25 OCTOBER 1957, Page 29

TROUT'S DIET

When I first used to fish for trout, with a piece of brown line and short length of gut on my spruce- pole rod, my bait was a red-streaked worm dug at the midden's edge. Sometimes on my way to the water I would meet an old angler whose advice was to open my fish when I caught them and find out what they were eating. I wasn't old enough to profit from the advice. The worm and the results it brought contented me. Years passed and although I aban- doned the middcn worm it wasn't until recently that I began to examine the stomach contents of lake trout. Opening every fish 1 caught, I discovered that their diet was mainly beetles which, with a little skill, can be fashioned from the herl of a peacock's tail, a cock hackle or dyed ostrich plume, small feather from a sparrow's breast, wool and horsehair. Of eighty fish I caught in one lake last season, sixty- five contained one sort of beetle or another. One must arm oneself accordingly if one wants to catch trout. and so, in the winter evenings, apart from dreaming about fish I might have caught, I shall he making modest imitations of lesser waterboatmen and imagining the gape oF'a great trout as he wheels to gulp one down.