18 THETARPON 



The very young of the tarpon were not observed for 

 many years. A ten or eleven-pound fish was rarely 

 caught, and until 1900 the smallest tarpon in the 

 National Museum was nine inches long. Dimock re- 

 corded the capture of many tarpon weighing less than 

 two pounds in the Harney River near the Everglades 

 and stated that the Allen and Turner rivers on the 

 West Coast are nurseries for them. He caught them 

 on an eight ounce rod with a fly. 



I am indebted to Mr. George E. Bruner of Kokomo, 

 Indiana, for some very interesting facts. Mr. Bruner 

 has a winter residence at Everglade, Florida. In a 

 recent letter he says : 



"For ten years I have fished for and caught 

 tarpon, the gamiest of all fish, among the Ten 

 Thousand Islands that surround my winter camp, 

 and farther down the Coast around the mouths of 

 Chatham, Losmans, Rogers, Harvey and Shark 

 Rivers. We get them to bite here long before they 

 appear at Captiva and Boca Grande. I have caught 

 them in every month from October to May. Last 

 winter (20-21) in the upper Shark River during 

 the month of February I found the water full of 

 small tarpon from eight to twelve inches long. 

 They were jumping and striking constantly, thou- 

 sands of them, and had the water churned up and 

 dirty from their activities. I had gone up there to 

 fish for black bass, the water being fresh, but the 

 small tarpon had evidently driven the bass away 

 for I could not get a strike from a bass although a 

 few weeks before we had had wonderful bass fish- 



