news/editorial

19 June 2022 News/Editorial

With a better, albeit less than stellar, fishing week behind us (maybe 120+ were landed by the rods), those that were caught were both of high quality and remarkably adept at moving upstream, despite no encouragement whatever from water levels. At times they must have had their backs out of the water.

We have reached the point in June when, our scientists advise, few if any more “springers” will arrive. Summer fish and grilse behave quite differently from springers, something drummed into me many years ago when talking to Tweed’s traditional netsmen. They would say, from a netting perspective, you had one “go” at a springer, or he/she was gone, moving upstream at speed in an exceptionally single minded, determined fashion, despite all water and weather conditions. Hence why the beats in and around Kelso always do better in the spring, for that is the distance many springers go before they stop for the first time, 20 miles or more, and can be caught by those “of the angle”.

By contrast, the springer’s summer (and autumn, when there were any) cousins are far more relaxed, to the point that when they settle in the lower pools below Coldstream, from late June onwards, and even when there are floods, they can be remarkably reluctant to move upstream. This is counterintuitive in that the later salmon enter the river, the more of a hurry they should be in to move upstream. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the lowest reaches of all, summer salmon and grilse will come in and out on the tide, in those far off days giving the old netting stations more than one “go” at them.

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After three dry months, one begins to doubt if it ever will rain properly, with 1959 and 1976 lurking uncomfortably as precedents in the “great Tweed droughts” history book. When levels are this low, the real enemy, for fish health, is heat, which Tweedside has avoided so far. With no rain forecast for next week, neither is excessive heat (mercifully).

But the longer this goes on, the more fish become stressed, especially after being caught, and revival becomes more likely to end in the opposite. Those (understandable) pictures of happy, successful anglers and fish, out of the water, will become more and more dangerous (for the fish).

As the summer progresses, it is worth considering not removing the fish, even momentarily for a quick snap, at all from the water, if possible. If you must have a picture, try kneeling in the water next to it, but with as much of the fish’s face as possible both under water and facing upstream.

The evidence is that the less fish are handled, and the less they are taken out of the water, especially in hot water conditions, the better their prospects of survival until they can spawn from October onwards. Which is the whole point.

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There is something annoyingly predictable about Governments ducking the burning issues of the day, while at the same time talking a good game. Whereas you and I would like some really concrete, practical actions eg (a) open season on all goosanders and cormorants within the river corridor from November to April every year; (b) serious seal scaring devices and initiatives in the lower river and in Berwick harbour (and all other river mouths) to deter seals from eating both our adult salmon and from hoovering up 1,000s of our smolts at their most vulnerable stage; (c) specific targeted grants to assist with the financial costs of effective riparian planting in the headwaters, (d) action to force the fish farming industry to meet the strictest environmental standards by moving into close containment units only, and with no further expansion in the sea etc etc, in fact, what we got last week was something else.

The Government announced it is giving the wild salmon sector £500,000, £300,000 of which will go towards a National Adult Salmon Sampling Programme (“this will provide crucial data on wild adult salmon necessary for future stock assessment”) and £200,000 “to develop a standard fisheries management plan template”.

Now none of us wants to look a gift horse in the mouth, but if you asked 100 anglers and river managers where priorities lie, in order to reverse the ever declining trend in our Atlantic salmon, I am not sure any of them would have come up with what has been announced.

Some might say that the real issues affecting our salmon, the ones I have listed above for instance, require real political will to tackle, for they will not be popular with our urbanised society and its fluffy view of the natural world, to say nothing of their liking for the “sustainably sourced” (ahem) farmed salmon on the supermarket shelves.

Maybe one day a politician will understand that Scotland without wild salmon in its rivers is both a real possibility and a natural disaster of unimaginable proportions. Sadly, we are not yet at the point where politicians realise that, or are prepared to do anything meaningful about it.

(By way of some factual footnotes, Marine Scotland’s latest 2022 categorisation, shows 80% of Scotland’s rivers (138 out of 173) to be in the two most “at risk” categories 2 and 3, with the killing of no, or virtually no, salmon allowed; 40-50 years ago none of these 138 rivers were, or would have been, so categorised. ICES (International Council for Exploration of the Sea) estimates that adult salmon now returning to Scotland amount to some 250,000 every year, a reduction of 80% from over and around 1 million salmon 40-50 years ago; 2021 was the lowest salmon catch since records began in 1952, and would no doubt have been lower than any years before that, had pre-1952 records existed).