Yo, Robert!
About eight years ago, and long after blues were supposed to be extinct, I
was living near Niagara Falls. A fellow I worked with came back from the
Kippawa (sp?) River area of Western Quebec with pictures of bunches of blue
pike he and his friends had caught on his trip up there.
When I quizzed him about how this could be, he said no, that they were only
extinct in Lake Erie. The problem was that Icthyologists were unwilling to
admit that they had ever lived anywhere else. Now it seemed to me at the
time, that since the Kippawa River drains eventually into the St Lawrence,
and that small fish could easily have survived a drop over Niagara Falls,
then why was it unreasonable that they might not have travelled downstream,
and for some reason unknown to us, then chosen to go back up this particular
drainage to find a place to spawn. It would only have taken two fish to make
the passage for a new population to spring up. I talked to a number of
government officials, and a dude at the Niagara Falls aquarium, and they all
said the same thing, which basically was that they regularly recieved
reports
from fisherman who lived in and around Niagara County saying that
they had
caught blues in Western Quebec. But there is no way they really
could have
been Blue Pike, and so the government was not going to go looking
for them,
nor were they going to cough up the 5 grand to have someone at
Cornell
University examine a specimen to confirm that it was truly a blue,
and not a
blue-ish looking yellow pike. They are both just variations of
walleye, and
so it is just to hard to confirm that this one or that one or
every one that
someone brings in is or is not a blue.
Now, an interesting side note. If you can find any of the old-timers who
remember what blues looked and tasted like, they will tell you that a yellow
pike tastes best at around five lbs, but a blie tastes best at around three,
and that a five pound blue is just plain nasty. Well, my co-worker assured
me that these blues definitely passed the "taste-test". I tried to arrange a
trip up there, but was informed by Canadian Fish and Game officials that I
wouldn't be able to get one back across the border alive. I was also assured
by the folks at cornell that if it was brought in to them on ice, there
would
be no way to prove how long it had been dead.
So, anyway, if your members in Lockport, NY, check around the local bait
shops and ask the right questions, they might find a local who would be
willing to take them up there. The fellow I worked with at that time is
named Ron Fritz, and he worked with me at Voss Industries, on Lockport Road
in Sanborn, NY. If he isn't still there, someone probably knows how to find
him.
Bob Dixon (Killietrader list guy)