I Have Often Attracted These Small
Perch To The Shore At Evening, By Rippling The Water With My
Fingers, And They May Sometimes Be Caught While Attempting To
Pass Inside Your Hands.
It is a tough and heedless fish, biting
from impulse, without nibbling, and from impulse refraining to
bite, and sculling indifferently past.
It rather prefers the
clear water and sandy bottoms, though here it has not much
choice. It is a true fish, such as the angler loves to put into
his basket or hang at the top of his willow twig, in shady
afternoons along the banks of the stream. So many unquestionable
fishes he counts, and so many shiners, which he counts and then
throws away. Old Josselyn in his "New England's Rarities,"
published in 1672, mentions the Perch or River Partridge.
The Chivin, Dace, Roach, Cousin Trout, or whatever else it is
called, _Leuciscus pulchellus_, white and red, always an unexpected
prize, which, however, any angler is glad to hook for its
rarity. A name that reminds us of many an unsuccessful ramble by
swift streams, when the wind rose to disappoint the fisher. It is
commonly a silvery soft-scaled fish, of graceful, scholarlike,
and classical look, like many a picture in an English book. It
loves a swift current and a sandy bottom, and bites
inadvertently, yet not without appetite for the bait. The
minnows are used as bait for pickerel in the winter. The red
chivin, according to some, is still the same fish, only older, or
with its tints deepened as they think by the darker water it
inhabits, as the red clouds swim in the twilight atmosphere.
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