[5] TROUT FISHERIES ON THE M’CLOUD RIVER, CAL. 619 
they may possibly devour their own kind to some extent. The artificial 
food which we give our trout in the ponds consists, chiefly, in the sum- 
mer, of boiled salmon. They eat this voraciously, but they like fresh 
meat better. When salmon are not to be had we give them venison, 
and occasionally kill a steer for them in the winter. The trout that are 
in the ponds at the present writing will eat a whole deer at two feeds. 
We also give them dried salmon and the dead salmon eggs picked out 
of the salmon-hatching troughs, which we dry for this purpose. Of 
course it is impossible to purchase any food for them from the markets 
in this remote region. 
As the number of trout in our pond increases it is obvious that more 
food will be required for them, and the question of furnishing food to 
the parent trout promises, at no distant day, to be quite a serious one. 
We probably have now in our ponds upwards of two tons of live trout. 
They will certainly eat five times their weight, or ten tons in a year. 
We can easily manage this amount of food, but what shall we do when 
we have ten tons of fish and they require annually fifty tons of food? 
Fortunately the salmon which they subsist on during the summer costs. 
nothing, but an allowance of several hundred dollars a year wil! proba- 
bly have to be made to supply the trout with food in the winter, when 
the trout ponds at this station are being carried on on the scale which 
is now contemplated. 
Mr. Green thinks that the males have milt when they are two years 
old, but that the females do not spawn till they are three years old. He 
says he never saw a spawning female of less than one and a half pounds 
weight. In this respect they must be very different from eastern brook 
trout (Salmo fontinalis), as the writer has taken eggs from an eastern 
trout that weighed only an ounce and a half. Mr. Green is of the opin- 
ion that the McCloud River trout do not cross with the salmon unless. 
in rare instances, and if they do at all that the progeny are barren. 
FISHING FOR TROUT. 
One of the most essential tasks when we began to operate here with 
trout was of course to catch breeders for the ponds. The fishing has 
been entirely under the management of Mr. Myron Green, who has 
shown great sagacity in discovering the ways of the fish and in using 
his knowledge in capturing them. 
Mr. Green’s method has been almost entirely to use set lines. These 
horizontal lines are 150 to 175 feet long when the nature of the water 
will permit the useof so longa line. The eddies and the comparatively 
quiet pools of the river are used to fish in. The short vertical lines 
attached to the long horizontal line are 5 feet apart and are themselves 
2 feet long. 
We use No. 1 and No. 14 Sproat’s hooks in the spring and summer 
and No. 2 and No. 3 in the fall. The reason for using a larger hook in 
the spring and summer is that the salmon, which are so abundant in 
