National News & Information > Features September 2007

At the end are the rainbows by Hugh Creasy

A gray-skinned Hoplodactylus stared with slit vertical pupils at its intended victim. The wind-battered moth clung to its beach gravel refuge, unaware that it was soon to be breakfast for a gecko. Its rest was short-lived and within a second or two it was being slowly chewed and swallowed. The gecko, with a name like a dinosaur,  retreated to the cover of a glossy-leaved taupata, growing prostrate in the teeth of endless gales.

On the beach a marching line of darkly-clad men wielding white-meshed nets on the end of long poles, waded knee-deep in the surf, patrolling the rivermouth, at equidistant spacing to be fair, in their search for whitebait. As each man reached the end of his run he lifted his net from the water, turned it inside out over a bucket, and squizzed the contents carefully. From a distance it looked like a weird ritual, an out of step dance in honour of a natural phenomenon. The gecko was far more efficient in pursuit of its prey, in energy at least.

Inland, there were more efficient methods of harvesting the tiny fish. Steel-framed netting sunk in the river bottom and swung from great booms proclaimed man’s mastery over the river and its struggling inhabitants. The lords of the foodchain sat in deckchairs, smoked and drank endless beers as they waited for a natural miracle, the coming of the progeny of galaxidae, dwellers in mud and swamp.

Under the surface there were currents the tiny fish must swim against. They started at sea, hatched from sticky egg masses, prey to kahawai and barracuda, then moved to the estuary where trout waited, thin from their own spawning and savage with the need to regain condition. The translucent bait were a protein feast for larger fish. 
Trout churned the surface water as they pursued whitebait, throwing panic into the flow of galaxids and drawing curses from the net wielders who relied on a steady and peaceful flow of fish to fill their nets.

In the backwaters and pools of the upper river there had also been hatchings of small fish. They did not come in the vast numbers of whitebait. In the early months of winter, the mating urge drove trout to the stable gravels of the river’s riffles and runs where the hen fish scraped redds and laid eggs, and the  jack fish followed, spurting milt with sexual energy that drained them of fat and muscle.

It was a short-lived orgy and the spent fish drifted in the river’s current – too exhausted to fight the pressure of winter-swollen flow.

They drifted to the estuary where shrimp,  yellow-eyed mullet and baby mackerel were easier pickings. Many trout did not survive the rigours of mating and fell prey to lamprey and eel.

Those that did survive fed with ferocity. Some stayed in the salty estuary and some moved to the sea, taking their chances among predators far more fierce than themselves. Others travelled back upstream as the weather warmed and the snow-melt floods of spring gave way to more stable flows. To them whitebait were a blessing – a protein feast before the insect hatches of summer.

They passed backwaters where their own progeny gathered for safety in the shallows.  These tiny trout had survived attacks by their own kind and by shags that pursued them underwater, and decimated their numbers.

The fingerlings had begun their lives in an endless struggle for survival. They fought the currents of the river, the spring floods and the attacks of vicious predators. Few of them would survive, but those that did were experienced in the ways of nature – wary at movement and shadow, forever alert. The next test of their ability to survive would be to find their place in the river. By summer they would have enough growth to start competing for a place in the foodline – that central current of every river and stream where hatching mayflies drifted and caddis fluttered to the surface, where the terrestrial insects that fell from willows and overhanging shrubbery gathered on the way downriver.

For months they would travel the river in schools, their numbers reducing as time passed and predators took  their toll. But there were places on the river, of refuge and rest, behind boulders and logs, where backcurrents eased the river’s flow and  the frantic flurry of fin could ease to a gentle thrust to maintain position and enable the young fish to sip soft-bodied insects from the surface. They would grow at a prodigious rate.

Into this desperate struggle steps the light-hearted angler, thinking to subdue a wild creature – to trick it through cunning disguise and lazy guile. A cast  to a rising fish brings a snap in reply – a sweep of the head sets the hook and the fish – a creature that has run such a wild gauntlet – is caught.

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