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 ° 
tome. During the first year in the life of the fry 
