Life of a Chalkstream: To kill or not to kill

Greetings!

I write this from the departure lounge of my favourite airport, if it is possible to have such a thing in the current era of that torture we call international air travel.

Jackson Hole Airport lives up to the cowboy country heritage of Wyoming, America’s least populous state. The single storey pinewood buildings that house it are barely visible amongst the sage bush landscape until you get up close. Inside, the lounge would fit nicely on the set of a Western movie with a blazing log fire and brown leather sofas. Across the hall is a shop selling kitsch that harks back to cattle country, the early settlers and a life on the open range. It seems all very idyllic now, but I suspect that in a state that spends five months of every year under many feet of snow the reality was very different. It is no real comparator but yesterday we were caught out on the river in an hour of hailstorm; for a while I hated fly fishing.

I’ve been coming here for close on fifteen years, first to compete in the US One Fly but more recently just for fun. What makes it worth 16 hours in a plane? Yes, the fishing is good, but you won’t catch much more or bigger that you might on an average chalkstream day. The techniques are a bit more fluid – upstream, downstream, across stream or whatever as your drift boat covers maybe as much as 20 miles of river in a day. Most people like foam, huge buoyant flies that imitate grasshoppers and their like or ugly, luminescent streamers that would work well on any a British reservoir. But equally a size twenty Parachute Adams will do the business as you beach your boat to prospect nervous water, back eddies and side channels.

But most of all it is the big sky that draws me here. The immensity of the landscape in which you fish. A geology carved millions of years ago. Elk, moose, bears and bald eagles as your regular companions. And the fact that how totally dialled into fly fishing everyone here is, whether they fish or not. New Zealand is the only other place in the world I have ever found this. Even in my adopted home of Stockbridge, arguably the world capital of fly fishing, we fluff chuckers still arouse a certain curiosity as we go about our business.

The guides here tend to be very much younger than a British counterpart; the vast majority are in the 25-45 range, fishing guides in the summer and skiing guides in the winter. Neither of these are professions kind on the body; rowing is hard, and the days are long. I asked one guide what he was doing that evening. “What I do every night May to September,” he replied, “eat something and sleep.” Really, I questioned, imagining beer nights in the Victor Keg House as closer to the truth. “Oh,” he conceded, “sometimes I tie a few flies.”

You learn a lot about a person in the confines of a boat for 10 hours. Trump or Biden always passes an interesting hour, albeit you need to know a guide well to get the full experience. 401Ks, personal pension plans to you and me, along with the machinations of the stock market is another constant. Famous clients always make for a rich seam as Teton County, the region in which the town of Jackson lies, is currently the wealthiest county in the US. It shows in the prices of everything from a sandwich to a modest home. It is no surprise that most of the guides commute daily an hour plus across the Teton mountain pass from neighbouring Idaho. We did get to share the takeout ramp on day two with Mötley Crüe founder and bassist Nikki Sixx bizarrely dressed as a 19^th century Western undertaker; it is that sort of place.

But the real hot topic was the recent advisement by the US Game & Wildlife Park Service to kill all rainbow trout. Historically the rivers around these parts, and the Snake River in particular, is the home of the cutthroat trout with both browns and rainbows being recent imports. German browns and cutties as they are generally called get on just fine but rainbows not only crossbreed with cutties to produce cutbows but outcompete them for the prime spawning areas. After 50 years of rainbow stocking the cutthroat has gone from dominant to decline in its own native river. So, the plan is to reduce the rainbow population by the cessation of stocking, electro fishing and the killing of all rainbows caught on rod and line.

Frankly, I could not bring myself to do it. These are not ‘stocked’ rainbows in any sense. They are the poster children of past stocked fish: bright, rainbow silver, lean and hard fighting. I offered to give mine up for the cause but the guide was more sanguine. He’d done the math as they say here. On any given day the Snake has 200 guides out on the river. It is reasonable to assume, figured our guide, that every boat will catch at least two rainbows a day. That’s 400 a day, 2,800 in a week so somewhere north of 50,000 in a season, every one of which makes for a happy client. Thousands of grip and grin portraits for Instagram. Fish equal tips and guides, not unreasonably, like tips.

It seems to me that the Wyoming rainbows are safe for a while to come.

Going underwater

Snorkelling in a chalkstream is not my idea of fun (brrrrrr) but for filmmaker and photographer Jack Perks going underwater is his thing. So, last week, as part of a crowdfunding reward for his film Britain’s Hidden Fishes Jack took two intrepid souls who had bought a day with him at Bullington Manor.

It is going to be a long project. Filming will continue well into 2023 with the one-hour film slated for release towards the end of that year. Narrated by River Monsters Jeremy Wade Jack’s film is to be a celebration of our native fish showcasing their remarkable lives in all manners of British waterways.

Who are we? See quiz question 3

I don’t suspect it will be easy film to make. Last week Jack spent a week in the Hebrides filming basking sharks. Or not. He didn’t get a single second of footage. Likewise, his aim to film spawning chalkstream Atlantic salmon, something we both agree has never been done, also looks a tricky task. But thanks to the £30,000 fund to which many of you contributed Jack has the time and finance to do what he likes to call his Blue Planet on a budget.

I’ll keep you posted but here are a few shots from the snorkelling day.

Grayling rootling for shrimps

Mystery hare deaths

We’ve seen a great many hares this year around Nether Wallop; I think we are lucky in that we are surrounded by open downland that makes for perfect hare habitat. However, earlier in the week our Parish Pump, the email round robin that connects the village with news of everything from suspicious cars to village film shows told a sadder tale of multiple dead hares.

In the space of less than a month five hares, three leverets, a female adult and a juvenile, have been found dead in pretty well the same spot. Various theories were examined: shooting, snaring, disease or illegal coursing being the most common. However, none of the corpses had any visible injuries or myxomatosis symptoms which very occasionally transfers across from rabbits to hares.

In common with many British wild animals the hare has, relative to population at the start of the 1900’s, seen a significant decline. The most commonly cited figure, which I have sometimes quoted myself, is 80% with the current total number somewhere just under a million. However, having done a closer examination of the figures the decline appears to be closer to 65%, still bad but hiding some unexpected variations.

The population was fairly stable around 2.5m from 1900 to the outbreak of WW2 when the massive expansion of agriculture put to the plough millions of acres of open grassland, just the sort of landscape the hare requires to live and breed. The decline was also exacerbated by the decline in fox hunting during and immediately after the war, foxes being the main predator of hares. However, when hunting and predator management returned to more normal peacetime levels the hare population saw a significant recovery until the mid-1960’s when the decline set it again to a low point in the late 1980’s with hare numbers below that of WW2.

That’s all the bad news. However, since then hares have been ever so slowly clawing their way back with the population now above the lows of the 1940’s it is now on an upward trajectory to levels now higher than anytime on the past half century. Why? According to the Game & Wildfire Conservation Trust, “the introduction of set-aside and agri-environment schemes that have restored some habitat diversity to farmland.”

As to our hare deaths we contacted Paul Duff at the Animal and Plant Health Agency which is tasked by the government to look after health and welfare of animals, as well as the general public, from disease. He concluded that if infectious disease is the cause of the deaths then although there are several possibilities, the likely one is EBHS (which is viral hepatitis) or its more recent manifestation, RHD2 (Rabbit haemorrhagic Disease), originally found in rabbits, now in hares also.

Hopefully we won’t find anymore dead hares but if we do the Agency has asked us to ship it to them for further examination.

Quiz

The normal random collection of questions inspired by the date, events or topics in the Newsletter.

It is just for fun with answers at the bottom of the page.

1) Complete the title of the Aesop Fable, "The …….. and the Hare".

2) On this day in 1869 a Wall Street Black Friday securities panic was precipitated by the decline in the value of which commodity after a market manipulation by two financiers was stymied by the US government?

3) What are the two species fish in the photo above?

4 (optional) Spot and name the birdie in the photo below. You may only be able to do this if reading on a smart device.