news/editorial

7 June 2020 News/Editorial

Something truly exceptional may be happening on the Tweed. Initially, it could have been simply the aftermath of lockdown, because nobody had been fishing for 2 months. You would expect a brief post lockdown fishing catches boom. But it continues, and, even odder, it may not be happening in the other big rivers. I have no real fix on how many were caught last week, but with numerous non-reporting beats it could well be 300-400 salmon, extraordinary for largely unfavourable conditions in early June, with the first half of the week being wall to wall sunshine.

Nor can you give any credit to water conditions; the fish kept coming in despite minimal fresh water in the river to encourage them. My spies on the lower river talk of great pods of salmon coming on every tide with double figure scores per beat now a regular occurrence, whereas throughout last year there were hardly any, all year long.

Middle Mertoun caught 13 and 10 on Thursday/Friday, and the day before my old friend Nigel Houldsworth, erstwhile purveyor of cards, some quite naughty, only fished there for a part of the day, got 4 and could have had more; all fresh fish he said, getting that far up river despite the dead low water conditions. Ladykirk caught 13 and Hendersyde 11 on Friday, and so the good scores go on. Better still, I am told that most are being caught on a fly, thank heavens for that. That some beats are missing out simply means the river is not yet full of fish, and the good fortune is patchy, but if the numbers go on coming in as they are, the river will fill up soon enough. Maybe the only things we fishers need now are a moderate/poor summer (!) and more rain.

So what is going on; are we witnessing the start of much bigger late spring and summer runs? Will it regress further back into the spring and is it the herald of big spring runs in the future? Does it mean anything for what we might expect in July, August and September? What of the autumn proper in October and November?

For now we can expect no answers, but simply rejoice that something is happening which has broken the mould of what we have come to expect in recent years. We might understand both how and why it has happened in due course. Those who come up with theories now, and they will, are guessing, and I will bet you none of them expected quite this to happen when it has, or if they did, several fingers were crossed behind their backs.

Long may it continue.

For next week, no significant rain is forecast, cool and showery is the theme and it may be warming up a tad as we head towards the weekend.

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Forgive the smuggery of the “I told you so” kind, but in days of yore when yours truly was in the Chair at the RTC, the Scottish Wildlife Trust (SWT) and Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), and, of course, the flagwavers in the Scottish Government, started doing that thing that Governments always do, they have a “trial” which proves they can safely do what they were always going to do anyway; in this case beaver introductions.

So they introduced beavers in Knapdale which is basically nowhere, nobody lives there, nobody has heard of it, there are no arable farmers there, few trees of any merit, no drains or culverts, and no rivers with migratory fish. In other words, the trial was bound to be a success because all the things that beavers do to annoy and disrupt humans ie block drains and culverts, block spawning tributaries, flood arable fields, collapse flood banks, cut down your specimen young trees etc etc, they could not do in Knapdale. The trial was a rip roaring success.

So now let’s move over to Tayside, where some be-sandalled eco warrior decided to release beavers illegally, as you do if you are both be-sandalled and an eco warrior of the “we know best for the planet” variety.

The resulting population of Tayside thrived and after a while, rather than remove the illegal beavers, the Scottish Government decided it would be a jolly good idea to reward said law-breaking eco warriors by giving the Tay population , now expanding, legal protection. Part of that is that you have to apply for a licence to remove, transplant or in any other way interfere with said beavers which are being especially annoying.

Now, because they are by nature very annoying, lots of farmers and others have been applying for licences to “control” beavers and surprise surprise, aforementioned be-sandalled eco warriors are now screaming blue murder because licences have been granted. The result is 87 of the cuddly wuddly beavery things have been shot or otherwise disposed of, and 83 dams removed, in the short period between May and December last year.

Imagine the howls of protest now from SWT and their friends!?

Now let us go back 10 years to when yours truly was in said RTC Chair, the then CEO of the RTC/Tweed Foundation, Nick Yonge and I went to see Mike Russell, SNP Minister in charge of beavery things, and his civil servants in the Scottish Parliament building. It was an unhappy meeting. We said then exactly what has happened now ie that beavers are excellent breeders, they travel well from one district to another, and the more there are, the more damage they do and the more they adversely interact with all sorts of human activities. It is one thing to have them in Lithuania where there are no (2 million) people (44 humans per sq km), quite another in the GB where 60+ million of us (274 humans per sq km) cram into one small island.

Nick Yonge and MIke Russell ended up shouting at each other, which was fun; he was going to introduce beavers as some sort of Scottish virility symbol, whether we liked it or not.

“They stop flooding” I hear you cry. No they do not! Their dams would be washed away as if they did not exist when we have really massive, property damaging floods here; the floods in February and March here this year would have smashed their dams to smithereens and just given us in the lower river more rubbish to clear up.

What is more, this sort of thing is going to get much much worse the more the beavers spread. So who is going to pay for unblocking dams, culverts and drains, for repairing burrowed into floodbanks, for ruined crops, for replacing perfectly good gnawed and cut down trees, for the wire to protect every young tree, for hiring JCBs to unblock spawning tributaries, and numerous other things?

It should be Mike Russell, SWT, SNH and the eco warriors who did it deliberately and illegally, and whose fault this all is. But it won’t be them, it will be you and me, and it will get worse, and become far far more expensive as beaver numbers grow.

Now I wonder if our old friend Chris Packham will volunteer to pay?