FOREST, FISH AND GAME COMMISSIONER. 309 



in position to do very effective work. It has a stock of brood fish, black 

 bass and calico bass, and its ponds are now in condition for active service, 

 while the water supply has been reinforced by a pumping plant for taking 

 water from Roeliff-Jansen Kill. This will always obviate the danger of a 

 failure of the supply from Kleine Kill, and will furnish cooler water in the 

 spring, in all probability making it possible to carry brook trout to fingerling 

 size. The ordinary work of that station was supplemented in 1909 by a 

 succesful experiment with the river herring, of which Foreman Winchester 

 planted 9,500,000 of fry, besides having liberated more than 1,000,000 shad 

 in the Hudson river and the Roeliff-Jansen Kill. He also filled applications 

 for 44,800 black bass from adult stock brought chiefly from the Oneida 

 station. At the Linlithgo station there are now about 500 adult calico 

 bass which were collected by Foreman Winchester in Nassau lake, Rensselaer 

 county, where this species was introduced many years ago by the State. 



A glance at the distribution for 1907, 1908 and 1909 reveals gratifying 

 increases at the Adirondack, Caledonia, Chautauqua, Cold Spring Harbor, 

 Linlithgo and Oneida stations. These gains are principally represented 

 by brook trout, whitefish, pike perch, blue pike, river and lake herring and 

 by several marine species such as the smelt, flatfish and lobster, which 

 contribute so largely to the food supplv. 



Very serious difficulty has been encountered in the collection of lake 

 trout and whitefish eggs. It seems almost impossible now to get lake 

 trout eggs from Canada, as the Commission formerly did. In the first place, 

 it is hard to find an expert who will collect the eggs in numbers sufficient 

 for our purposes; and, again, the lake trout season is so frequently inter- 

 rupted by storms as to make the crop of eggs a very uncertain one. Mr. 

 Marks was sent to Owen Sound where he obtained about 4,000,000 eggs of 

 lake trout, but these arrived at Caledonia in bad shape, and will yield only 

 a small percentage of healthy fish, probably less than forty per cent. The 

 number of eggs taken by Foremen Burke and Otis in the Fulton Chain and 

 other Adirondack lakes is too small to be worth considering, and Foreman' 

 Davidson took none at all in Keuka lake, owing to the natural difficulties 

 in fishing that body of water. He has at last discovered a spawning bed of 

 the lake trout in Keuka lake, on which he believes he can obtain the trout, 

 but only in gill nets, owing to the peculiar conformation of the lake bottom. 



