2 January 2019 News/Editorial
Corporal Frazer's doom and gloom; a response -
As we turn into 2019, "it really doesn't do", as my Aunt Bridget would have said, to leave headlining any longer, here on Tweedbeats, my old friend Bill Thomson's (aka Corporal Frazer) excellent piece about how the Scottish salmon world is "doomed".
We need something more upbeat for the New Year.
Our salmon world is undeniably in crisis, and split down the middle as to both where we are now, and what to do about it.
Bill's assertions that the river levels on Tweed are now one third less than they were 50 years ago, and that the river is clogged with chemicals, microplastics and every other sort of ecological horror, all to the detriment of our fish, quite simply do not stand up to examination. Back then, I can recall the Galashiels sewage works pouring untreated sewage into the river, and we had as many extreme droughts and minimal water levels as we have now; if anything, the new reservoirs, which provide the masses in their new houses with water, perform a dual role, because they also retain flood waters which would otherwise disappear into the North Sea, those retained waters then being released to mitigate the effects of otherwise damagingly high water temperatures and dangerously low levels of water. Few can remember the droughts of 1972, 1974, 1976 and 1984, but they were extreme and I am sure that anyone writing in 1984 after 4 exceptional droughts over the previous 12 years would have been even more gloomy about water abstraction and pollution, but then over the next 34 years we have only had 2 more (1995 and 2018).
I live on the river, have done for 40 years, and cannot detect any obvious difference in water levels. If anything the river is cleaner with the very striking absence of green slime and floating weed in hot, dry conditions, because of the nitrate restrictions now imposed on farmers.
As for the salmon, most of us who bothered to look, have never seen such a massive smolt run as we had on the Tweed in 2018. It was late, thanks to "the beast from the east", but as a result it was largely untroubled by those ghastly avian predators which had gone off to their nesting grounds. Some goosanders remained, but we never saw a cormorant here between May and late August.
And now we hear from the Environment Agency, that that perennial scourge of the Tweed, the North East Drift Net Fishery has closed and will not operate after 2018, and that the more shore-based T&J nets will only be allowed to kill sea trout, so that with the exception of our own Gardo net, returning salmon in 2019 will have unfettered access to the harbour at Berwick, if they can dodge the waiting seals and dolphins.
In short, we know we sent a vast number of smolts to sea in 2018, and we know that they will encounter fewer nets than they have ever encountered for 100s of years when they return.
You could well argue that things are looking very much less gloomy for 2019 and subsequent years...but that is not Corporal Frazer's way.
Which may be just as well. We Brits revel in gloom, in the disaster of Brexit, in the demise of the high street, in just about anything else we can obsess about, especially the weather which is always about to produce another ice age (one of my Uncles was convinced of that) or the opposite in the form of a drought ridden wasteland.
There is some comfort in the Corporal Frazer way...for we know deep down it is not/will not be quite that bad.
And woe betide anyone saying something optimistic.
The biggest challenge for 2019?
Well that's easy... coming up with a protocol for dealing with "those bloody birds" which is (a) effective in significantly reducing their impact on our young fish, (b) gets the approval, if grudging, of the authorities (SNH and the Government) who monitor these things and (c) satisfies our anglers that we are doing as much as we possibly can to maximise the juveniles we send off to sea.
It may be impossible to get (c), for there are anglers out there who think you can wipe out all cormorants and goosanders on the Tweed, for ever.
You can't.
Even the (probably underestimated) RSPB figures say we have 41,000 overwintering cormorants in the UK, and the evidence from elsewhere is that if you eliminate them in one place, within 6 weeks those eliminated will have been replaced by the same number coming in from elsewhere.
There will be a way of reducing their impact to acceptable levels.
If we can find it, and if all parties agree to it, in 2019; if the numbers of adult fish returning in 2019 prove to be a step change up on what we saw in 2018; if fishing conditions in summer 2019 are slightly less harsh than they were in 2018.
A lot of "ifs".
But...they could easily all happen, and then even Corporal Frazer might see the faintest glimmer of hope through the pervading doom.
Happy New Year.
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