18 February 2018 News/Editorial
Spoiled by adverse conditions throughout, 7 salmon and 3 sea trout was the catch for last week, making the season’s total 37 salmon and 3 sea trout.
As the weather becomes calmer and colder in the coming week, the river will settle and give anglers more chance.
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If there is one issue which has become toxic for almost all salmon anglers, it is this.
Birds…….or more specifically…….fish eating birds.
There are those who blame them for the whole decline in salmon stocks, and then there are those who think their effect is minimal.
The truth is somewhere in between.
No logic can attribute blame for the grilse and autumn run decline of the last 4 years on birds, or indeed on any predation. How is that pre-August fish numbers have increased over those 4 years, at the same time as the autumn has so reduced? Have our birds somehow en masse said “yes please” to a meal of a smolt that would come back in the autumn, but “no thanks” to one that would come back before August?!
That would be absurd, just as it is absurd to pretend that fish eating birds do no harm at all.
Or, as a learned friend and colleague put it, “Cormorants and goosanders are not the problem (ie the decline of grilse and late running salmon), but they most certainly are a problem (in that they generally reduce the numbers of our young salmon which reach the sea).
We cannot precisely quantify the damage they do, because we cannot yet count smolts on a river as big as the Tweed, and because a main stem counter of returning adults is both unaffordable and, even if afforded, would not work (viz the Dee main stem counter of the 1990s which cost Ł400,000... and never worked). So, the holy grail of salmon river management…..knowing exactly how many smolts are going to sea, and how many adults are returning…... is beyond us, for now at least.
Maybe there is only one thing on which all parties, even the RSPB, will agree. That fish eating birds do exactly that…...they eat fish. In other words, the Tweed’s population of goosanders and cormorants are here because the Tweed provides them with food.
By tracking smolts going downstream and finding out what percentage do not make it to sea, we can get a handle on percentage loss, but does that get us any closer to absolute numbers, if you do not know the total population?
If there are 2 million smolts, and birds eat 25% of those, losing 500,000 and leaving 1.5 million to go to sea, that looks ok. But if there are “only” 500,000 smolts, do you lose 30% to birds, or do you still lose 500,000?!
So many unanswered questions, but what we do know for sure is that cormorants and goosanders eat untold numbers of our young fish.
It is illegal to shoot cormorants and goosanders under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, so that any control of numbers can only be given by licence. At present, the RTC has a numerically limited licence, and they have done well to maintain that licence over the years. Some here would like it to be lawful, by special licence, to shoot any cormorant or goosander, without any number restriction, which is seen anywhere on the Tweed, or on any of its tributaries. This would be well short of a general licence to shoot which applies to (say) crows and pigeons, and means you can shoot them in unlimited numbers, wherever they are.
If the Tweed and other salmon rivers were to obtain such numerically unlimited, but geographically limited, licences to kill goosanders and cormorants, could it possibly endanger, or even result in an overall UK decline in numbers of, these birds? According to the RSPB, the current UK estimated populations of cormorants, goosanders and mergansers are these:
Breeding Pairs/Overwintering Birds
Cormorants - 9,018/41,000
Goosanders - 3,100-3,800/12,000
Mergansers - 2,800/9,000
All three species are categorised “green” in conservation terms by the RSPB, which means they are “least critical” and “occur regularly in the UK and do not qualify under any of the other (critical) criteria”. In other words, they are thriving and under no conservation threat.
We will all have our own ideas as to how accurate the RSPB figures are (especially the 9,018 breeding pairs of cormorants!), but even at these figures, would a general licence to allow salmon rivers to protect their salmon stocks really threaten these birds’ overall numbers?
The number of fish eating birds in the UK has increased hugely over the last 35 years. For the first 30 years of my life on the Tweed, I do not recall ever seeing a cormorant or a goosander while fishing for salmon. Their numbers are still increasing, and it is reasonable to assume their range, and the numbers coming inland, will expand as overall populations increase.
Even if goosander numbers as per the RTC quarterly counts are broadly stable, the recent prevalence of large cormorant flocks here on the Tweed, from 60 to 200 birds per flock and extending well above Kelso, is a very visible demonstration of the trend. Moreover, they are not daily visitors, for they have established resident roosts here over the long autumn, winter and early spring months.
Most salmon anglers would be horrified at estimates of the young salmon eaten by (say) 150 resident cormorants from October to March….but it will be 10s of 1,000s of juveniles, which could have smolted and come back as salmon, but now will not. And many more still are eaten by goosanders, both resident and overwintering.
At some point, and soon, politicians will surely have to accept that the damage being done, day in day out, by the proliferation of these birds in our rivers, is a far far greater risk to our salmon, than we humans would be to them if we were allowed unrestricted licence to shoot all cormorants and goosanders found, within the river corridor only.
It is laughable that SNH, English Nature and the RSPB’s preferred deterrence is to “scare”, rather than shoot, fishing eating birds. Laughable, because with 3,000 km of Tweed river and tributaries to operate in, any self respecting goosander or cormorant when “scared” from fishing in one place, will simply fly off some short-ish distance…...and continue eating Tweed’s young fish there.
Everyone needs to make as much noise as they possibly can about this, to local MPs and MSPs, and anyone else of influence….and soon.
And finally, there is a belief out there that everything is ok, because having so many fish eating birds proves how many young fish there are to eat in the Tweed system. Whilst to an extent this is so, the trouble with predators is that, as we know from the Langholm experiment with grouse and raptors, they will go on eating everything until there is nothing left. Cormorants and goosanders have no bag limits, they do not practice catch and release, and have never heard of conservation.
By way of reminder, and proof, here is a photograph from 2001. The caption needs no explanation…...except to say this was one meal, for one goosander, on one day….and cormorants, much bigger birds, will eat more.
That was 17 years ago, and it is still going on, most would say getting worse because of these “new” cormorant flocks.
It is a sobering thought.
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