ROYAL STURGEON

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20906, 11 September 1939, Page 11

ROYAL STURGEON

ENGLISH ANGLER’S CATCH (From a Correspondent.) LONDON, August 12 Sympathy must be felt for the angler who landed a Gslb fish from the Severn at Woolaston. After a 20 minutes’ fight he landed his catch on the Bar Sands, only to find that it did not belong to him. It was a Royal sturgeon, and in the ordinary way the property of the King. (Gloucestershire enjoys an exception, however, for, as Lord of the Manor, Viscount Bledisloe, of Lydney Park, former Governor-General of New Zealand, is entitled to all Royal sturgeon captured in local waters. The last to be captured in the Lydney district was in June, 1937. This weighed about 5001 b and wais the heaviest on record to he caught in the Severn. When lie received this record fish, Lord Bledisloe told a number of New Zealand guests that he was one of three people in England entitled to have all sturgeon caught delivered to him. Often the sturgeon are passed on to be the fish course at big banquets in London. Sturgeons have an elongated body covered with tough skin and protected by five rows ol' bony plates. They live in fresh water or in the sea, entering rivers to spawn. Their flesh is eaten, their roe is made into caviar and their air bladder into isinglass—the substance used for preserving eggs, nxsd.ranin