President's Journal September 2006
Tuesday, 19 September 2006, 11:02 a.m. CDT
Why Little Fish Are Important
A while back I wrote about why I now think big fish mean something important.
By that, I didn't and don't mean to give little fish short shrift; in fact, I think they are extremely important. So today they get equal time.
First and foremost, without little fish, there would soon be no big fish. In general, nature seems to plan it so that a larger number of little fish get hatched, so as to grow into a smaller number of big fish. Hopefully, in the medium term at least, some sort of equilibrium gets established where enough babies get born so that a certain percentage can get predated (that's to say, caught, eaten, or otherwise die) and still leave "enough" adults for the species to live in peace in a balanced eco-system. That's the theory anyway. In the short term, everything seems to go on wild swings of plenty and privation. In the long term, of course, mass extinctions do indeed occur and I guess I'm OK with that -- I like being a human fly fishing more than I imagine I'd like being a velociraptor fly fishing, which we could well be if the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct. I don't think they would have used split bamboo.
Since we only live one lifetime, the short term is more important to us, and we need the yearly cycle to produce enough babies so that there can still be some adults around. That goes for humans and mayflies as well as trout. So, no small fry, no big "hawg" trout, and we all like to catch big fish, so we have an obligation to like the babies too.
Second, fly fishing is not exactly an easy sport to get into. It takes practice, a certain amount of gear, and time on the water, goofing up, learning, observing... When you start out, it is easy not to catch any fish at all. I can attest to that. There is nothing to say that you can even get a cast onto the water the first time, and we almost all start out with a limited assortment of mostly-very-generic (and too large) flies, which the fish snub. We know virtually nothing about how the fish behave, nor about their environment. Get skunked enough times in the early days, and it's easy to put the gear up on e-bay and buy a set of golf clubs. What sometimes makes the difference between growing into a devoted fisherman and devolving into a Sunday golfer is... small fish. The little, inexperienced, stupid fish, the ones that nature intended to get eaten so their luckier or smarter brethren can grow into "pigs", those fish can sometimes be the difference between getting skunked, and having a good day consistently catching small but eager fish. Take a little kid fishing 2 times, once where you are working to catch the biggest fish in the pond, and another time where you are going after 4-inch bluegills under the dock, and see which day is the better one for them. So little fish help new-comers turn into devoted fly fishers. In a sport (and a club) over-represented by males "of a certain age", that's a good thing.
Even today, there are times where you can find a pod of medium and big fish, working some small food near the bottom, and in the same pool will be a group of excited small fish slashing and jumping at dry flies on the surface. You can catch 10 or 20 of those small guys on an easy-to-see size 14 royal wulff in the same amount of time it would take you to figure out that the big guys want the #20 scud with 5 wraps of wire, not 4 or 6, gray tinged with a small bit of orange, and the left legs sticking straight out instead of down in the natural way. Which is more fun? Sometimes, catching an endless string of exuberant small fish is. Maybe not all the time, but sometimes it's great. As I've noted before, a person can be justifiably proud to grow into a fly fisher who can "move on," beyond the eager small fish, to catch big fish from time to time (or more often.) But we have to start somewhere, and little fish are where we often start.
So baby fish pass through the small-fish period on their way to becoming big fish, and they intersect with fly fishing newbies passing through the stage of catching naive little fish on their way to becoming accomplished fly fishers. It's an important moment that keeps us all moving forward. I tilt a glass to small fish!