Dace? At Trail Wood

Trail Wood #86 Earl Plato
Edwin Teale wrote April 20th the following: “The smaller fish appear to be dace…” It was on a hillside creek at Short Hills Provincial Park in Niagara that we saw black- lined dace, those little fish (2-3 in.), trying to climb up the fast flowing spring stream.
Teale told us about larger fish as we quote him, “Again and again … these minnow-sized fingerlings hurl themselves upward against the plunge of the falls. Each time after rising a foot or so, they are dashed back amid the shining bubbles that whirl away in the seethe below the waterfall. Once a larger fish, five and a half or six inches long, shoots upwards, cutting its way through the descending water. The trajectory of its leap carries it more than half way to the top. Then it arcs downward again. It is. I think a young brook trout that has worked its way up the tributary stream from Little River. The smaller fish appear to be dace. …”