By JOHN MACLEOD FOR THE SCOTTISH DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED:28 June 2024
They were hardened men, but as Roman soldiers two millennia ago tramped through the likes of Gaul, Flanders and England, they were struck by extraordinary, silvery fish surging up the foaming rivers.
Challenging waterfalls, bouncing through rapids, jumping repeatedly into the air and against daunting odds... And the warriors fumbled for a name in their demotic Latin, and called him salmo: the leaper.
A fish once so abundant that – as at least one newspaper in 1811 documented – indentured apprentices, from Govan to Worcester, often demanded a clause forbidding their masters from feeding them salmon more than once a week.
And one summer day a Mr Naylor, holidaying on the west side of Lewis, decided to go fishing in the Grimersta river.
He landed 54 salmon, and might well have beaten what remains the British rod-caught record the following day, for that morning he caught another 45.
An angler tries his luck on the Tay but sun may be setting on salmon fishing in our rivers
But he casually put his rod aside that lunchtime, and went out for a bit of rough shooting instead.
Even 30 years ago, you could have stood outside Amhuinnsuidhe Castle in North Harris and marvelled at all the salmon marshalled at the mouth of the river – dorsals cutting the foam – awaiting the spate, when they could finally run upstream and fulfil their instincts.
For, however far she wanders, however long he roams the Arctic salmon cannot spawn in salt water – and spawn, eventually, they must.
But last year, only 33,023 wild salmon were caught in Scotland. Twenty five per cent down on the 2022 haul – and the lowest since records began, back in 1952.
And, last December, the International Union for Conservation of Nature added Scotland’s Atlantic salmon to its red list.
The King of Fish is now up there with mountain gorillas, the blue whale and the Komodo dragon as an officially endangered species – perhaps, some say, within 20 years of extinction. And no one seems to have a coherent explanation as to why.
Alarm first began in the early 1990s and, by 1994, fisheries began increasingly to urge – then command – a ‘catch and release’ policy from anglers, with such success that if you search YouTube for recent salmon-hunting adventures you will struggle to find any fisherman actually killing one.
Commercial poaching remained a serious problem – local Claude Greengrasses touting salmon of mysterious provenance at the back door of some cynical hotel – until, in 2002, the Scottish Government desperately changed the law.
It became a criminal offence to buy or sell rod-caught salmon, all wild salmon ensnared at licensed netting stations now had to be tagged before sale and with much documentation and utter traceability, and more recently the law has been changed again, forbidding the killing of any wild salmon before May 1.
All coastal netting fisheries have since been closed and the handful of licensed estuarial ones that survive are, surely, on borrowed time.
Unless you live near one, or are in a big Scottish city with a high-end fishmonger, it is all but impossible to buy wild salmon.
And, still, the numbers of wild fish continue to crash – to the point where appalled Americans might shell out big money for fishing in Scotland, and spend a week without even seeing a salmon. With fraught economic impact.
For anglers in pursuit of the silver tourists spend around £135million in Scotland every year, support some 4,300 jobs and add an additional Gross Value Added (GVA) of £79.9million annually.
In 2015, a study calculated that angling brought £24million into the Tweed region’s economy, supporting the equivalent of 520 jobs.
That spending has fallen by between 50 and 60 per cent since then, lamented Fay Hieatt in 2019 – clerk to the River Tweed Commission, an august body set up by act of Parliament in 1807 to police and conserve local salmon stocks.
People are now struggling. In the early 1990s, when Kevin Patterson took up his trade as a Tweed ghillie – on the Tweedswood beat, near Melrose – about 40 fish would be caught on that stretch alone in the spring season.
In 1995, three rods landed 19 salmon in just one outing. As of April 22, 2019, so far that season, his guests had caught two.
Salmon numbers had ‘gone off a cliff,’ Patterson lamented. And he felt sorry for his clients.
‘They just want to come and enjoy their fishing. Anglers aren’t expecting ten fish. They just want one; two would be mega. But it’s just not happening...’
In recent history the Tweed enjoyed its best season in 2010, when 23,000 salmon were caught.
Mr Patterson thought that a freak but, on average, 10,000 to 15,000 were caught every year. Since 2014, those numbers have halved. In 2018, just 5,510 were taken.
The collapse in numbers means fewer anglers. So the prices for a day’s fishing have been slashed up and down the Tweed – which must soon impact on wages and jobs.
By April 2019, Mr Patterson was charging as little as £40 for a day’s fishing; he once levied £140.
The most sought-after sites have cut prices by 50 per cent, down to a few hundred pounds a day. Local hotels are struggling; many beats are losing money.
These statistics increasingly vindicate those who, back in the 1990s, questioned the wisdom – and even the morality – of the ‘catch and release’ policy, which the Scottish Government has in recent years threatened to impose with the full force of law. (It has been illegal to kill a wild salmon in Wales, in any circumstances, since 2020.)
Yet catch and release has not worked. It debases what should be a sport – that hunting instinct, deep in us all, to win food for the table – into a game. Instead, the policy involves the repeated hooking, torment and release of living creatures.
Canadian studies suggest that at least 5 per cent of caught-and-released salmon do not survive.
Others say the mortality rate is even higher. And the managers of stocked, stew-pond rainbow trout fisheries almost all forbid it, insisting that – within a decreed bag limit – you kill everything you catch.
They know that ‘pricked’ fish soon become most reluctant to bite, that dead, decomposing fish do their water no good – and that catch and release is bad for business.
Last year, only 33,023 wild salmon were caught in Scotland - 25pc down on 2022, and the lowest since records began, back in 1952
By contrast the sensible Highlander, after one for the pot, would eventually catch his salmon, bang it on the head, thank the Lord for His mercies new every morning, head home to pop his prize into the freezer and not trouble the river for another year.
But the big problem with catch and release is political. By embracing it, back around 1994, Scotland’s estates unwittingly endorsed a cherished myth – that the main threat to wild salmon is the angler.
Most convenient for Edinburgh politicians, who know most voters think the pursuit of wild salmon the indulgence of woofly-voiced toffs.
And Mr Patterson and Ms Hieatt point out a most inconvenient truth: their extensive monitoring of salmon breeding – by electronic hi-tech means in the estuary, and so on – suggests there has been no fall in the number of juvenile salmon leaving the Tweed.
Which suggests there is little wrong with the management of the Tweed – no careless coniferous plantations acidifiying the water; no paddling cattle muddying the spawning redds, and no significant pollution.
It is just that very few make it back, perhaps only 1 per cent. This is not, in fact, a crisis in Scotland’s lochs and rivers. The emergency, whatever it is, is in the sea.
There are – and have long been – three chief suspects. One is rapacious, industrial fishing for salmon in the ocean itself.
The Faroese were fingered for it in the 1990s. And, until very recent decades, salmon netting off the west coast of Ireland was wholesale and unregulated.
Another, of course, is climate change. The Tweed Commissioners – whose excellent records go back over 200 years – argue that there is a 60-year cycle in salmon stocks rising and falling, linked to a meteorological phenomenon known as the North Atlantic oscillation, which affects the climate across the region.
‘That affects food supplies for salmon out at sea,’ argued one journalist five years ago, ‘increasing competition for food with species such as mackerel, and altering water temperatures.
‘Climate change, which is warming the sea and harming marine life, is making those pressures much more significant.’
And the third is commercial salmon farming in the West Highlands, first trialled in the Sixties and which, by the 1990s, had become big business. It is now Scotland’s biggest food export.
The Chinese are crazy for it and, in 2022, our farmed salmon hit a record value of some £1.2billion.
A government-commissioned report in 2018 examined aquaculture’s wider economic impacts and showed the sector supported 11,700 jobs and generated £885million GVA.
But its foes insist salmon cages are a source of serious if localised pollution, that they are crawling with sea lice – which the wild fish quickly shed in fresh water; that they in turn infest passing migrant fish with sea lice, and that salmon cage escapees could be running up our rivers and wrecking the established local gene pool.
Each hypothesis, though, has serious holes. The Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic – OSPAR – flatly declares ocean trawling is no longer a problem, however voracious some of our neighbours may have been 30 or 40 years ago.
‘Fisheries exploitation of Atlantic salmon was a great concern in the past century,’ OSPAR allows, ‘but average annual exploitation by commercial and recreational fisheries have greatly decreased over the last 60 years and are presently at very low levels.’
Nor is climate change some sort of appalling, novel emergency. It is a constant in history. The parching of Asian grasslands was central to the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Medieval Warm Period enriched England. The subsequent Little Ice Age helped to beggar Scotland and deliver the Union itself.
Indeed, we were still in the Little Ice Age when Govan lads were revolting against salmon yet again for tea – and things were warming up again when Mr Naylor on the Grimersta was reeling in a beauty on every cast.
Scapegoating fish farming has one howling flaw: there is scarcely any salmon farming on the east coast of Scotland, where wild salmon numbers have crashed so catastrophically.
A case can certainly be made that the cages are very bad for sea trout – which hang around our coast, rather than following their more famous kin into the deep ocean.
But aquaculturists – the sector is now almost wholly in Norwegian hands – are out to make money, and there is no profit in sickly, dying fish in filthy cages.
A much stronger ecological argument is the prodigious volume of fish harvested to feed caged salmon.
‘The Scottish salmon industry,’ thundered environmental campaigner Matt Mellen in 2020, ‘uses roughly the same quantity of wild-caught fish to feed its salmon, as is purchased by the entire adult population of the UK in one year.
‘And to raise a single adult fish in a cage requires the capture and slaughter of up to 200 wild caught fish, depriving those in lands far away of much-needed, local sources of protein...’ And all that fish processed into pellets for caged salmon is fish denied to their wild brethren at sea.
Meanwhile, the government’s timid Wild Salmon Strategy and Implementation Plan, published earlier this year, has been widely mocked in the angling press for its refusal to sanction the culling of seals, the licensed shooting of predatory birds, or to seriously study the impact of reintroduced beavers.
And while ministers will not support ‘further salmon and trout open-pen fish farm developments on the north and east coasts of Scotland,’ they have nothing at all to say about the west.
The fact is that the best stewards of our wild salmon are local anglers themselves, and that of late has been recognised at Lough Melvin on the Irish border.
It’s an intriguing place with three salmonid species – such as the gillaroo – found nowhere else in the world, and with generous runs of migratory fish.
And its County Fermanagh stretch is the only place in Northern Ireland where you are allowed to kill a salmon, such is the respect earned by the Garrison Anglers Club over decades of management and conservation.
It costs you £80 a season or £10 a day and you are also given two tags, entitling you to keep two salmon per season. (Northern Ireland also insists on a game-rod licence, but it is only £17 a year.)
A grown-up order by people who take angling seriously – and which Scotland might do well to emulate.
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