Angling for Common 
The Sunfish 
NCE I wrote in regard to the 
() sunfish: “It is true, anyway 
that you look at it, the older 
we grow the more in kindliness do we 
hark back to the days of our boyhood; 
it is always the old recurring lines, 
‘backward, turn backward O time in 
ihy flight; make me a boy again just 
for to-night!’ And the wheel of recol- 
lection revolves; the eye of the mind 
looks backward, going over again those 
pleasant pathways; it stumbles bare- 
footed along those same old home- 
brooks; and, pausing here and there, 
treads the soft sands of the shore of 
the home lake. Through the pipes’ 
blue smoke wreaths one is strangely 
able to see a great distance—as one 
grows older. It is therefore in a re- 
miniscent vein that we remember the 
sunfish and his essential place in this 
world of worlds. Now a sunfish has 
never been guilty of causing a man to 
sit awake nights, pen in hand, setting 
down immortal lines designed to fit- 
tingly describe his person, position and 
career. Save in rare instances its 
shape and hue have not been colored 
with the choicest poetic pigments. The 
sunfish simply—is. It is scarcely right 
therefore to expect an active angling 
writer to sit down and peck out a tome 
on behalf of the said sunfish. 
URTHERMORE he need not tear 
his hair, and hunt in the dictionary 
for strange, mouth-filling words to foist 
upon an innocent reading public; all to 
make people believe that the sunfish is 
more than he is. We know the sunfish. 
The sunfish is no brook trout in any 
By ROBERT PAGE LINCOLN 
sense of the word. He simply is a 
sunfish.” 
But an anonymous writer has 
thought different stating that when the 
pumpkin seed sunfish is “taken drip- 
ping from the water it has all the colors 
of a green opal and several more.” 
That is every bit as good description as 
has ever been accorded fontinalis. Nor 
is this all. The same writer holds that 
“in color the pumpkin-seed rivals the 
coral fish of the south seas. Even the 
lordly brook trout is not more beauti- 
ful. The back is bluish, sometimes with 
purple reflections, and again with a 
greenish-olive appearance; the sides 
are a lighter shade, spotted and 
blotched with a rich orange; and the 
belly is a bright orange-yellow, some- 
times gleaming like gold. The cheeks 
are deep orange, crossed with wavy 
blue streaks, which give them a 
zebra-like appearance. The lower 
fins are yellow, while the dorsal fin 
is blue and yellow. The ear-flap is 
a deep velvet black, splashed with red 
on the lower side, a mark which al- 
ways appears in the adult fish, serving 
to distinguish it from all other bright- 
colored members of the family. The 
angler should remember that gibbosus 
alone is possessed of the decorated 
iiss. 
LuAr is very good indeed and I be- 
lieve many an old angler bending 
over these pages will heartily agree 
with the verdict rendered. The older 
we grow the more important the sun- 
fish becomes; the more attentive is the 
fancy to the sunlit hours of youth. 

For “smail though it be, and feeble, 
the sunfish is yet a fish; and it is large 
enough to open to childhood the door 
to a great wonderworld of fish and fish- 
ing. Where is the veteran freshwater 
angler who does not recall the-electric 
thrills of his first ‘bite’ and his first 
living, wriggling, scintillating sunfish. 
Blessings be upon their rainbow-tinted 
sides for the joys they have been, or 
yet will be, to childhood!” 
T is said that the origin of the sunfish 
group of North American fishes is 
undoubtedly Asiatic; that a fish of 
Japan known as the serranoid (Bryt- 
tosus) looks a great deal like our sun- 
fish and that the genus Kuhlia, a rep- 
resentative of the Pacific, in many ways 
has the appearance of our so-called 
black bass. All of these things I doubt 
very much would cause a still fisher to 
drop his pipe in amazement; but it all 
goes to show that small though a fish 
may be, its ancestors in all possibility 
came from foreign shores. The eastern 
United States is, properly speaking, 
the home of the sunfish; the family is 
divided into fifteen species not one of 
which would not gladly die by taking 
an angleworm on the hook. The most 
beautiful member of the family is the 
so-called common sunfish, or pumpkin- 
seed (Hupotomis gibbosus). It was so 
named in the year 1758 by the great 
Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, who was 
supplied with a number of the kind 
which were captured in the state of 
South Carolina. It is found mainly 
east of the Mississippi River, from 
Florida in the south, to the Great Lakes. 
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