52 REPORT OF THE 



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amount to fourteen inches in diameter. The brook will probably fill a pipe six 

 or eight inches in diameter, and when I visited the springs they were at their worst. 

 The Beaver Kill, into which these streams flow, was almost dry, and the brooks 

 and streams in all that region lower than ever before. 



"An estimate has been made of the cost of moving the hatchery, and Mr. Will- 

 iam Thompson, a builder of considerable experience, will undertake to move the 

 hatchery, putting in new lumber that may be needed, or that is broken or defaced, 

 and putting the building on a new foundation, for $2,500. The site for the hatchery 

 in its new location will control all the water supply, and can be purchased for not to 

 exceed $500. The present hatchery site cost $650, as I recollect the amount, and 

 probably could be disposed of for a portion of the purchase price." 



The Sacandaga Hatchery at Speculator is badly located and should be, in the 

 near future, abandoned. For this reason no improvements are made more than to 

 keep the property in repair. It is twenty-eight miles from a railroad and difficult to 

 secure stock fish, and also difficult to secure eggs from wild fish. At some seasons 

 the water is cold enough to carry a few stock trout ; at others, it is not. 



The hatchery at Old Forge is going from bad to worse from year to year, and 

 was a subject for special mention in one of my monthly reports. In brief, in 1895 

 nearly 600,000 trout eggs were taken, and this year only 35,000. Stock fish have 

 decreased from 1,300 in 1895 to about 100 in 1900. 



During the year I recommend that no small-mouth black bass should be dis- 

 tributed, as the law does not cover their breeding season. It is a fish that is not 

 cultivated artificially, in like manner with the trout and shad, and there are but tAvo 

 methods of furnishing fish to applicants : one, to take the adult fish from one water 

 to plant in another, and the other to confine the adult fish and permit them to 

 spawn naturally, then remove the parent bass, rear the fry to fingerlings and plant 

 them. There is scarcely any black bass water but would recuperate of itself, pro- 

 vided it was suitable for the fish, if the fish were protected during the actual spawn- 

 ing season and while the parent bass are brooding the young. Black bass do not 

 spawn until the temperature of the water reaches about sixty-five degrees. There 

 may be some few bodies of shallow water where it reaches this temperature before 

 the first or middle of June, but the great majority of waters in the State do not 

 reach a temperature to induce the black bass to spawn before some part of the 

 month of June, and no bass should be taken before July ist. The enactment of a 

 close season for black bass, and its enforcement, to cover the month of June would 

 do more to re-stock waters with black bass than any amount of fish at the command 

 of the Commission for distribution. 



