3 i4 WILD LIFE ON A NORFOLK ESTUARY 



that nature there, and yet we sailed past eels turned up in 

 vast numbers in fact, in some places we had to give up the 

 counting. I made many inquiries as to the cause of the eels 

 dying off, and the major portion pronounced it to be the 

 warmth of the water, and nothing else. One or two of the 

 oldest inhabitants have recollections of something happening 

 many years ago. No salt water has been up, and I am in- 

 formed that, although the salt causes the eels to vomit, they 

 are none the worse for it. ... I may say that a friend of 

 mine also saw thousands of dead eels in the Waveney, 

 between Beccles and Yarmouth." 



My next letter to the Angler's News was as follows : 



" DEAR SIRS, I was interested in * Holiday Maker's' letter. 

 . . . Eels in Norfolk waters have * turned .up ' and died by 

 thousands, some of them fine fellows. 



" These fatalities occur only at long intervals. . . . The 

 fact of them * turning up ' in the Bure, and high up there too, 

 goes to prove that to sewage and chemical waste all the 

 fatalities cannot be due. After a number of inquiries I 

 have come to the conclusion that asphyxiation, from the 

 effects of the great heat upon the mud in which they delight 

 to lay and the decay of vegetable matter, has had most to do 

 with it. The mud stinks ! The decayed vegetation assists 

 that stench ; and eels are peculiarly sensitive creatures, 

 although it is said they do not mind a temporary bit of 

 burrowing into a decomposing corpse. How soon they will 

 4 turn up ' in a floating eel-trunk the eel-babbers know, and 

 watch for sickly tenants almost hourly in the busiest season ; 

 a dead eel soon goes wrong, and spoils its living fellows. A 

 dirty scum has risen to the surface, and streaked white-painted 

 yachts with an offensive and filthy banding ; and it is a pretty 

 good indication of the fermentation going on in the shallows 

 below. A few good rains are badly wanted." 



For several days the rivers, especially where bordered by 

 reeds, presented a gruesome sight, the floating bodies of the 

 eels being threaded in and out among the stems ; and weeks 

 elapsed before the last traces of them had vanished. The 

 summer of 1905 was an exceptionally hot one, with few tides 

 of any strength; in fact, they remained abnormally low for a 

 long period, thus creating the disaster and nuisance, and in 

 no way helping to abate the unpleasantness of it. The eel- 

 catching season of 1906, more especially on Breydon, and in 

 the lower reaches of the rivers, was a complete failure. 



