They Made a Good Start

They Made a Good Start The picture is of a culvert, of the trademark CCC design, in Inks Lake State Park. This is just one example of their handiwork that is still in place and in use in the park today. They did not get to complete the building of Inks Lake State Park but they made a good start --- a war interrupted their work. The project was put on hold as the soldiers, many of whom were these same CCC workers here at Inks Lake, went off to World War II. But during the brief time they were there they constructed a road system with dozens of stone culverts and a boathouse. The CCC workers from Company 854 came to Inks Lake from the Longhorn Caverns restoration work – SP-#35. I’ll bet they felt they had died and gone on to Heaven when they got to this duty station. The “nature” of the work in Longhorn Caverns, according to the tour guide on my visit there, was as follows: “They removed 2.5 million cubic yards of rock debris and soil that had washed into the caverns over the years. Also there were large bat guano deposits present that had to be removed. In this removal work the tools used were pick, shovel and wheel borrow. Since there was no electricity available for lighting, all of this work was conducted by the light of kerosene lanterns”. Inks Lake is one in the Highlands Lakes Chain on the Colorado River. This is Texas’ own Colorado River --- not the one that goes through the Grand Canyon and into the Gulf of California. Our Texas Colorado is totally “in-state” --- it heads up in the Panhandle and enters the Gulf of Mexico through Matagorda Bay. With 349 camp sites, Inks Lake State Park is a very “Camper Friendly” destination on this 800 acre body of water. It is close enough to all of the Texas metropolitan areas for all of those sights to be heavily used throughout the year. The scenery, clear blue water contained between jagged pink granite cliffs, is like in a John Wayne movie. Remember the one where “Rooster” and Miss Eula Goodnight are floating down river on a raft carrying nitroglycerin? Take a look at the “Devils Waterhole” in Inks Lake and you will see what I mean. That little bit of movie nostalgia will take a lot of us back in time but if you want to see something that goes back into the time BEFORE the dinosaurs --- Inks Lake is the place. To be precise, it is at the Inks Dam Federal Fish Hatchery. To quote from a Texas Parks & Wildlife Department document: “Fossil records indicate that it is older than dinosaurs (300 million years).” The reference is to paddlefish. The first paddlefish I ever encountered while sampling fish populations on the Arkansas and Cimarron Rivers. We were on the river just below Cleveland, Oklahoma. We had set about a dozen 300 foot long gill nets in a zig zag pattern alternating off of each bank of the river. It was late July so the temperature down in the bed of the river became uncomfortably hot pretty early in the day. So the strategy was to set the nets late in the evening and “run” them early in the morning. So there we were just as the sun was coming up retrieving the first net. You can tell if you have fish in the net before you can see them by the way the net “jerks” as you begin to pull it in. This one was bucking and jumping as if we had caught a whale. When we got it out of the water we were still not sure what we had landed. The “thing” looked somewhat like a catfish and somewhat like a shark but with a snout that looked like a canoe paddle. It was three feet long and weighed 14 pounds (these statistics were determined later, after the shock wore off). It was a Paddlefish! We caught another 26 over the course of that summer, but none created the excitement that the first one did. They are not only unusual creatures in design but in construction and habits as well. Their skeleton is all cartilage except for one bone in the jaw --- the jaw bone. They feed only on plankton. They do this by opening their mouth, which creates an open large enough for a volley ball to enter. They then swim through the water accumulating plankton on their gills. Then they “gulp” it down. This process is truly a sight to behold. They produce paddlefish at the Inks Dam National Fish Hatchery for stocking in a variety of places --- Lake Texoma Reservoir being one of the major recipients. Marc Jackson, the Project Manager, said that this program was started ten years ago and is still “going strong”. In that period of time they have reared and released about 3,000 paddlefish “head started” at the Inks Dam Hatchery. The fry come to the Inks Dam from another Federal hatchery in Tishomingo Oklahoma. When they arrive they are about one inch in length. They raise them up to 12 to 14 inches then they are released. Before being released they are tagged by inserting a tiny little coded wire tag in their snout. They are then released into Lake Texoma Reservoir or other suitable bodies of water. During their regular annual surveys of the reservoir, when a paddlefish is captured, it is “scanned” with a device like that used at the checkout counter at the grocery store. It “reads” the information from the coded wire tag showing where the fish came from, when it was released, how old it is and how big it was the last time it was last “seen”; at release, previous capture(s), etc. I spoke to Brent Bristow, “Keeper of The Records” at the Tishomingo Hatchery about the rate of growth of the fish after being released into Lake Texoma. They are from 5 to 12 inches in length (not including the snout) and weigh from one- quarter to one-half pond. He has found in his survey/recapture work, that by the time the fish are from 5 to 6 years old, they may be as large as 38 inches in length (snout not included) and weigh 46 pounds. And they do this all on a diet composed of little plankton creatures that can hardly be seen by the naked eye. Inks Dam National Fish Hatchery was established in 1938. Its original mission was to supply fish to the lakes along the Colorado River. Presently, in addition to the paddlefish, they annually produce catfish, striped bass and largemouth bass. So if, on your next visit to Inks Lake State Park, you would like see a lot of fish, as well as a creature that makes a dinosaur seem only a “Johnny Come Lately”, visit the Inks Dam Hatchery. Visiting hours at the Hatchery are from 7 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. every day including holidays; call weekdays for a tour. See: http://www.fws.gov/offices/directory/OfficeDetail.cfm?OrgCode=21220 .

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