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NFC: Fw: Blue Pike
More Blue Pike stuff very fascinating........
Robert Rice
Help Preserve our Aquatic Heritage join the Native Fish Conservancy
online
at our website http://www.nativefish.org
--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: IDMiamiBob at aol_com
To: president at nativefish_org
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 19:00:53 EDT
Subject: Blue Pike
Message-ID: <9fa9853b.24ce42a5 at aol_com>
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)