Steve Featherstone | [email protected] Located in the center of the Colonnade next to the Dairy Building, The New York State Department of Conservation aquarium is an oasis of calm and tranquility amid the hustle and hubbub of the NYS Fair. Frazzled fairgoers seeking a vibe reset appreciate the aquarium’s dimly lit interior, the lack of blaring music, and of course, the massive wall of crystal clear, bubbling tanks brimming with New York’s freshwater critters.
There’s a few frogs and turtles in the tank on one end, but otherwise it’s all fish, including some species that many anglers may have never seen before. (When’s the last time you reeled in a redhorse?) So next time you stroll through the aquarium to snap a selfie with a sunfish, ask yourself: Where did that sunfish—or sturgeon, or pickerel, or bowfin—come from? “ Some people think they’re out there all year round, but they’re not,” said Bill Evans, manager of the DEC’s Oneida Fish Hatchery in Constantia and the man responsible for stocking the aquarium. “They’re only there for the duration of the Fair.
” Evans gave Syracuse.com a backstage pass to see how he gets the aquarium shipshape for the Fair. If there’s one thing we learned from the experience, it’s that beauty sells, even below the surface.
Bill Evans inspects every fish in each tank on the morning of the first day of the Fair, making sure only the best specimens are on display. Steve Featherstone | [email protected] One day before the Fair opened, two hatchery technicians in a skiff motored down Scriba Creek out into Oneida Lake.
It was a calm, cool morning after days of rough weather. The skiff swung aside an orange buoy marking a submerged six-foot trap net that the hatchery mainly used to net spawning walleye. One of the technicians, Josh Bryant, snagged the net with a gaffe and began hauling it toward the skiff.
He and another tech probed the far corners of the trap net with long-handled nets, scooping up fish. They dumped their catch—silvery freshwater drum, bright turquoise and orange pumpkinseeds, dull green bass—into a blue plastic tub sitting in the middle of the skiff. Undersized fish and duplicates went back into the lake.
“We net every day we’re out,” Evans said. “As long as the Fair is going on, we bring fish in the building. So if we net something we don’t have at the Fair, we’ll get them out there so that folks can see them.
” Back at the hatchery, a crane lifted the blue tub out of the skiff and Bryant rolled it toward a flatbed truck outfitted with large transfer tanks. Evans peered down into the tub. “You got a beautiful pumpkinseed, look at him,” he said.
“We can take him out and we can kind of gauge which one looks better.” Fish were scooped from both the blue tub and the hatchery’s holding tanks and then dropped into the truck’s tanks for transport to the Fairgrounds. DEC's aquarium at the Fair is located in the middle of the Colonnade, next to the Dairy Building.
Steve Featherstone | [email protected] Opening day of the Fair, two hours before the gates opened, the hatchery truck rolled up the Colonnade ramp and stopped about 20 yards from the aquarium. Bryant unlatched the tank hatches and began scooping out fish.
Evans stood below, gently swiping fish from Bryant’s net into a plastic trash can filled with water. The fish were taken through a back entrance into the aquarium, up a small set of stairs, and into a narrow access corridor behind the tanks. Evans dumped the fish into a tank and made another run to the truck.
When all the fish had been offloaded into the appropriate tanks, Evans went out front into the public area to survey the aquarium from the fairgoer’s point of view. The crystal-clear water glowed blue in the dim light. Dozens of fish swam in each tank.
“We don’t feed these fish at the Fair, that way they don’t metabolize, they’re not defecating and urinating in the water,” Evans said. “It keeps the water cleaner, so it’s better for all of them.” The water circulating in the tanks is also chilled to 52 degrees—about 15 degrees cooler than Oneida Lake—to slow down the fish’s metabolism.
Every other day the tanks are replenished with fresh new fish. Any sluggish or raggedy fish are sent back to the lake. Three pumpkinseeds from Oneida Fish Hatchery's tank truck are temporarily dumped into a water-filled garbage can for transfer to DEC's aquarium at the Fair.
Steve Featherstone | [email protected] Evans paced back and forth in front of the tanks, cataloging each fish with the cold, discerning eye of a beauty contest judge. He wanted the prettiest fish Oneida Lake had to offer—it was a matter of pride.
“Because these are beautiful fish, you know?” Evans said. “They’re out there in the wild doing their thing. So we want to try showcase what people are actually going to catch when they’re out in there in the wild, fishing.
” The fish in the warmwater sportfish tank met with Evans’ approval. The northern pike got a thumbs up, as did the tiger muskie. A group of five bullhead in the panfish tank were especially impressive.
They rested on the bottom in a row like sunken logs, whiskers waving in the current. “Wow,” Evans exclaimed, nodding appreciatively, “the bullhead look really good.” Whenever he spotted a fish that appeared less than ideal, however, Evans shouted instructions to Bryant, who stood in the narrow corridor behind the tanks with a net.
“To the right—yup!” Evans shouted as Bryant’s net billowed inside the tank. “You got ‘em, Josh, nice job!” Fish at DEC's aquarium at the Fair are replenished every other day with fresh fish while others are scooped out and released back into the lake. Steve Featherstone | sfeatherstone@syracuse.
com Healthwise, there was nothing wrong with the fish Evans asked Bryant to remove from the tanks. The problem was that any fish might look fine at the bottom of a dark holding tank back at the hatchery, but once it’s under the bright aquarium lights, every little flaw gets magnified. “Especially freshwater drum,” Evans said.
“They’re such a powerful fish, they’re in the nets, they’re trying to get away, their skin is being abraded by the netting, so they look pretty rough. It’s all superficial scrapings on the surface, but it’s not a good representation of what they really are in the wild, so we’ll get them out and probably bring a few more in tomorrow.” On the way out of the aquarium, something caught Evans’ eye.
Something must’ve jarred the flexible backdrop inside one of the tanks, opening a small gap between the background and the edge of the tank. Evans leaned forward to examine the gap, his face a few inches from the glass. “Oh boy,” he frowned, “that’s disheartening.
” Weeks earlier, before the tanks were filled with water, Evans and a hatchery crew crawled around inside each tank, arranging the stones and plants and getting the backdrops in place. Now he had to fix this unsightly gap, merely one hour before the gates opened at the Fair. “We took the time to make it all nice,” Evans joked and threw his hands in the air.
“I’m going to walk away now.” Stay up to date on all our New York State Fair news, food, music, schedules and more with Syracuse.com ’s free newsletter.
It’s emailed to you each morning. Click here to sign up. More NYS Fair News • A NY State Fair ‘size matters’ controversy: How big is that Pizze Fritte anyway? • NYS Fair Love Stories: Jordan couple started as goat show friends, then things got ‘a bit serious’ • NYS Fair Love Stories: There really were ‘two less lonely people in the world’ after this couple met in 1996 • More than 52,000 come out for Day 7 of 2024 NYS Fair Steve Featherstone covers the outdoors for The Post Standard, syracuse.
com and NYUP.com . Contact him at sfeatherstone@syracuse.
com or on Twitter @featheroutdoors . You can also follow along with all of our outdoors content at newyorkupstate.com/outdoors/ or follow us on Facebook at facebook.
com/upstatenyoutdoors ..
