#buffalo fish

[bethanythebogwitch]

Check out my new puppy

[ronthafrog]

who took… his snout :(

[thislovintime]

Q: “How did you end up going out to California [from Greenwich Village]?”  Peter Tork: “‘37 Chevy. Broke down outside of Las Vegas. When it started to belch brown water out of the tail pipe I knew it was all over. We hitch hiked the rest of the way. I had a lady friend waiting for me, I thought. Turned out I was far more threatening in the flesh than at a calm, safe distance, so that didn’t last long. But she connected me to with the Golden Bear Cafe in Huntington Beach, where I got a job washing dishes.” - Goldmine (May 1982)

“I’d run into Stephen earlier when he was playing with Peter Tork and John Hopkins, and I thought they were really doing it right.” - Richie Furay, Crosby, Stills & Nash: The Authorized Biography (1984)

“[Stills] put together a short-lived folk duo called Buffalo Fish with bass player Ron Long (another refugee from Greenwich Village). Together, they hit the Southern California folk circuit in late 1965, playing mostly folk and blues standards. One night, when they hit the Golden Bear, in Huntington Beach, Peter Tork was working in the club’s kitchen.‘I was between gigs,’ says Tork, ‘washing dishes and jerkin’ beer at the Golden Bear, when all of a sudden I hear this voice coming from out in the club. I look and it’s Stephen, who I hadn’t seen since leaving New York.’ Over beers, Stills and Tork renewed their friendship and Buffalo Fish became a trio, with Tork adding some vocal support and comedic touches. But after a few more times around the circuit, Buffalo Fish spread apart.” - ibid

“So we [Stephen Stills and Ron Long] were booked into the [Golden] Bear [in 1965] and we were really terrible for the whole gig except for two nights. Those two nights Peter [Tork] got up and played piano with us.” - Stephen Stills, Stephen Stills: Change Partners: The Definitive Biography (2016)

[inthecityofgoodabode]

January 2026: Before Fern

The poblano pepper plant that we're overwintering in the house made one last fruit before going dormant:

buffalo fish ribs, homemade French fries & coleslaw:

Buffalo fish rib bone. It is easy to see why some Native American cultures near large rivers like the Mississippi used these bones as sewing needles:

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

Daily fish fact #677

Black buffalo!

This fish is a bottom feeder and tends to feed on crustaceans and algae, though it's been found that most of their edible diet consists of invasive clams in some areas! Besides food intake, the black buffalo also ingests large amounts of sand, which makes up nearly half of everything they consume.

[nothingbutflow3rs]

Does this matter to anyone else

[isaacsfishingcorner]

Some late night ultralight fishing resulted in this little Smallmouth Buffalo and a number of little Channel Catfish

[rjzimmerman]

Fun story, and terrific photos. If you don’t want to read the story of the razorback sucker and the scientists pursuing it, then go through the story and look at the photos of the Grand Canyon taken mostly from its base as the scientists do their work.

Excerpt:

The Grand Canyon contains one of North America’s quirkiest ecosystems—and the best action is underwater, in the latte-colored churn of the Colorado. Although the Colorado River possesses North America’s lowest native fish diversity, it has the highest ratio of endemic species, fishes that are found nowhere else on Earth. In this warm, turbulent, geographically isolated watershed, ecological niches that might be filled by trout in other rivers are instead occupied by tough-as-nails minnows and suckers. The Grand Canyon was long ruled by evolutionary oddities like the humpback chub (Gila cypha), a silvery omnivore endowed with a distinguished ridge just behind its head, and the Colorado pikeminnow (Ptychocheilus lucius), the predatory king of the Cyprinidae, the minnow family, which can grow as long as a human. Early anglers caught the mammoth carnivore—yes, really, a six-foot-long minnow—on hooks baited with small rabbits.

Glen Canyon Dam, a concrete wall twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty, changed the canyon’s ecosystem forever. To the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that completed the titanic barrier in 1963, the dam was a technological triumph: It yoked the capricious Colorado, transformed inhospitable desert into fertile farmland, and powered the Southwest’s metastasizing cities. To the canyon’s aquatic inhabitants, it was an existential crisis. The dam blocked spawning grounds, stifled the deposition of habitat-building sediment, and created prime conditions for non-native rainbow trout that had been stocked for anglers. The pikeminnow, the roundtail chub, and the bonytail soon vanished from Grand Canyon National Park. The reign of the canyon’s native fishes had seemingly come to an end.

Lately, however, one species has launched a comeback. The razorback sucker (Xyrauchen texanus), a homely bottom-dweller listed as endangered since 1991, has resumed spawning in the canyon after a decades-long absence. Razorbacks are stout fish, sized and shaped like a block of firewood, with creamy yellow bellies and flanks the greenish-bronze of a dull penny. A bony prow, like the keel of a ship, rises from its back, earning it the nickname “buffalo fish.” (Scientists think the hump may help to keep the fish stable in raging floodwaters.) What razorbacks lack in loveliness, they make up in longevity: They can live more than 40 years. There may be suckers swimming in the Colorado River that are as old as the Endangered Species Act itself.