4 November 2018 News/Editorial
Tweed’s rod catches for last week were 230 salmon and 20 sea trout, making totals for the season to date of 4,765 salmon and 665 sea trout, within 90% accuracy.
With a flood today and maybe more rain from midweek, the question is whether those coloured river fish will disappear way upstream to spawn, beyond the reach of any rod beats?
With precious little sign of anything fresher coming in, it takes a supreme optimist to predict anything very different, from the last few years, for this November.
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Cautionary tales arrived last week from two stalwart forces for good in the fishing world, old friends Andrew Graham-Stewart and Tom Fort.
Andrew pointed out that those of us who live on the east and imagine our rivers to be protected from the ghastly sea-lice borne mortality (from fish farms) of our wild smolts, should consider the Shetlands.
Students of the globe will see that once our smolts round the northeast tip of Scotland, heading for the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, it is hard to imagine that many of them do not pass within say 25 miles of the Shetlands and their fish farms, which have an appalling sea-lice record.
Yet another unseen danger for our smolts to overcome, which unlike those all too visible birds, most of our fishermen will not have even considered.
And then Tom tells me, from a punishingly tedious EU report (or as he puts it “of immense length and uselessness”) that Bavaria has been shooting between 2,500 and 6,500 cormorants every winter since 1985, but that there has been neither a reduction in the overall numbers of birds nor in the number of night roosts...ergo no reduction in the numbers of fish eaten...over that period.
One supposes some lessons can be drawn from this; first, that without shooting there could have been even more birds and fish mortality and, secondly, that if SNH are worried that by increasing our licence to cull, cormorant numbers overall will plummet, they need have no such concerns; and thirdly, that the overall cormorant population in Bavaria, despite the shooting, still ate an awful lot of fish.
We have been warned.
Even if we do get a bigger cormorant and goosander cull licence... it will be no panacea.
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It is not the purpose of these pages to wallow in collective misery, but when you get years like this with not enough fish to populate all beats, some miss out completely... thereby producing some truly shocking figures.
Salmon like having friends, and the effect of that is that when they move upriver they tend to stop where there are already some residents, and pass straight through those beats/pools where there are none.
Our own Temple Pool is a case in point; so far this year it has yielded just 2 salmon; pre 2014 it unfailingly yielded between 125 and 250 every year.
And what of the two most famous Tweed beats of all, Upper Floors and the Junction?
It is unlikely that even in the UDN/post 1967 years that they ever found themselves in early November on scores of under 100 and just over 200 salmon respectively...unimaginably low scores for such great beats, for there is nothing wrong with them, their pools are as good as they ever were, it is just the fish that have been absent.
Spare a thought too for those upper Tweed beats, above the junction with Ettrick, which used to thrive on the arrival of the autumn run in October and November.... but no more.
Whether you have any salmon, or almost none at all, is a matter of luck
Most would say that there have been fewer fish this year overall than last, and the final catch figures for 2018 will most probably show that.... and yet Tillmouth last year caught just 189 salmon, against well over 500 so far this year.
Sometimes you are hot, and sometimes not... and it is only when there are enough fish to populate the pools in all the beats that you get a more even distribution of catches.
As for us here, we are lucky and may well have caught more than all but two other beats.
Yet it will be the worst annual catch we have had since coming to live here almost 40 year ago.
That says it all.
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With thanks to all those helpful (!?) comments about how to deal with the seal which has inhabited our Cauld Stream for most of last week.
It was difficult not to feel a little bit sorry for it...with some encouragement, it tried to escape downstream, but so low was the river that it ended up flapping aimlessly on the gravel below the water, the level simply being too low for it to navigate.
Anyway, with the little 6 inch rise on Friday, it disappeared.
Then a Common (or Eurasian) Crane appeared on the Lees Haugh and stayed for most of the week.
For pictures of both, proof if you will, especially of the Crane, go to Tweedbeats Instagram where Malcolm has excelled at his now customary recording of such wildlife events.
The crane seemed perfectly happy eating grubs and worms on Colin McGregor’s winter wheat field...no doubt before recovering its sense of direction and heading off south.
It all reminds me of my Uncle Henry, ornithologist, wildlife artist and erstwhile BBC birdman. He painted the most beautiful watercolour collection of “all the birds of Berwickshire”.
Just as he thought he had finished, we young (we are talking 50 years ago) would take great delight in finding another specimen (a Garganey or a White-fronted Goose) which nobody had ever seen here before...whereupon he would say “You twisters, now I have got to paint yet another bird, will you please stop finding them!”.
If the Common Crane is not amongst his stunningly beautiful collection, as I feel sure it is not, I like to think that, somewhere up there, he is cursing us...
...but getting out his paintbrush.
Just one more time.
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