Flying fishes of Wucheng

Natural History, Oct, 1998 by Erling Hoh

While some Chinese fishermen deploy electrified nets, others still depend on the old-fashioned cormorant.

Yang Shuyun's cormorants are Big Guy, Little Guy, Big Pearl. Little Pearl, and Boss Wu. They fish for him in fresh waters near the town of Wucheng, in the southeastern Chinese province of Jiangxi. Before releasing his cormorants to dive for prey, Shuyun ties a grass straw snugly around each bird's neck. If a fish gets swallowed before Shuyun manages to grab it, the grass straw keep it from passing all the way down the bird's throat. By stroking its neck upward, Shuyun can coax the bird to give up its catch. When the birds are not fishing, they sit tied to a bamboo perch outside Shuyun's brick house, sleeping with their heads tucked back between their wings, preening themselves with their beaks, scratching their necks with their webbed feet, snapping at their neighbors, cawing, defecating. Occasionally one bird will mount another.

Shuyun, age forty-six, lives with his wife, daughter, two sons, a daughter-in-law, and grandson. He learned cormorant fishing from his stepfather, Zhou Dahai, whose family had practiced the trade for many generations. His own father, who died when Shuyun was only two, had been a net fisherman. Shuyun grew up, illiterate, on a boat that made the rounds of far-flung fishing waters; he bought a house in Wucheng so that his children would be able to go to school. He and his cormorants raised the money.

The city occupies a low hill where the Gan and Xiu Rivers merge before emptying into Poyang Lake, one of the nation's largest freshwater lakes. Wucheng was once an important trading hub in the Yangtze Basin. Bustling with shops and a population of 70,000, it was nicknamed Little Shanghai. But early this century, railroad construction robbed Wucheng of its importance, and in 1939 it was nearly razed by Japanese bombing. Only about 4,000 people live there now, mostly employed in agriculture or fishing.

There are three types of fishermen. The wealthiest group, consisting of about seventy families, uses nets. They live on large, concrete-hulled boats and catch fish with net fences and elaborate net traps. Some twenty other families rely on hooks. Hook fishermen do not bait their hooks but place poles strung with hundreds of hooks at strategic spots; the fish get entangled by the sharp barbs. The least prosperous, if outwardly most exotic, group consists of twenty-two families of cormorant fishermen. Most of these families have one large boat with an engine, which they use for towing their rowboats to fishing places. Some families have just one smaller, motorized boat, and they turn the engine off when it is time to fish. Altogether, the cormorant fishermen employ some 125 birds.

By all appearances, Shuyun is one of the most industrious of Wucheng's cormorant fishermen. He fishes day or night, year-round, the weather dictating the rhythm of his work. Rain interferes because it muddies the water, making it difficult for the cormorants to spot the fish. Hard wind is another reason to call it a day. If the weather does not permit fishing, Shuyun goes to the market and buys fry for his cormorants. He feeds them in the afternoon, about one pound offish each, followed by a liberal dose of water. The fish are swallowed whole; the bones and other indigestible parts are regurgitated with a yellowish slime the following morning.

One morning I watched Shuyun and two other fishermen maneuver their boats along a small rivulet off the Gan River. Standing and facing forward, the fishermen rowed rapidly along the narrow waterway, hauling in the birds that had made a catch and prodding on the stragglers. In Wucheng, the cormorants' wings are often clipped to keep them from flying too far away. Each bird has a three-foot-long is string tied around one leg, with a knot on the loose end. The fisherman retrieves a bird with a long, thin bamboo pole tipped with a block of wood. He uses the block to catch onto the knotted string and pulls the bird toward the boat, letting it sit up on the pole. Since the cormorant swallows fish head first, it takes some juggling before the bird can get the fish into the right position, and usually the fishermen can snatch the fish while it is still in the cormorant's beak.

The rivulet, it turned out, was a bad bet--the fishermen caught only a few pounds of nian, a common catfish. When the ditch came to an end, we met a herdsman who told us about another stream nearby where, he said, there were plenty of fish. One of the fishermen was sent off to see if the water was deep enough to move the boats there, but he returned after a while with the news that it was not possible.

This kind of daily labor is intensive and exhausting, which is why the fishermen in Wucheng usually retire in their late forties or early fifties. Neither of Shuyun's two sons plans to carry on the trade. His older, married son, Guoyong, works as a cook. Twenty-year-old Jian, who graduated from Wucheng's junior high school four years ago, did a stint as a welder's apprentice and then joined his father as a cormorant fisherman for a couple of years. But he quickly began looking for opportunities farther afield. Currently he trades fish between Wucheng and Yongxiu, a larger town nearby. "Wucheng is a good place to grow up and grow old in," he says. "In between, I think one has to go somewhere else."