Just browsing around a wee bit this morning, and I came across a nice wee clip on the BBC website. It’s about the piscivorous brown trout, known in the UK as the ferox trout.
There’s some nice footage showing one swimming around in Loch Ness, together with commentary by everyone’s favourite gardener, Alan Titchmarsh. Take a look.
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I couldn’t make the video work, but I think most of the brown trout in middle parts of Finland go to this category. They are called here järvitaimen (direct translation is ‘lake trout’ – but they are salmo trutta). We have a lot of lakes and usually short streches of streams between them. Big fish, big streamers.
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Shame, I couldn’t get it to work either and I wanted to see footage of Ferox. Opax’s comment is interesting. The Finnish word for trout (I am assuming taimen in the “järvitaimen” is the trout bit) is the same as the great fish of Mongolia and parts east, the Taimen (Hucho taimen). Yet the latin word for our brown trout is trutta?
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Hi folks,
Sorry about that, I keep forgetting that BBC Iplayer is only available to UK internet users. A real shame, it was a nice wee video, with a very large and very ugly ferox.
Do you fish streamers quite a lot then Olli? Over here they are becoming a bit more popular but still not widely used on the rivers. We tend to fish nymphs or dries, or swing small wet flies.
Interesting you spotted that with the name Simon, I didn’t even notice. Perhaps the Finnish word for ferox follows from the large and predatory nature of the eastern taimen..?
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The biggest fish are caught with streamer here. I don’t use them all that much, maybe about 1/6th to 1/4th of my river fishing is streamer fishing.
Simon, you’re right ‘taimen’ is trout – but salmo trutta not hucho. There is no word for hucho trout in Finnish language. I’ve also noticed the use of word ‘taimen’ in eastern countries. There is a fly fishing web shop called taimen.com in Poland also.
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Can’t really find much on the etymology of Taimen. But it seems they were named by Pallas, a German zoologist from the 1700s (who travelled out east) so perhaps he gave them their name after knowing about what the Finns call trout. Certainly not from the German where trout is Forelle. Sorry for usurping your blog on this Mike, just curious about how a name travels across the continent.
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No problem at all Simon, not usurping at all. One of the best things about fishing blogs is discovering and exchanging ideas and knowledge from different countries.
Do I take it that ‘Taimen’ is a word of Finnish descent then, not German? I’m not even sure how similar/different the two languages are.
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The BBC article over-simplifies the status of Ferox trout. In some lakes it can cross-breed with ordinary brown trout, for example some of the Scottish varieties. In other places, Mask and Corrib for example, Ferox seem to be completely speciated.
Thanks for drawing attention to this.Regards
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Hi Tony,
That’s interesting. I’ve heard some similar things about the separation of the ferox from more typical sized browns, even during mating. I’ve had the book ‘Ferox Trout’ for a while but have not read it yet. Hopefully it will contain some interesting insights.
Cheers,
mike
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