12 May 2019 News/Editorial
The scores for last week were 118 salmon and 8 sea trout, making the running totals, to 11th May, 731 salmon and 74 sea trout, all within 90% accuracy.
It rained for most of Wednesday, but the ground soaked it up, producing no more than an inch or two of fresh water. As for next week, warmer, sunnier and calmer seems to be the prognosis, or at least until Friday when things may start to roughen up a bit, with some rain and wind from the east.
Fishing will become even more difficult in the sunshine, early and late being the most likely times of day for success.
Of the last seven months here, six have produced below average rainfall, January being the exemplar with just 4mm against an average of over 50mm. Only March has exceeded its average (80+mm) and but for that you would think we would now be in near drought conditions. May is looking to be distinctly dry as well. You can jet off to the Costas if you want sun, we Scottish salmon anglers would pay good money for a flood every ten days throughout this summer.
“Warmer and wetter” is what global warming was supposed to produce. We had the warmer last summer; we need the wetter.
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If you are walking by the river next week and see dimples in the water surface, those are smolts. The river is full of them, thousands and thousands, maybe even millions, making their way downstream. It is a wonderful and hugely encouraging sight, building on the 2018 smolt run which was equally massive, and this following two largely “big flood free” spawning winters, which should ensure even more juveniles for the future.
The Tweed Foundation’s current work on smolt tracking will give us a big clue of percentage smolt survival from stream to sea, or more precisely from the Gala water to Berwick harbour, but anyone looking at the river will tell you that a seriously large number are going to get there safely.
The cormorants are long gone to the coast, and there is a flock or two of goosanders (we have seen one of 40 plus here) causing concerns, but for the most part the smolts should make it.
Now where shall we put that (expensive, unnecessary) hatchery?
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We were staying with friends, fishing on the glorious Dee, last week. Before you ask, fish were caught, not by yours truly, but it was all wonderful. Deeside looked its best, if a little chilly, and our most generous hosts laid on everything for us, including the unbeatable pools of the Cambus O’May beat. Even if, like me, you are incompetent enough not to catch one, the pools are such that you feel you will get one every cast, and salmon were there because we saw them jumping.
One evening before dinner, I was perusing the Times or the Telegraph, as one does, having failed to make much impression on the former’s crossword, when I came across that picture of the great White Tailed Sea Eagle carrying a lamb.
You can imagine the predictable outcry from the assembled company, when James, the most knowledgeable amongst us about wildlife and son of other great friends also in the party, resolutely defended the eagle, saying most forcefully that we should not blame the eagle. “That’s what they do” he said, and “it’s an animal, how should it know any better?”
He was, of course, completely right. He would also defend to the hilt any suggestion of anyone artificially limiting their numbers, and you can see why, they are stunningly beautiful, huge birds and a great sight when you see them, as I have, quartering the ground on Mull in search of lunch.
All of which brings us right back to our cormorants and goosanders. It is not their fault that they eat our fish for fun, or that, like the sea eagle, there is remarkably little (in the sea eagle’s case nothing at all) in nature that will keep numbers in check. Which might be fine if we lived in a totally wild, unmanaged landscape, like wilder parts of Africa or any pristine jungles worldwide, where nature provides cover for the hunted to hide away and somehow survive.
The UK, England especially and all lowland areas in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, are amongst the most intensively managed and manicured places on God’s earth, both because over 65 million humans live there, but also because they, the humans, take a lot of feeding.
As a result, leaving it to nature will not work on its own, for the hunter has his/her meals handed to him/her virtually on a plate, their quarry being all too easy to see and catch, whereas the hunted will suffer terribly, and numbers deplete to the point of extinction in some places. In addition, there is a marked absence of anything, in nature here in the UK, keeping the hunters’ numbers in check.
Raptors, corvids, cormorants, goosanders, sea eagles, badgers (I haven’t seen a hedgehog here for ten years, and we have a badger sett just outside our garden) you name it, in our managed landscape and without anything to prey on them, their numbers will increase just as the numbers of what they eat decrease.
And if you think they are bad, just wait until beavers get going now that they have protected status. It will take a few years. Lock up your trees, if you live anywhere near water. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
But James is right, don’t blame the hunters, the birds, the badgers, the beavers, but the people who protect/introduce them, seemingly blind to, and with no plan as to how to deal with, the long term consequences of what they do in a man made landscape such as we have here.
Something will have to give.
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