They bite with greater freedom, show more sport, and are better on the table than at any other season of the year.
The yellow perch is a bold, nay! a savage biter, and a greedy feeder; it is even recorded of him that he has been known to strike at his own eye, casually torn out by the point of the hook, which is to me by no means incredible.
Securely weaponed by the sharp palisade of arrowy spines bristling along his back, and by the stout jagged thorns protruding in advance of his ventral anal fins, when of any considerable size, he fears neither the tremendous rush and shark-like jaws of the savage mascalonge, nor the terrible agility and dauntless daring of the namaycush and siskawity, those vast lake trouts, but feeds himself, a lesser tyrant of the waters, on whatever crosses his path of havoc.
A light, stiff, ten-foot rod, with a small reel, and twenty-five or thirty yards of line, with a small cork float, and a proper sinker for bottom fishing, is the best implement; and the best baits for this method are the common ground-worm or the little scarlet brandling. The latter particularly in rapid channels and scours. Cheese pastes are also used, and at times successfully, but I do not advocate their use, but the most certainly deadly of all baits is the paste made from the preserved roe of any fish which frequents the waters you are to fish. Trout-roe, in lakes or rivers haunted by that gamest and best of all the inhabitants of the water, kills unerringly.
In brackish water shrimp beats the world for perch, remembering that you fish near to or upon the bottom.
Perch, especially when of large size, may be trolled for as pike, with the hind legs of a frog, or with any small fish on a gorge hook. But in my opinion the prettiest of all modes of catching them is to rove for them with the live minnow.
For this purpose you take a fine, clear, gut leader, with a No. 9 Limerick hook whipped on at the tail, and an inch and a half above it, and back to back to the tail hook, a second one size smaller than the first.
The upper should be hooked securely into the lower jaw of a moderate sized minnow, and the lower into his dorsal fin, care being taken not to pierce his back, when he will swim about naturally and gayly for many hours, if not taken by a fish, and if carefully released without laceration, will survive the operation. A small cork, or, what is better, quill-float, is necessary to this method, and a few shot, sufficient to sink the bait to within three inches of the bottom. When a bite is felt, a little time should be given before striking; when struck, the perch is surely taken, for though he pulls hard for a short time he has neither the fierce courage nor the wily craft of the trout, but succumbs after a few brief struggles. A reel is necessary, and the float often dispensed with by veterans in the art.
The following very graphic extracts, on perch fishing in the waters of the Niagara river and Lake Erie, are from the pen of probably the best piscatorial writer of the United States, long an esteemed correspondent of the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, from whose lucubrations I have borrowed largely in my larger works on “Fish and Fishing,” and to whom I gladly record my obligation:
“The Yellow Perch. This beautiful and active fish is almost omnipresent in the fresh waters of the Northern States. There are probably two distinct but similar species in our country, blended together under this common name. The perch of New England differs from ours principally in the shape of the head. In the Saratoga Lake, Owasco Lake, Cayuga Outlet, the Flats of Lake Huron, and many other localities, the perch is larger than with us, frequently weighing three pounds. Among the perch of our streams and rivers, a half-pounder is a very portly citizen—though on a few particular bars they are sometimes taken in considerable numbers, averaging nearly a pound each. It is almost always to be had, from earliest spring to the commencement of winter; and when poor Piscator has had all his lobsters[[3]] taken by the sheeps-head, and utterly despairs of bass, he can, at any time, and almost any where, in our river, bait with the minnow and the worm, and retrieve somewhat from frowning fortune, by catching a mess of perch.