6 June 2021 News/Editorial
“I don’t like the look of it for the summer” said one of our most knowledgeable fishermen. It is hard to disagree. The river is low, the tides have been high, we are in early June and yet the beats below Coldstream are both seeing and catching little. This is a worry after a distinctly patchy spring.
Amongst the many possibilities, and the one optimists favour, is that up to the middle of June any fish coming in are mainly springers. Well, we already know that the spring has been poor-ish, so this is just more of the same. It will all come good from mid June onwards, they say.
The technical problem for optimists is that, in the absence of grilse, summer salmon are mainly 1:2s or 2:2s, just like the springers. So why should the summer run be as good as we would wish, like last year for instance, when the spring was not? There is also evidence that numbers are far from great elsewhere, on other rivers, indicating, yet again, that the common factor, the sea, is the problem.
Of course, it is still early days in Tweed terms. 75%+ of every annual rod catch happens after 1st June. There is all to play for, but to settle the nerves, we could do with those summer fish turning up in numbers, and soon.
The forecast for the week ahead is for no appreciable rain. As levels continue to drop, lowest beats should be best. But if, like last week, no fresh fish turn up, that will prove to be yet another hopelessly incorrect prediction.
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It is a sobering thought that in just under a month’s time, from 1st July, Tweed salmon anglers will be allowed to kill again. Sobering indeed.
As the Salmon & Trout Conservation Trust seek to have the Atlantic salmon moved up the “endangered species” RED LIST of the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) ; as all other fishery bodies in Scotland agree that salmon numbers are in steady decline and are appealing to Government and elsewhere for help in halting, and reversing, the decline; as almost all other rivers are aiming for and achieving 97-98% in releases of salmon caught (the 2-3 % being basically those that die in the process of being caught by deep hooking/bleeding), yet still the Tweed allows between 750 and 1,100 salmon, every year, to be wilfully killed by anglers.
In times past, the Tweed was in the forefront of salmon management practices. In the matter of not killing so many of the salmon we catch, we are bringing up the rear. The drum has been beating in these pages for 100% catch and release, all year round, for some time now. It is hard to understand the logic, the accompanying PR own goal, and ultimate futility of deliberately killing a single one of a diminishing and increasingly endangered resource.
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One of the rivers returning all salmon caught, as it has for many years now, is the Dee in Aberdeenshire, where I will be casting a line next week. It has also engaged in a massive tree planting/shading programme to protect its fish from the dangerously high summer temperatures that are possible nowadays and must, you would think, make sustaining life amongst our young salmonids, in high summer, a marginal enterprise.
The same massive, long term tree planting exercise is being carried out here and throughout Scotland by the Tweed Forum. The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration runs from 2021 to 2030, part of it is called Riverwoods (link for much more info https://www.riverwoods.org.uk/) and the Delivery Group is being chaired by the Tweed Forum’s CEO Luke Comins.
We are so lucky to have the Forum here on the Tweed. Even a quick google maps search of the upper reaches of the Teviot, Tweed, Ettrick, Yarrow and too many other smaller tributaries to mention, reveals a depressing lack of shade in all the upper reaches. We have around 1,700 miles (equal to 5 car journeys from here to London) of spawning tributaries, under 20m wide, on the Tweed catchment, and properly treed and shaded parts of that huge area are in the vast minority. There is much to do to protect our fish from the warming climate, and no time to be lost.
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On the whole subject of ecosystem ruination, I spent a sobering (that word again) 75 minutes watching Artifishal; you can get it on youtube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdNJ0JAwT7I
It is depressing and sad that we humans could have been responsible for so much destruction, as if nature did not matter. Its specific targets are salmon fish farms and artificial stocking, the latter especially, far from being the easy panacea for correcting the terminal damage to once prolific wild salmon rivers, actually proving to be their death knell. It is mainly, not wholly, about Pacific salmon, but the message is the same ie that you can only hope to repair things if you allow the wild fish (absolutely no stocking) to do their own thing, and for that to work the whole river ecosystem must be fully functioning and well.
One of the more frightening statistics is that only 14% of once fully thriving Atlantic salmon rivers now have sustainable populations. We are one of the 14%. It would be a mistake to think that we are alright and need to do nothing. I have traveled along much of the Tweed catchment’s 1,700 miles of its upper tributaries over the past 40 years, and seen for myself, the most important parts of any salmon river system.
Tree cover is in pretty short supply on most of it.
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We know from electrofishing counts that the Tweed produces masses of fry. What is not so clear, is the conversion rate from fry to parr, and then from parr to smolt. LIke all other rivers, we have no idea how many smolts we produce and go to sea every year (other than estimates on the Gala where the smolt tracking is done).
Would the conversion from fry to parr, and from parr to smolt be higher if the upper reaches were more nutrient rich, if there were more vegetation and trees? I have always been told that 90%+ of the fry produced die because of lack of food, competition for space and resources etc etc. Even a small %age reduction in that “natural” attrition rate could be significant. Or could it?
Someone will tell me I am, as usual, talking rubbish.
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