To everything there is a season, and in Vermont, from late March until late May, it is the season to shoot fish. You think Vermont is all about civil unions and comfortable shoes? Think again.
Vermont is the only state in the union where it is legal to take fish with a firearm. Each spring, rain and melting snow swell the banks of Lake Champlain; the marshes and low-lying areas brim with water and several species of lake fish – particularly northern pike, chain pickerel and muskellunge – swim into the marshes to spawn. At this moment, as the fish are laying their eggs and recreating the miracle of life, some of my fellow citizens, shod in rubber boots and armed with an arsenal ranging from handguns to rifles loaded with center-fire cartridges, kill these fish as they breed.
The fish hunters don’t shoot the fish, really. If they did, the result would be nothing but fish-gut stew. The idea is to shoot near the fish, near the fish’s head is best, and the concussion of the bullet striking the water is sufficient to either kill or stun the fish. You apprehend your prey with a spear or a long-handled net.
It’s hard to know how all this got started, I’ve gotten a different answer from everyone I’ve asked and the origins of the practice recede into the mist of history. It seems the Abnaki, our local Native Americans, used to use spears to take fish in the marshes in the spring. When the white folk showed up, they brought guns, and there you have it. It was legalized in 1898 and up through World War II, fish shooting was a way for poor Vermonters to put many pounds of fish on the table for not much money.
But times have changed. The Great Depression is over, even in Vermont. Poor people have any number of ways to obtain sustenance without taking a gun to our finned friends. Maybe you just like eating fish, but thanks to any number industrial air polluters to our west, fish in Lake Champlain are full of mercury, so if you do eat our fish, you’d be wise not to eat too many. That doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem here. Although a goodly number of Vermonters shoot fish, not many eat them. A game warden I spoke with said many shooters just throw their dead fish up on the bank and leave them to rot. He calls them “trophy piles.” Of course, all this thrashing about in the swamps, often at night, with lanterns and beer, while fish are trying to breed, isn’t doing much for resource management. Nor does it help the birds that are trying to nest in the wetlands.
The problem at the heart of this is ignorance. At the turn of the last century, people thought fish like northerns, pickerel and muskies were a nuisance, because they feed on perch, a preferred food fish. What we didn’t understand then was that a healthy population of natural predators is good for a species like perch. The unnatural predators, the ones with guns, well, that’s another story.
The shooting falls particularly hard on the muskies. Muskellunge are native to Vermont, but their population has dropped substantially in recent years. A spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Department told me there hasn’t been a confirmed muskie catch in over 10 years. It’s still legal to shoot them; muskellunge are closely related to northern pike and pickerel and it can be difficult for a shooter to determine the exact species until the dead fish is in hand.
Every now and then the state legislature tries to pass a law putting this embarrassing practice to rest, but the fish shooters come out and scream and shout it down.
Funniest thing about it – they call themselves sportsmen.
Shoot and Release
To everything there is a season, and in Vermont, from late March until late May, it is the season to shoot fish. You think Vermont is all about civil unions and comfortable shoes? Think again.
Vermont is the only state in the union where it is legal to take fish with a firearm. Each spring, rain and melting snow swell the banks of Lake Champlain; the marshes and low-lying areas brim with water and several species of lake fish – particularly northern pike, chain pickerel and muskellunge – swim into the marshes to spawn. At this moment, as the fish are laying their eggs and recreating the miracle of life, some of my fellow citizens, shod in rubber boots and armed with an arsenal ranging from handguns to rifles loaded with center-fire cartridges, kill these fish as they breed.
The fish hunters don’t shoot the fish, really. If they did, the result would be nothing but fish-gut stew. The idea is to shoot near the fish, near the fish’s head is best, and the concussion of the bullet striking the water is sufficient to either kill or stun the fish. You apprehend your prey with a spear or a long-handled net.
It’s hard to know how all this got started, I’ve gotten a different answer from everyone I’ve asked and the origins of the practice recede into the mist of history. It seems the Abnaki, our local Native Americans, used to use spears to take fish in the marshes in the spring. When the white folk showed up, they brought guns, and there you have it. It was legalized in 1898 and up through World War II, fish shooting was a way for poor Vermonters to put many pounds of fish on the table for not much money.
But times have changed. The Great Depression is over, even in Vermont. Poor people have any number of ways to obtain sustenance without taking a gun to our finned friends. Maybe you just like eating fish, but thanks to any number industrial air polluters to our west, fish in Lake Champlain are full of mercury, so if you do eat our fish, you’d be wise not to eat too many. That doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem here. Although a goodly number of Vermonters shoot fish, not many eat them. A game warden I spoke with said many shooters just throw their dead fish up on the bank and leave them to rot. He calls them “trophy piles.” Of course, all this thrashing about in the swamps, often at night, with lanterns and beer, while fish are trying to breed, isn’t doing much for resource management. Nor does it help the birds that are trying to nest in the wetlands.
The problem at the heart of this is ignorance. At the turn of the last century, people thought fish like northerns, pickerel and muskies were a nuisance, because they feed on perch, a preferred food fish. What we didn’t understand then was that a healthy population of natural predators is good for a species like perch. The unnatural predators, the ones with guns, well, that’s another story.
The shooting falls particularly hard on the muskies. Muskellunge are native to Vermont, but their population has dropped substantially in recent years. A spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Department told me there hasn’t been a confirmed muskie catch in over 10 years. It’s still legal to shoot them; muskellunge are closely related to northern pike and pickerel and it can be difficult for a shooter to determine the exact species until the dead fish is in hand.
Every now and then the state legislature tries to pass a law putting this embarrassing practice to rest, but the fish shooters come out and scream and shout it down.
Funniest thing about it – they call themselves sportsmen.