622 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Nov. 15, 1913. 
Fry, Fingerlings and Fish 
A N old gentleman who had a lake with good 
trout fishing in it used to allow a num¬ 
ber of us to go there to fish each year. 
We paid for such fish as we brought home, and 
ate all we wanted while on the premises. We 
paid board while there, to his wife, who, by 
the way, was a delightful hostess. 
“Bad times” came. The old gentleman 
-died and his affairs were hopelessly involved. 
Almost co-incident with our sympathy for the 
'widow came the realization that if we were to 
fish there any more we must do something. 
We did. We formed a club and bought the 
;place. There were some four or five hundred 
acres of woodland, surrounding the lake and 
including the stream to its headwaters. There 
was a large house, an eight-room cottage, 
servants’ cottage, barn, chicken houses, boat 
house, and last, but not least, a trout hatchery; 
all in a state of more or less dilapidation. 
The first thing was to re-build the boat 
house and get two new boats. Before we could 
do much along the lines of conservation, we 
had to give the members of the club a chance 
to catch trout. 
That season, after things were well started, 
we rebuilt the hatchery, the roof of which had 
fallen in. There was a lot to be done to get 
ready for the spawning season, and none of us 
were practical fishculturists. There are some 
people who “rush in where angels,” etc. I 
did. I wanted to be chairman of the fish and 
game committee. I got my wish. Confiden¬ 
tially, the chairman of the usual club house 
committee has a sinecure compared to the 
chairman of our fish and game committee, but 
it is great fun in spite of the work. 
Well, a copy of Livingston Stone’s book 
was our guide, and it started us to work. We 
cleaned up the hatchery and tarred it down with 
coal tar. Repaired the hatching trays and we 
thought we had repaired the screens in the 
hatchery trough. We overhauled our water 
supply system. 
About Oct. 25 the trout began to come 
up stream to the spawning beds. We had to 
“study it in the book and then go and do it.” 
We stripped 2,700 fish and killed only two. We 
utilized the “dry fertilization system,” and 
while our output would not compare with a 
commercial hatchery, we felt very cheerful the 
following spring with about 200,000 fry. 
Then we discovered that the fry were dis¬ 
appearing like a June frost, and finally found 
that they were coming through the screens. 
We did our best to calk the screens around 
the bottom and side of the hatching troughs, 
but the troughs were made of zinc and they 
bulged when tight calking was attempted. I 
would never build hatching troughs of metal. 
By ROBESON L. LOW 
Good cedar 2-inch plank, white pine, if possible, 
neatly put together and tarred is better. 
We sold 50,000 fry before they escaped, to 
help pay expenses. Those that come through 
the screens we did not worry about, because 
they went into the spring brook where we 
would have turned them down anyway. We 
managed to keep 30,000 that we put into two 
small rearing ponds that we made. The pur¬ 
pose was to bring them to fingerling size be¬ 
fore turning them down, and to bring them 
to that size more quickly than if planted as 
fry. 
Well, when the fry were in the rearing 
ponds they commenced to die like flies. Liv¬ 
ingston Stone says in his book that he found 
earth was beneficial. Earth was used, and still 
they died. I went up and found their food 
had been offered too much at a time, and that 
the bottom was foul and even the purifying 
earth was not sufficient. I left directions to 
clean out the pond bottoms and put in gravel 
and sand from the brook and came back to 
town to my business. For one reason or an¬ 
other (there are always plenty of reasons) it 
was not done and still the fish died, and in 
July I went up and had the cleaning job done. 
A marked improvement in vitality followed, 
but it was very disappointing to find that the 
fish that lived were very much smaller than 
the fry that had escaped to the brook, instead 
of being larger, as we had hoped. 
Much discouraged, abandonment of rearing 
ponds was contemplated, but we screwed our 
courage up to the point of building three more 
ponds on an entirely different plan. Our rear¬ 
ing ponds were nothing but plank-lined spring 
holes, fed entirely by spring water that came in 
with little or no fall and remained about 43 
degrees F. throughout the summer. Our new 
ponds were constructed each a foot below the 
other with a fall between, and a good fall from 
the flume that fed it. The water supply was 
so arranged that it could be either brook water, 
spring water or a mixture. The bottom of the 
ponds was packed clay with the sand and gravel 
from the brook over that to the depth of sev¬ 
eral inches. Flash boards between rearing 
ponds permitted control of depth of water. 
They were located beside the brook above the 
highest known freshet and beneath a grove 
of deciduous trees that would give shade in 
summer and permit sun in winter. We were 
quite proud of the job when it was done, but 
the entire question was still unanswered: Would 
it raise fingerlings economically? 
We decided that we would try the brook 
water, as the fry in the brook had done so 
well, and there was undoubtedly natural food 
in it also. We brought the water in from about 
six hundred feet above where we made a small 
dam, and spilled it into No. 1 pond over a 
splatter board. Oxygen was what was wanted 
by the fish, so we reasoned. We transferred 
the “runts” from one of our spring ponds and 
found there were only 1,450 left out of 15,000, 
and they were a very poor looking lot com¬ 
pared with the fry in the brook of the same 
age. The “runts” in the other pond we had 
already turned into the brook. 
We had to improve the method of feeding, 
and our chore-boy solved the difficulty with a 
squirt gun. We ground liver fine enough, so 
that when mixed with water it could be sprayed 
over the surface of the rearing pond. This 
prevented chunks of liver too large for the fish 
to swallow going to the bottom to foul the 
water, and it insured distribution of food in 
such manner that all the fry had a chance at it 
instead of only the more vigorous and more 
bold, that would otherwise become still more 
vigorous and bold by comparison with their 
timid brothers and sisters. 
By now it was August and again the hatch¬ 
ery must be prepared for another season. We 
went at it, mending egg trays and making new 
screens for the hatchery troughs. The escap¬ 
ing of fry I was determined to prevent, so 
went down to Cold Spring on Long Island and 
told our troubles to the superintendent there. 
He showed me how his screens were set down 
in slots in the sides of the hatchery troughs 
and wedged up. If we couldn’t cut slots in 
our zinc troughs, we could put battens in to 
make the slides. We put in oak or hard maple 
battens with a piece of tarred flannel between 
the batten and the sides and bottom of the 
troughs, and on the outside another batten and 
bolted them through and drew the inside batten 
tight against the troughs, tight enough to make 
the tar ooze out of the flannel packing. That 
did the trick. 
Our second season we stripped 2,800 fish 
and didn’t kill any, although one of the hands 
at it (our chore-boy) was a green one. The 
importance of cleanliness was emphasized and 
a better result was shown in the condition of 
the hatchery. I am convinced that not enough 
care in picking out dead eggs was used, for 
when I finally got up to the club in February 
there were some fuzzy-looking messes in among 
the hatching trout that were evidently going to 
do, if they had not already done, some damage. 
Byssus was much to be feared. 
The week-end of Washington’s Birthday 
this year I spent up to my elbows in the 
hatchery. Nevertheless, by Monday there were 
a lot of alevins carried down to the lower ends 
of the troughs and up against the screens. 
When I returned to New York I called up Cold 
