The Pacific Salmon 



to be in great anxiety to find fresh water, and many of them work 

 their way up little brooks only a few inches deep, where they perish 

 miserably, floundering about on the stones. Every stream, of what- 

 ever kind, has more or less of these fall salmon. 



It is the prevailing impression that the salmon have some 

 special instinct which leads them to return to spawn on the same 

 spawning grounds where they were originally hatched. We fail 

 to find any evidence of this in the case of the Pacific Coast 

 salmon, and we do not believe it to be true. It seems more 

 probable that the young salmon hatched in any river mostly re- 

 main in the ocean within a radius of 20, 30 or 40 miles of its 

 mouth. These, in their movements about in the ocean, may 

 come into contact with the cold waters of their parent river, or 

 perhaps of any other river, at a considerable distance from the 

 shore. In the case of the quinnat and the blueback, their 

 "instinct" seems to lead them to ascend these fresh waters, 

 and, in a majority of cases, these waters will be those in 

 which the fishes in question were originally spawned. Later in 

 the season the growth of the reproductive organs leads them to 

 approach the shore and search for fresh waters, and still the 

 chances are that they may find the original stream. But undoubt- 

 edly many fall salmon ascend, or try to ascend, streams in which 

 no salmon were ever hatched. In little brooks about Puget 

 Sound, where the water is not 3 inches deep, are often found 

 dead or dying salmon, which have entered them for the pur- 

 pose of spawning. It is said of the Russian River and other 

 California rivers, that their mouths in the time of low water In 

 summer generally become entirely closed by sand bars, and that 

 the salmon in their eagerness to ascend them frequently fling 

 themselves entirely out of water on the beach. But this does not 

 prove that the salmon are guided by a marvellous geographical 

 instinct which leads them to their parent river in spite of the 

 fact that the river can not be found. The waters of Russian 

 River soak through these sand bars, and the salmon instinct, 

 we think, leads them merely to search for fresh waters. This 

 matter is in much need of further investigation; at present, how- 

 ever, we find no reason to believe that the salmon enter the 

 Rogue River simply because they were spawned there, or that 

 a salmon hatched in the Clackamas River is more likely on that 



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