Just to enliven your Thursday, here's a quote from John Keast Lord, The Naturalist in Vancouver Island and British Columbia (1866):
I have often seen a shoal of herrings, when hotly pursued by the dogfish, dash into a little rock-bound nook, the water lashed into white spray by a thousand tails and fins, plied with all the power and energy the poor struggling fish could exert to escape the dreaded foe. A wall of rocks, right and left, ahead the shelving shingle—on they go, and hundreds lie high-and-dry, panting on the pebbles. It is just as well perhaps to die there, as to be torn, bitten, and eaten by the piratical cannibals that are waging the fearful havoc on the imprisoned shoal. The dogfish wound ten times as many as they eat, and, having satiated and gorged their greedy stomachs, swim lazily away, leaving the dead, dying, and disabled to the tender mercies of the sea-birds watching the battle, ever ready to pounce upon the unprotected, and end its miseries.
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Just to enliven your Thursday, here's a quote from John Keast Lord, The Naturalist in Vancouver Island and British Columbia (1866):
I have often seen a shoal of herrings, when hotly pursued by the dogfish, dash into a little rock-bound nook, the water lashed into white spray by a thousand tails and fins, plied with all the power and energy the poor struggling fish could exert to escape the dreaded foe. A wall of rocks, right and left, ahead the shelving shingle—on they go, and hundreds lie high-and-dry, panting on the pebbles. It is just as well perhaps to die there, as to be torn, bitten, and eaten by the piratical cannibals that are waging the fearful havoc on the imprisoned shoal. The dogfish wound ten times as many as they eat, and, having satiated and gorged their greedy stomachs, swim lazily away, leaving the dead, dying, and disabled to the tender mercies of the sea-birds watching the battle, ever ready to pounce upon the unprotected, and end its miseries.
Yours in herring,
Boyd