spikelets of sedge. The staple food, however, seems 

 to be the herring, which, amongst all fish in our 

 seas, has been shown to be at once the most nourish- 

 ing and the most easily digested. Concerning the 

 small Crustacea (mostly amphipods), we may probably 

 be not far wrong in assuming that they were ingested ; 

 in other words, that the herring swallowed the am- 

 phipods, and the salmon swallowed the herring. 



It is interesting to notice that from the commence- 

 ment of the salmon's life the feeding habit waxes 

 and wanes with the seasons. Every angler knows 

 how persistently parr will keep rising to the fly, how 

 greedy and troublesome they are in the spring and 

 early summer. When fry are reared in ponds and 

 hand fed they show the same peculiarities which seem 

 to mark the "taking" proclivities of the adults. 

 Some time since interesting notes, taken by the 

 keeper of the rearing ponds at the mouth of the 

 Spey, to which I have already referred, were supplied 

 to me. During the first year in the life of the fry 



