To all intents and purposes they look just like springers, except the female fish has protruding vents while the cock fish has kypes.
And if you have a coloured cock fish that has grown a prominent kype on its lower jaw, then you have a kipper - again another unclean fish.
After sulking in deep pools for 5 or more days, kings begin turning up their
kypes at spin and wobble.
Males up to five pounds attacked the flies and came to hand with hooked
kypes and vents that dripped white milt (cutts don't spawn successfully in the lake).
Rawners or kippers are dressed in the typical reddish brown breeding colours of a cock fish and have large kypes.
It had a kype - the hookshaped beak which grows on a male salmon's lower jaw when it approaches the breeding cycle.
Sometimes, however, very large salmon which have spent three or four winters at sea, grow smallish kypes and the considered opinion is that these are genuine springers.
They will usually still be in their autumn breeding colours and still bearing a kype, the long, upturned hook on the lower jaw which they use for either scaring off rivals, or digging out spawning beds.
I have heard this year of some fishermen catching silver cock fish with kypes and killing them.
Male springers just don't have kypes because these large upturned hooks on a salmon's lower jaw only grow in the autumn when they are used as tools to dig out spawning redds, or weapons to scare off rival male fish.
Because it had grown a prominent kype, a hooked lower jaw.
A true male springer has only the very small makings of a kype and sometimes it can be almost impossible to tell the difference between a male and a female springer.