1 April 2018 News/Editorial
After a more productive week’s fishing, again mainly limited to within a few miles either side of Kelso, the score for the week was 73 salmon and 2 sea trout, making a total of 190 salmon and 23 sea trout for the months of February and March.
Not a lot for two months fishing, but the below average catches here have been mirrored on all the other big east coast rivers. Optimists would say this gives some comfort that the fish are going to come later than normal this year.
The extraordinarily prolonged cold, and seemingly never ending bitter easterlies, cannot have helped in encouraging fish to leave the sea for the much colder waters of the Tweed. Boatman Paul Hume tells me the netsmen used to call these easterlies the “poverty wind”, because no fish would come in over the churned up sandbanks in Berwick harbour. The netsmen would make no money until the winds turned.
And so it goes on, winter weather in April, all a result of the disruption in the polar vortex earlier in March, and next week looks to be no drier, if, gradually, slightly less cold
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If you have not already tuned in, please read the first of the RTC/ Tweed Foundation’s monthly issue “The River”. You can find it here
http://www.rivertweed.org.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/2018-March-The-River-Issue-1.pdf
It is all about our avian predator friends.
This is part of the Tweed’s commendable wish to communicate more effectively with boatmen and anglers, so if you would like them to address any fishy subject that concerns/interests you, all you have to do is let them know at
Please do not be shy; they would welcome all (sensible) suggestions.
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The police said “you couldn’t make it up” and, indeed, when I first read the story, I struggled not to burst out laughing.
Some bloke, “a vulnerable elderly man”, in North Wales had seen a heron eating a brood of ducklings. So incensed was he by this, that he decided to kill the heron and rescue the unfortunate ducklings, all of which (remarkably) he successfully achieved…..or at least he rescued one of them.
The duckling that survived was rescued, so the report says, “from its stomach”, indicating an unlikely degree of surgical skill from our heroic assassin.
He was let off with a caution by the police, much to the predictable fury of those appalling birdie fundamentalists.
Curiously, initially no mention was made of how “the vulnerable elderly man” actually killed the heron. Apparently, he shot it, not something “vulnerable elderly men” normally do. Not only that, he might also have shot the partly digested ducklings, thereby rather spoiling the point of the whole escapade.
All of which proves a point we have been making for some time in these pages, viz that little or no thought is given to the knock-on effects of individual species proliferating to the point where they themselves, having originally become endangered, now pose an existential threat to other species lower down the food change.
You need go no further than badgers and hedgehogs, buzzards and red squirrels, cormorants, goosanders, seals and salmon…….although even I question if herons and ducklings can seriously be added to the list!
I well remember, post the appalling winter of 1962/63, that we never saw a heron or a kingfisher for years afterwards. Almost none had survived the 3 month freeze.
Had our North Wales hero behaved then, as he did now, I would have castigated him, as I hope would all right thinking folk.
But with herons aplenty now, he chose to intervene on the side of the hunted, the underdog. I know he broke the law, and you cannot have people going around killing herons willy nilly, but, once I had stopped laughing at the absurdity of it all, I found myself saying……
……..good on yer.
Not least because it is one in the eye to all those birdie fundamentalists who think that we humans should never be allowed to control any birds or mammals, no matter how numerous and damaging to other species they are.
They are of course, like all fundamentalists, misguided and would make pretty dull fare as company……
…….whereas one can easily imagine that you and I would rather like a good crack with our improbable hero from North Wales.
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