news/editorial

5 June 2016 News/Editorial

When established norms are challenged, we are left wondering if the “norms” were wrong all along, or are the things that challenge them “one-offs”, isolated instances of peculiar behaviour, the exceptions which prove the rule?

The proprietor tells me there is a salmon resident in one of his pools, the Shott at Upper Floors, which has now been caught twice on a trout dry fly, and despite that, continues to take olives, march browns and anything else that only brown trout or sea trout would normally take, with gay abandon, as if these floating meals will shortly go out of fashion. It has become a feeding machine, observable to anyone who is there at the right time, gulping down every fly which is unlucky enough to be on the right track for coming over its watery lair.

But how can this be?

As I understand it, nobody has ever found any food in the stomach of a salmon in fresh water, therein the great mystery as to why they ever take our feeble offerings of flies (and other excrescences, such as the deplorable upstream flying c) when they do not actually ingest ?

Annoyance, a random trigger of their old marine feeding mechanism, is thought to be the reason we ever catch them, this theory appearing logical in that the further away from the time they used to feed in the sea, ie the longer they are in fresh water, the harder they become to catch.

So far, so good, until we come across a salmon, our friend in the Shott, which is a regular feeder, caught twice on a dry fly and still at it….. big time.

Is it really eating hundreds of flies simply to eject them, sometime later, when its stomach, supposedly in shut down mode, rejects them?

Answers on a postcard to…..or on second thoughts please don’t, none of you knows the correct answer, it is a mystery, a beguiling and intriguing one, which will remain, and rightly so, unless and until you can interpret the internal workings of our friend in the Shott.

Good luck with that!

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At the same time that our friend in the Shott was behaving most oddly, the same proprietor came a photo of a large brown trout from the Spey which should be eating flies, shrimps et al, proper trout fodder, the “norm” you would say, but is in fact eating…….. young salmon, and in some numbers.

At a time when almost everyone is blaming what happens at sea for our recent paucity of returning adult salmon (and thinking this is something new), I rather enjoy this quote from Russell writing “The Salmon” in 1864, just 152 year ago:

“From such facts we draw only one “practical improvement”....that the fact of such great multitudes (of smolts) perishing beyond our help in the wild and wicked sea, is, though not exactly an encouragement, an additional reason why we should take better care of them during the periods when they are our wards and guests” …...in our rivers.

So are we taking better care of them while “they are our wards and guests”?

The answer for adult returners is “yes”, unequivocally, for never on Tweed, or at least for well over 200 years, have so few salmon been killed by both nets and rods.

But for our juveniles, I am perfectly certain we are not doing well enough, impeded by those who like goosanders and cormorants, of which there is no evidence of any decline, in favour of our young salmon, the adult version of which there is far too much evidence of decline, and of the “gathering pace” variety.

Migrating, descending to the sea, smolts are the survivors, the elite, the stormtroopers of the salmon world, those which drew the winning ticket amongst the millions of fry born every year, of which 80/90% plus will die in the river before making it to smolt stage.

So it is vital that these “winners” complete the journey to sea, that they survive whilst still under our safekeeping in our rivers, and are not eaten en route by avian piscivores and by those large cannibalistic brown trout.

That brown trout anglers exercise pretty much 100% catch and release on the Tweed now is to be applauded, but the debate needs to be had about big brown trout, which as they become larger, tend towards eating other, smaller, fish (both young trout and salmon) rather than flies, shrimps etc.

In the old days, I remember catching big browns at Upper Pavilion and we always killed them, just because my father called them, correctly it would seem, “cannibals”.

As part of the stewardship of both our young trout and salmon, one wonders if angling clubs should consider killing any brown trout over say 3lbs, as a conservation measure.

I can hear howls of protest from some, but a quick glance at that photograph of one brown trout’s meal on one day, might at least give pause for thought as to whether killing large browns might be the way to go for the future.

The Tweed, having much better feeding than the Spey, being a more lowland river, will have many more large brown trout than the Spey.

Nobody knows, but it just could be that large brown trout kill even more of our smolts than those more visible, and rightly reviled, avian piscivores.

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So there we have it, evidence of two fish breaking the mould, outside the “norm”.

Or are they?

My guess is that our friend, the salmon in the Shott, is a minor freak, not unique (for other salmon have been caught this spring on a dry fly) but having acquired a curious taste for olives and the like, despite being unable to ingest them.

As for that Spey brown trout, it is entirely normal behaviour for large brown trout to hoover up as many of our descending smolts as they can.

It is just that we cannot see it happening.