FOREST AND STREAM. 



243 



Fish Culture in Kentucky.— Earnest efforts are now 

 beino* made to stock the waters of Kentucky with fish. 

 Foremost in the good work are Hon. Jas. B. Beck, of Lex- 

 ington; Gov. Robinson, of Georgetown; Lewis Sublett, of 

 Versailles; Col. R. W. Wooliey, of Louisville; Col. 

 Owens, of Maysville; Judge Hines, of Bowling Green, and 

 Judge Duvall, of Frankfort. Mr. Beck is President of the 

 Kentucky State Sportsmen's Association. It is expected 

 to lay before the Legislature this Winter bills looking 

 to the protection of game and the propagation and 

 protection of fish. Much correspondence has passed 

 in quest of information as to the best mode of procedure 

 in all matters relating to the subject in general. Prof. 

 Baird has furnished his assistance, as the subjoined letter 



shows:— 



United States Commission Fish and Fisheries, } 

 Washington, November 4th, 1875. j 



My Dear Mr. Beck: Yours of the yd is received, and in reply 1 beg to 

 say that it will give me great pleasure to do all I can to assist in the land- 

 able enterprise of stocking the Kentucky waters with fish. I have not 

 had much to do with the enactment of laws for the regulation of the in- 

 tenor waters, although mv forthcoming report will contain a very elabo- 

 rate disquisition on this subject, showing the measures adopted in foreign 

 countries towards this same object. I send you a draft of a law prepared 

 for regulating the ponds on the New England coast, which may , perhaps, 

 give some hints in regard to the matter of police, but will not be much 

 o'herhelp to you. 



I will write to one or two of my brother commissioners of the State, 

 asking them to send you anything that they may have in the way of legis- 

 lative enactment. 



If there is any particular part of the State of Kentucky whose waters 

 you wish provided with the California salmon, please write to Mr. James 

 W. Miluer. Waukegan, 111., at once. I have had large numbers of Cali- 

 fornia salmon hatched out in Michigan for distribution to the interior of 

 the country, and now is the time to take action on the subject. Yours 

 very truly, Spencer F. Baird, Commissioner, 



Hon. James B. Beck, Lexington, Ky. 

 ■ •+•■&• 



English Soles in America . — A public-spirited citizen 

 of Boston, Mr. J. G. Kidder, has offered to be at the ex- 

 pense of attempting to introduce the English turbot and 

 sole into American waters, and Prof. Baird has written to 

 Frank Buckland for information in regard to the habits of 

 these animals, that will throw light upon the subject, as to 

 the best season and method of accomplishing this import- 

 ant enterprise. Mr. Buckland gives little encouragement, 

 though he thinks success not impossible. He says: — 

 "I am afraid that the task of introducing and naturalising 

 turbot and soles in America is very problematical, but it 

 should be tried, and I shall be glad to assist in any „way I 



can." 



«*•** • 



—The new Dominion fish-breeding establishment has re- 

 cently been completed at Bedford, near Halifax, Nova 

 Scotia, and is already in operation, under the superinten- 

 dence of A. B. Wilmot, who has charge also of the hatch- 

 ing houses at Gaspe and Miramichh 



^t& 



Fish as Food. — As a source of nutriment, as a field of 

 profitable industry, extending enormously the area of food 

 production, admitting of vast expansion, which can be 

 worked at every season of the year, requiring no outlay in 

 seed or tillage, and no artificial stimulants to renew their 

 harvest (for the fisherman reaps where he has not sown 

 and gathers where he has not scattered), the British sea 

 fisheries deserve the consideration of all who feel how 

 largely (he comfort and well-being of a people rest upon 

 that humble but solid basis — abundant and low priced food. 

 It may be roughly estimated that London actually con- 

 sumes 800,00(ffat cattle, which at an average of 600 weight 

 each would amount to 90,000 tons of beef. At the present 

 time there are certainly not less than 900 trawling vessels 

 engaged in supplying the London market with fish; and 

 assuming the annual take of each vessel to be only ninety 

 Ions, this would give a total of 80.000 tons of trawled fish; 

 but this computation is irrespective of the vast quantities 

 of herrings, mackerel, sprats, and fhii caught by lines, 

 drift-nets, and seines. An acre of land properly tilled will 

 produce every year either a ton of corn or three hundred 

 weight of mutton or beef; but an area of good fishing 

 ground of the same extent at the bottom of the sea will 

 yield to a persevering fisherman a considerably greater 

 quantity of nutritious food every day in the year. It was 

 computed by the late Mr. Mayhew, in his work on the 

 "London Poor," that during the months of October and 

 November, or what is termed the costermongers' fish sea- 

 son, 800,000,000 herrings are disposed of in the streets of 

 London alone, providing a cheap and wholesome meal for 

 thousands and tens of thousands of the humble' classes of 

 the metropolis. The prejudice against a fish diet, which 

 was long current, was based upon the assumption that it 

 yielded but little nutriment. The result, however, of an 

 analysis of various kinds has proved that they contain 

 nearly as much albuminous matter as the flesh of quadru- 

 peds—hence, as flesh producing, fish is nearly equal to 

 beef^ The herring contains, moreover, a large. quantity of 

 oleaginous matter in addition to its albuminous principle, 

 by which its nutritious properties are considerably in- 

 creased. It is evident, therefore, that fish were designed 

 to occupy an important place in the sustance of mankind, 

 and it certainly contributes agreeably to that variety of 

 diet by which the human frame is maintained in its highest 

 degree of vigor and health. Nitrogen i3 a well-known and 

 important vital stimulant, and the proportion of nitrogen 

 i«n ve ^ t0 cai 'k° u > estimated in grains, is in flesh meat as 

 lw to 2,580, and in herrings 817* to 1,435. Fish is a flesh 

 and muscle, not a fat, producing aliment, as is obvious 

 trom the appearance of our seafaring population, who are 

 spare, sinewy, and strong, and free from those mountains 

 0r flesh and masses of blubber which characterize the 

 prosperous beef eating Englishman, and have from time 

 immemorial typified the traditional John Bull.— Blackwood. 

 *.»*» 



Fish Hatching House. —The first specimen of salmon 

 made its appearance on Sunday morning. Prof. Mather 

 Presided at the accouchment, with Dr. Pater as consulting 

 Pivsician. This representative of California made his 

 uebut in marching order, with haversack and six weeks' 

 aiions in it.^ He has been joined by several of his con- 



eres, all similarly accoutred and provisioned. These 

 we the avant garde of a grand army one hundred thousand 

 Wong, which will the coming Spring populate our 

 streams.— Lexington {Va.) Gazette, 5th; 



The Hatching House.— About, the 1st of ^November 

 the trout are preparing to spawn in many localities, and if 

 the house has not yet been put in order for the season, 

 no time should be lost in doing it. Dry out the troughs, 

 clean them thoroughly, and coat with coal or gas tar thin- 

 ned with spirits of turpentine and applied with a paint 

 brush. If the troughs are new, give two or three coats; if 

 old, one may be sufficient. Treat the wire-cloth spawn- 

 frames in the same manner. No one uses gravel nowa- 

 days, and if you have been reading the older publications 

 on fish culture that recommend its use, abandon it and use 

 the frames. Make them about thirty inches long and a 

 half inch narrower than the trough; let the sides be of 

 inch stuff and the ends only half an inch thick, so that 

 when placed on top of each other there will be a flow be- 

 tween them; tack wire-cloth, No. 10 or 12, on the bottom, 

 first tarring the frames; have the wire-cloth in a long strip 

 and well tarred on some fence or out-building, and when 

 dry put it on a roller, with ends projecting for handles; 

 tact one end of the wire to a frame and stretch tightly 

 with the roller, tack it, and cut off at the end; see that the 

 frames for flannel filters, if you use them, are in good 

 order; look to the spawn-pans and see that they are free 

 from rust or grease; examine the Ainsworth screens, if you 

 take spawn that w T ay, and treat them as recommended for 

 spawn-frames; look for rust in the sprinkling pot, cribbles, 

 and all tin ware; lay in a stock of feathers, and at spare 

 times whittle out egg-nippers. We prefer the home- 

 made wooden nippers to steel ones', bulb syringes or 

 spoons. To make them, get a piece of straight grain pine 

 or cedar seven inches long and an inch square, slit it up 

 five inches, and with a pen-knife work it out so that the 

 points will stand open a quarter and the upper end half 

 an inch; work the points down to suit, and lound them or 

 whip on loops of fine brass wire with waxed silk; a feather 

 can be inserted in the head. These, if properly made, 

 will have a delicate nip, and a live egg can be picked up 

 by an expert without injury. We have not mentioned the 

 Coste tray nor the new glass jars of Ferguson's, because 

 the first is a glass toy, made by substituting glass rods for 

 wire-cloth, and the latter we regard as only suitable for ex- 

 perimental or fancy work. But for businessvone man will 

 do more work in taking care of eggs on wire-cloth than in 

 any other manner. — Live Stock Journal. 



•SMH* 



Seth Green's Work.— Seth Green has just returned 

 from a month's stay at Cape Vincent, where he superin- 

 tended the taking of 3,000,000 spawn of the salmon trout, 

 the season having proved an unusually successful one. The 

 eggs are now all at the State hatching house at Caledonia, 

 and the fry will be hatched and delivered during the 

 Spring. There will also be distributed at that time 1,000,- 

 000 brook trout. These will be placed in public waters 

 only. — Syracuse Standard, 14th, 



* — - — 



\_'i his Department is no <w uncle?' the eharge of a competent Naturalist, 

 indorsed by the Smithsonian Institution, and will henceforth be made a 

 special feature of this paper. All communications, notes, queries, re~ 

 marks, arid seasonal observations will receive careful attention.] 

 . » 



A NEW VA RIETY OF QUAIL. 



R. JOHN KRIDER, of Philadelphia, has been fortu- 

 nate in securing for his ornithological collection a 

 magnificent specimen of a hybrid quail, or one mismarked 

 by a freak of nature. The bird is a male, and has a dark 

 band half an inch in width running from the base of the 

 lower mandible over the white patch on the throat, ending 

 at the top of the breast; the curved pencilings on the 

 breast are much darker and broader than on the common 

 quail, and the colors are more brilliant in every respect. 

 When killed by Mr. Foster, of Philadelphia, from whom 

 Mr. Krider obtained the bird, it weigheJ seven and one- 

 half ounces. It seems to be a cross between our common 

 quail and the California variety, as a number of the latter 

 have been let out in both Maryland and Delaware. Mr. 

 Krider has .given his new quail the name. Ortyx Hoopesii, 

 black-throated quail, a variety of Ortyx Virginianus. The 

 bird will thus bear the name of Mr. Bernard Hoopes, 

 President of the Philadelphia Sportsmen's Club. 



* 'Homo." 

 [This appears to be an accidental abnormalty of plum- 

 age of the common quail, Ortyx Virginianus. The gen- 

 eral tendency in this species is to darker colors toward the 

 South, as instanced in the recognized O rtyx Virginianus, var. 

 Floridanus, (Coues). The extreme of this case is witnessed in 

 the Ortyx castaneus of Gould, so that Mr. Krider's bird, be- 

 ing not a distinct species, is probably already provided 

 with a name. We have seen some other variously black- 

 ened examples of this species in the collection of Geo. N. 



Lawrence of this city. — Ed.] 



— «**^» 



Eagles on the Susquehanna. — "Audubon' ' writes to us 

 from Harrisburg. Pa., that the bald eagle {Haliaetus leuco- 

 cephalus) is still found in that section, especially along the 

 mountain spurs of the Kittatining and Blue Ridges, skirt- 

 ing the eastern and western shores of the Susquehanna 

 River, north of that city, where several of these birds have 

 their eyries. It is not unusual for them to stray down the 

 river as far as the city, especially on sunny days, and our 

 correspondent graphically describes an incident in which a 

 bald eagle figured. He was observed hovering over Inde- 

 pendence Island, nearly opposite Harrisburg, moving in 

 slow and measured circles over a certain spot. The island 

 is directly opposite the city water works, about 600 yards 

 from the eastern shore of the river.- Suddenly making a 

 swift circle, the bald-pated hunter dropped with the veloc- 

 ity of a falling stone, and striking the water sent up a 

 sheet of spray. A powerful field glass in the hands of one 

 of the spectators disclosed the fact that the eagle had seized 

 a black duck, and skimming leisurely over the surface of 

 the water, reached a broad rock some 200 yards off. Hold- 

 ing the writhing duck in one of his talons, the eagle thrust 

 the other talon into its belly, tearing out the entrails and 

 causing the hot blood to spurt out over the surface of the 

 rock. Each thrust he made with his powerful beak tore 

 away a shred of quivering flesh; and so the hungry bird 

 kept on until disturbed by the approach of a skiff. The 

 duck had been more than two-thirds consumed before the 

 eagle took wing aud sailed leisurely northward to his eyrie 

 on the Kittatining. 



A Model Museum.— Mr. Booth of Brighton, England, 

 has built a spacious hall of brick, lighted entirely from 

 above, around which are being placed 306 cases of birds 

 shot by himself and Mrs. Booth in Britain. One point 

 about the fixing of the cases^is worthy of mention. A 

 framework is constructed about three feet from the wall, 

 into which the cases fit. This prevents any damp from the 

 walls, too frequent in museums, and allows- of the easy 

 moving of the cases. As the cases are arranged in three 

 tiers and there is abundance of light, every bird can be 

 well seen, and the width of the hall is sufficient to admit 

 of viewing the groups from different positions. The most 

 important feature, next to the careful stuffing of the birds, 

 is the fidelity with which the characters of the habitat is 

 reproduced. Various stages and changes of plumage in 

 the same birds are also presented. Nature says that, "as a 

 collection illustrating our British birds in their native 

 haunts, this is probably unique." 



If a similarly well and intelligently mounted suite of 

 American birds, with their characteristic surroundings and 

 by the side of their nests, could be exhibited at the Cen- 

 tennial next year, how gratifying it would be to every natur- 

 alist, and how much it would do for the advancement of the 

 beautiful study of ornithology in this and other countries! 

 If such a collection, complete or partial, showing a fauna 

 wide-spread or local, is forthcoming, we will guarantee a 

 place for its exhibition. 



. «e~*^ . ~^- 



Deposits in the Stomach op the Moose. — Some time 

 ago there was published in Forest and Stream an ac- 

 count of concretions found in the stomachs of horses. 

 Dr. J. D. Caton, well known for his studies upon the deer 

 family, informs us that similar deposits are sometimes 

 found in the stomach of the. moose, and refers us to page 

 72 of Capt. Hardy's "Forest Life in Acadia." Capt. Har- 

 dy says: "I have often heard it asserted by Indian hunters 

 that a large stone is to be found in the stomach of every 

 moose. This, of course, is a fable; but a few years since 

 I was given a calculus from a moose's stomach, which I 

 had sawed in two. The concentric rings were well defined, 

 and were composed of radiating crystals like needles. The 

 nucleus was plainly a portion of broken molar teeth which 

 the animal had swallowed. A short time afterwards I ob- 

 tained another bezoar taken from a moose. The rings 

 were fewer in number than in the preceding, but the nu- 

 cleus was a very nearly perfect and entire molar." Dr. 

 Caton thinks that it would be interesting to know what 

 were the nuclei of the calculi found in the stomachs of 

 the horses mentioned. 



•+++- 



Singular Boldness op a Partridge. --The story of the 

 sparrow which was bred up by the servant maid in Eng- 

 land, and became so much attached to its benefactress, 

 which was printed in our issue of Nov. 11, has called out 

 the appended letter from B . F. S. Carde", of Flint, Mich. 

 The facts therein stated may cause a strain on the credu- 

 lity of ornithologists, but they are vouched for by our cor- 

 respondent and his references as literally true, and we 

 give them on his authority. Matters of intelligent obser- 

 vation are always desirable; but it is important that we do 

 not allow ourselves to be deceived. The narrative is as 

 follows : — 



"Willie Ackerman, a boy in the employ of Mr. George 

 Bolster, started from his employer's house to go to the 

 wood lot for a load of wood. While on the way a par- 

 tridge (ruffed grouse?) alighted on the wagon, rode some 

 distance, and then flew off, but returning, alighted upon 

 the shoulder of the boy, who then caught it. The bird at 

 last escaped. Willie got his wood and returned for an- 

 other load. Some distance from where the partridge first 

 made his acquaintance the same bird came and again 

 alighted on the wagon, showing not the least fear, and 

 again on his return to the house Willie caught it. This 

 time he took the bird home aud built a cage for it. The 

 bird ate well from the first, and on "the approach 

 of the boy would fly and endeavor to get out to 

 him. It was found dead several mornings after. Mr. 

 Bolster thinks its head was caught between the bars and 

 that the bird received injuries in the night which caused 

 its death. You know too well how wild a bird the par- 

 tridge is for me to comment upon the singularity of this 

 circumstance." 



■ — -#-^*> 



—Paragraphs have appeared in several New England 

 newspapers lately mentioning the occurrence of "white 

 partridges" at several points. It would be interesting to 

 know whether these were all albinos of the common ruffed 

 grouse, or whether some were ptarmigans. The latter, 

 which is white in Winter, can be easily told from an albino 

 grouse by the fact that the whole of its toes are warmly 

 feathered, while the foot of the grouse is naked; and by 

 the absence of any tufts of broad soft feathers about the 

 neck. F. W. M. writes us from Boston that a ruffed 

 grouse perfectly white has been shot by Henry F. Thayer 

 at West Bridgewater, Mass. This albino will be mounted. 

 The shooting of an albino partridge in the North of Eng- 

 land lately, is mentioned in the last Land and Water as a 

 noteworthy circumstance. 



• >«**^__ — ____ 



—filature announces that Mr. Gould will shortly issue the 

 second part of the "Birds of New Guinea," an important 

 work, which will supplement "The Birds of Australia" by 

 the same author. 



— Nature for November 4th opens with a flattering re- 

 view of the work done in Colorado by the United States 

 Geological Survey un der Dr. F. Y. Hayden. It is from the 

 pen of the eminent geologist, Prof. Arch. Geike. 



: ■«> » » — 



—A general scarcity of birds has been remarked durino- 

 the past season in England, collectors finding only about 

 three-fourths as many nests as usual. At the same time the 

 breeding and departure of numerous species has been ex- 

 traordinarily late. The hard frosts of last Winter are men- 

 tioned as a possible reason. 



