news/editorial

17 May 2016 News/Editorial

STOP PRESS

BERWICK NETSMAN KILLING TWEED'S PRECIOUS SPRING SALMON

I have some truly shocking news for all Tweed anglers and all those interested in the conservation of Tweed’s (otherwise) protected, and by far its weakest, salmon stock, its spring salmon.

In direct contravention of the strongest advice from the River Tweed Commission (RTC) and from the Tweed Foundation scientists, and indeed the same advice would also come from every salmon fishery manager I have ever come across in both Scotland and England, the lessee of the Gardo net fishery in Berwick harbour started netting operations and killing Tweed’s endangered spring salmon, from last Friday 13th May.

I have it on good authority that at least 2 boxes of our few Tweed springers went away to market, very dead and sold for profit.

Mr Michael Hindhaugh, a sales director with the Berwick firm of McCreath, Simpson & Prentice, is the lessee from the Berwick Harbour Commissioners who own the netting station, and took over the lease of Gardo in 2015 and did not then, in 2015, start netting for salmon until after 15th June, the date recommended by both the RTC and Tweed Foundation as the “safe” time to start netting to avoid catching and killing springers.

He was (supposedly) operating the net for “heritage” purposes, a social enterprise, to keep netting going in Berwick, and for the tourists to see and experience.

Presumably the words "heritage" and “social enterprise” now include killing some of our precious few spring salmon for personal gain?

This year, 2016, he sought monetary compensation from the RTC, despite never having netted in the spring before, for agreeing not to start netting on 1st April, the date from which it is technically legal in Scotland (for this purpose under the Tweed Acts, Berwick is deemed to be in Scotland) to start netting.

Everywhere else in England, it is illegal (a criminal offence) to net for salmon before 1st June, yet Mr Hindhaugh wanted to be paid substantial compensation for not starting netting (and killing salmon) 2 months earlier than that.

The RTC refused to pay compensation on the grounds that you do not compensate (a) for something that on conservation grounds you should not be doing anyway and (b) it is technically legal for all rod beats to kill salmon after 1st April, but of course they do not under Tweed’s voluntary code because everyone knows it is a precious and endangered stock which cannot sustain harvesting.

Indeed, the rods release everything they catch until 1st July, as they have for many years now. They too could technically seek compensation not just for not killing their rod caught salmon, which legally they could do after 1st April, but it is a little known fact that all rod beats could also legally net their salmon (if given tags,as all commercially killed salmon must now carry a tag)) after 1st April, and both kill and sell them…..but of course they do neither because, unlike Mr Hindhaugh, they know that there is no harvestable surplus of Tweed’s spring salmon and it is unsafe on conservation grounds to kill them.

In short, every time you kill a spring salmon you endanger the future of Tweed’s spring salmon stocks.

Dead fish do not spawn and therefore cannot produce the next generation.

Mr Hindhaugh not only seems determined to ignore this, but also to profit from it. He will, you would think, be getting premium prices for selling truly wild salmon at this time of year, because almost nobody else in the UK is (or legally can), so he will have a near monopoly in the market.

In the view of many who love Tweed and its spring salmon, he is putting his own greed and personal profit before the conservation of an endangered species.

I hope (a) he will be universally reprimanded by all those concerned to protect Tweed’s weakest salmon stock, and (b) that by 2017 he will be precluded by law from doing what he is now doing, because clearly for him a voluntary code promoted by the RTC and the Tweed Foundation scientists, and which everyone else on the river willingly abides by, is not good enough.

To be absolutely clear, Michael Hindhaugh is deliberately and against all salmon conservation advice, killing our few and precious Tweed spring salmon. He is the only person doing so on the Tweed, and it is illegal to do so elsewhere in England.

And what of the Berwick Harbour Commissioners, no doubt a most respectable and responsible body, why are they allowing their lessee to flout Tweed’s spring salmon conservation code, and go against the unequivocal advice of the relevant salmon fishery authority, the River Tweed Commission?

Questions, I hope, will be asked of them too.

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Amid the wonderful and varied wildlife our fishermen can enjoy at this time of year on the riverbank, ospreys, kingfishers, otters, swifts, swallows, sand martins, sandpipers, wagtails (pied, grey and even the occasional yellow), dippers (almost my favourite), oyster catchers, and all manner of ducks (including their young, always the earliest to be born, if sadly easy prey for my least favourite bird, the heron).........we will soon, it would seem, be able to add another, the Eurasian beaver.

If I go back 8 years or so, the RTC CEO Nick Yonge and I went to see the then Scottish minister, Mike Russell, accompanied by his civil servants.

Our mission was to stop the Scottish Government’s determination to re-introduce beavers to Scotland, they saw it as some sort of Scottish national virility symbol.

It was one of the most ill tempered meetings I have been to.

The then SNP led minority Government seemed hell bent on re-introducing beavers, with extraordinarily supine acquiescence of SNH, who must have known the dangers, but did not dare, it seemed to us after meeting with them, go against the wishes of their paymasters in the Government.

The trial reintroduction in Knapdale was/is a joke; the reporting period is now over (as of 2014, having started in 2009) and yet the Government is still considering what to do.

Of course, Knapdale was an idiotic place to have the trial, in the middle of nowhere, with no migratory fish rivers, no arable agricultural land dependent on working drainage systems/ flood defences, no young and growing tree plantations to be protected, therefore wholly unrepresentative of the sorts of places that beavers will do maximum damage.

The cynics amongst you might think that it was precisely for that reason that the Scottish Wildlife Trust and SNH wanted to have it there…. because the beavers could do no harm there.

But then, as luck would have it, enter the fray some rabid pro beaverites in Perthshire, impatient for those little furry cuddly things to be running around everywhere, not wanting to wait for the meaningless trial to be over, “Oh dear, isn’t it awful, simply too ghastly for words!, some of our harmless sweet beavery things have “escaped”, aren’t they just too too clever, from our authorised, completely secure beaver enclosure”.

And so it was that an “unauthorised” wild beaver colony, of untold numbers but now into the 100s, has become established in Tayside, a much better place to have a trial, if bad luck on the Tay in becoming the inadvertent guinea pig.

I have no idea if the Scottish Government is going to be brave enough to do what it should do and authorise the removal of the Tayside beavers, and stop any thought of mass reintroductions to Scotland…...for, you see, the rabid Perthshire pro beaverites have handed passionate antis like me a trick, because it has become all too clear what extraordinary damage beavers do…..and I am not including in that their obvious liking for blocking our salmon spawning streams…….when they are let loose somewhere like Perthshire.

They are devastating, and as their numbers (we know from Latvia and Lithuania where there are now 100,000 plus from a standing start of a few hundred 60 years ago) increase at 16% compound every year, the destruction in Tayside will only get worse, and then the little darlings will move out elsewhere, no doubt arriving on Tweedside sometime in the next 10 years.

All the while the largely urban Scottish public thinks they are cute and cuddly and that people like me are cruel and heartless monsters to be so against them.

So there we have it, I strongly suspect that the Scottish Minister knows that the right thing to do is to stop it all now, to remove the Knapdale beavers and all those on Tayside by whatever means, and go back to where we were before, no beavers anywhere.

But the SNP popular support is largely urban, and has a romantic notion of Scotland getting back to something it thinks it was before those beastly English came along, over 400 years ago when Scotland was Scotland and, yes, (we think, though not totally sure) there were a few beavers here.

So political reality might overcome common sense, in that no SNP Scottish Minister will ever dare say “get rid of our beavers” for fear of the howls of protest from the countless hordes of “aren’t they so cute and cuddly?” urbanites and others.

If so, the future is not only bleak but very expensive for country folk, and I hope Trout & Salmon magazine (the current June 2016 issue) do not mind if I quote from one of their letters…...it could be the future for all of us…..

“On my recent fishing visit to ...the River Isla (a Tay tributary) I was astounded by the total destruction of the trees, mainly willow. 90 % of the mature willow trees of around 1ft diameter had been gnawed and felled by beavers….The beavers have burrowed into flood-defence banks, their burrows are clearly visible with breather holes scattered around their burrows, so much so that the flood defences have been weakened and breached in many places after the damaging winter floods. God knows what damage the beavers are doing elsewhere in Scotland in the vicinity of the main spawning burns”

The contributor, Mr Frank Bell of Durham, is to be congratulated for providing a timely warning of what all our (non urban) futures could look like, not just on the Isla and Tayside.

As a countryman, I am fed up of our rural lives and interests being dictated to by the 80%-90% urban majority who know little or nothing of how the countryside and nature works.

There are many examples of this, the latest the urbanite adoration of badgers despite the havoc they have inflicted on the numbers of our beloved hedgehogs and the, albeit unwitting, infections they carry into our farmers’ cattle herds.

As Ronald Campbell, our Tweed senior biologist has said many times, “ nobody would like beavers if they looked like rats”.

They do look sweet, cute and cuddly (they aren’t, they bite), and that is why the majority of urban Scots and others want to see them back.

Their argument, despite meaningless protestations about beavers improving biodiversity (by damming our spawning streams and creating ponds, that’s good for the environment and our migratory fish, isn’t it?!)….

…... is as sophisticated as that.

God help us.