news/editorial

13 February 2022 News/Editorial

Like a suddenly uncorked bottle of something refreshing and fizzy, the blocking high pressures (bar the odd sudden storm) of the last 5 weeks have gone. The North Atlantic is in boisterous mood, throwing wind and rain at us in a seemingly never ending succession of fast moving depressions. The forecast for next week is not good, unless you like that sort of thing. For fishers, the river is flooding and more rain is falling as I write. Quite when it might become fishable again is way outside most predictive capabilities.

Reported catches last week were sparse, and as water conditions on many of the days were perfectly satisfactory, albeit often windy, the only conclusion is that numbers of very early running Tweed springers continue, in line with recent years, to be very low. Any assessment of true catches is not helped by two of the best spring beats, Junction and Sprouston, no longer (hopefully temporarily) reporting their catches to Fishpal.

With any luck, as we approach the end of winter and March’s beginning of spring, maybe this extra water will encourage more fish into the river.

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Without wishing to stoke up understandable anger and frustration at the cormorant situation, I have been receiving videos from concerned anglers which demonstrate the scale of the problem better than anything else.

I have never been sure that the much sought after analysis of what they eat (from stomach contents), whenever we get it, will really advance the discussion any further. The RTC is, unlike other Scottish rivers, responsible for all its salmon and other freshwater fish; it is frankly absurd to argue that the cormorants are eating anything other than the fish in the river, therefore they are doing harm to whatever precise stocks they are having for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I have done the calculation of how many small fish 200 cormorants, downstream of Galashiels on the main stem, will have eaten over the months of December, January and February before they start to go back to the coast to breed, in March. It varies, of course, depending on (a) how much each cormorant eats per day, and (b) the size of the fish they eat.

If each cormorant eats (say) 1 ½ lbs of fish per day, and the average weight of each fish eaten is (say) ½ lb, then over those 3 months the Tweed will have lost 54,000 of its precious young fish, being mainly salmon, trout and grayling. Now add on, if you dare, those fish eaten by both resident and winter migrating goosanders over the same 3 months.

When some say the Atlantic salmon is under existential threat, both cormorants and goosanders most decidedly are not, yet by law we can do little to protect one from the others. If politicians, and those others who decide these things, want Scottish river managers to produce fisheries with an abundance of salmon, and other freshwater fish, in them, then something has got to give. This is an old problem, but seemingly no closer to a solution that will safeguard Tweed’s young fish.