26 February 2017 - News/Editorial
Without wishing to invoke my old friends Pelion and Ossa, and the heaping, or piling, of one upon the other, it seems that bad news just keeps rolling on for salmon anglers, despite all our efforts to produce something better.
As if the demise of the Wild Fisheries Review was not bad enough, my generous correspondent writes of his fishing trip to the Tay, Upper Islamouth, and the all too evident damage of another Government decision, to allow the Tayside beavers legal protection.
He writes “Re Tay beavers. Fished last week on Upper Islamouth. Saw damage caused by beavers on the main Tay stem. I think the official numbers are way below the actual. The boatmen believe there are over 300 on the Isla alone. I thought they were on the tributaries only. All this in a very few years…..It really is quite unbelievable.”
What many of us find hard to take is that the Wild Fisheries Review tried to do lots of things (to be fair, actually did some things viz categorising rivers’ conservation status, temporarily ceasing all netting beyond estuary limits) but studiously ignored:
1. Predation
2. Fish farming
The latter is by far the biggest threat to our wild salmon, right now, but even more so if the Government’s proposed expansion is allowed to happen. These farmed salmon expansion plans are sacrificing our wild salmon on the altar of economic growth and supposed, but mainly fictitious, extra employment.
And if we lived in Iceland, where they jealously guard their wild fish, would we really have so many goosanders and cormorants eating our young salmon, and so many seals eating our mature ones?
As I watched a flock of between 70 and 90 cormorants resident here for 6 weeks in December/January, helplessly, for I could not legally do anything about it, I was left wondering just how many 1,000s of young fish that one flock had eaten over that 6 week period….. and that they would never have been left unmolested in Iceland?
For let us be clear, there is absolutely no shortage of cormorants (indeed the fact that there are so many now coming so far inland points to a considerable surplus on the coast), but there is most certainly a deficit of salmon, if the last 3 years catches are any judge.
The Government, if it really wanted to help the hard pressed wild salmon in Scotland, would abandon all fish farming expansion plans, and over a period of 5 years insist that existing fish farming is removed from sea lochs, and taken into close containment where no sea lice proliferation can attack and kill wild smolts, and/or no chemicals/faecal deposits pollute the ocean floors.
And any Government really committed to redressing the balance in favour of the young fish, would allow rivers a much more enlightened and appropriate control regime for all avian predators.
Instead of moving to deal effectively with predation and fish farms which we all know damage our fish, what does Government do?
It does something precisely contrary, and affords the illegally introduced Tayside beavers full legal protection, with no regard to the damage they will do over time to migrating fish, by restricting access to spawning streams, not just on the Tay but, in due course, nationwide.
It looks as if the last week of February here on the Tweed has been/will be lost to floods, which in turn means that the monthly 5 year average (for February) of 150-200 will be nowhere near achieved, with the total of those caught so far well under 100.
This says nothing for the success of the 2017 season as a whole, after all 2010 started with a very poor spring, but it would be nice if some good news, and more fish, came along in March.
I am not one of those doom mongers, even now predicting the demise of our salmon. But I do think that Government should put itself firmly in the vanguard of doing all it can to allow maximum survival of our salmon, both immature and mature, instead of wasting 2 ½ years in failing to achieve changes to salmon river management.
Get fish farming under control, allow us more effective control of our avian predators, and get rid of those Tayside beavers before they spread to all other neighbouring rivers, and no doubt, eventually, to us here on the Tweed.
Not much to ask, you might think, to help save a species showing very obvious signs of distress.
But, like all other similar requests over recent years, fated, I fear, to fall on deaf ears.
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