The hunt begins

Perch

Last week, for nostalgia's sake, I decided to seek out all the little fishes that seem to be going missing from our rivers. Of course, it may be that I haven't caught them lately because I have been fishing with huge hooks for big fish, but I have been asking around; "Where can I catch a ruffe or a gudgeon?" Everyone round here says that they haven't seen one for years, so it's definitely time to take stock of the situation.


The last time I caught a "Tommy Ruffe" was on the Great Ouse at Houghton, so that's where I started my search.

Roach

Fishing for tiddlers required me to go digging through the packets of hooks at the bottom of my old tackle box at the back of the garage in search of the smallest hook I could practically attach to a line. These turned out to be spade-ends, size 18, although I thought the packet was empty at first: I just couldn't see them, never mind tie them on.

I took along a bottle of tiny worms from my compost bin and a £2 tin of pink maggots that I bought, with some amusement, from a refrigerated dispenser at my local petrol station. The idea was to fish these small baits on a tiny hook using a sensitive float, under my rod-tip, close to the bank.


It worked; up to a point. Every time I swung the float out into the flow, it bobbed under and I struck. Mostly I missed, but I soon brought a small roach to my hand, followed by a dozen perch, another roach, and some bleak, then the final straw came:

Bleak

On a tiny hook, I fished a single maggot beneath a toy float suitable for a toddler and I caught a huge, slimy slab of a bream. It was time to regroup and reconsider my enterprise.

And so that's what I'm doing now. I'm working out how and where to catch a gudgeon, a bleak, a spiny loach and a stone loach, by any method and photograph it. Your help would be gratefully appreciated.

The reasons for the apparent decline in these small fishes are complex. It may be that the dredged, tamed channels of our rivers don't have enough hiding places for small bait-fish. It may also be that there are more big fish   such as carp and barbel around where they have been stocked for anglers. Even more problematic is the fact that our rivers now hold introduced species such as crayfish, catfish and zander.

Bream

I doubt that I can solve any problems regarding the survival of these fish, but I will at least find them and take their photos.

As a matter of interest, to me at least, catching a bunch of small perch, unhooking and photographing them led to a bit of a scientific observation. When perch are tiny, they seem to have quite small mouths in relation to their body size, but the bigger ones develop hugely disproportionate bait-inhaling "gobs". All this makes sense, but I need to measure it to be certain. My conjecture is that small perch eat mostly invertebrates, while big ones prefer to eat fish, and the gape adapts accordingly. I also think this works for trout, but I need to prove it.