Greetings!
This
week Farming Today on BBC Radio 4 has been running a daily
debate as to the pros and cons of the salmon farming prompted by
an upcoming report by the Scottish government as to the
sustainability of the industry. I must admit I had no idea how
enormous the industry was; the UK is the biggest exporter of
salmon in the world, the annual value being £640m, an industry
that has pretty well come from nowhere in the lives of most of
you reading this piece: the production of salmon in fish farms
has increased from half of nominal catch of wild salmon in 1980
to outnumbering it 2,000 times in 2019.
I didn’t
listen to Farming Today all week, but two points did catch
my ear on Monday. Firstly, when the report comes out beware – it
is primarily about economic rather than environmental
sustainability. Secondly, the man defending the fish farming
industry was utterly hopeless. I have some sympathy when you are
trying to defend the barely defensible but when he said they were
doing their bit for the wild salmon by replacing diesel boat engines
with electric I snorted into my morning tea. I think he was
missing the point. Or maybe that is the point.
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Wild
Atlantic salmon swimming past the cages of their confined
brethren
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Coincidently,
I came across in the week a report in the ICES Journal of Marine
Science that examined the natural and anthropogenic drivers of
escaped farmed salmon occurrence and introgression into wild
Norwegian Atlantic salmon populations. Essentially, do escaped
farm salmon breed with wild salmon and if so, is it happening in
significant numbers? The answer to both questions is assuredly
yes with the critical conclusion reading, ….. as long as salmon
aquaculture is based on technologies where non-sterile fish can
escape, all anadromous wild Atlantic salmon populations are at
risk.
It was
the phrase non-sterile that knocked me down flat. For nearly a
decade nobody has been allowed to stock a non-sterile brown trout
in any water of England or Wales. Plenty of us don’t consider it
a sensible or rational policy foisted on us by an Environment
Agency implementing a vague commitment in the 1997 Kyoto
Protocol, but that is a debate for another day. But it was
implemented with the best of intentions, to preserve the genetic
integrity of the native wild trout population. Alongside that in
fish farms, triploid i.e., non-fertile rainbow trout have been
reared largely for the table, fish farmers happy to do it because
they are a more robust fish and have a better food/growth ratio
that their diploid (fertile) equivalents.
Which
makes me ask, why is the salmon industry still farming fertile
fish when us trout people abandoned it long ago? The only answer
I have yet found was in an article in The Guardian back
in 2014 that suggested the salmon farming industry had resisted
triploids as it might have to take an economic hit with them
performing less well in the farm cages than diploids.
It seems
to me that when it comes to serious environmental reform the EA
and their Scottish like are perfectly happy to pick off the low
hanging fruit, namely the cottage industry that is brown trout
rearing for river stocking, but a well-funded, economically
vibrant industry such as salmon farming with the ear of a
government can, despite an appalling environmental record, ride
roughshod over common sense.
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Wild
salmon eggs in the River Tyne
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Top
(fishing) Gear
Richard
Hammond, he of motoring shows Top Gear and The
Grand Tour fame, would seem an unlikely champion of
chalkstreams but his programme on the River Test, one of the four
part series, Britain's Beautiful Rivers with Richard Hammond,
proved not only inspirational for chalkstreams and fly
fishing but also gently highlighted the dangers of pollution and
abstraction.
Hats off
to the uber-enthusiastic Gilly Bate who actually got Hammond into
a fish on a dry fly. Alastair Robjents of the Robjents fly store
in Stockbridge who separated him from at least £1,500 to get him geared
up. Mike Blackmore from the Wessex Rivers Trust who, with a
simple bank side testing kit, demonstrated the issue of
apparently clean sewer water flowing unchecked into the
river. And Jon Hall at Broadlands who provided that eureka moment
that accompanies the revelation of river bed kick sampling.
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It seems
rivers and fishing are TV catnip at present. Mortimer &
Whitehouse have just completed filming of their fifth
series and footballers Paul Gascoigne and David Seaman are making
a pilot for something similar. Heaven knows what that will be
like. Years ago, in my previous life, Gascoigne at the height of
Gazzamania, was to be the guest of honour at a racing evening.
Involved as I was it became clear that we had to ‘capture’ him
for the day to make sure he made it to the event, so we took him
fishing for the day at Hanningfield Reservoir in Essex. Best to
say it was a somewhat chaotic day if I recall but we did get Paul
to Romford Greyhound Stadium that night which had it’s biggest
ever crowd, every one of which, it seemed to me, he wanted to
greet personally.
See more
details or to watch the Richard Hammond show click here …..
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Road kill
It never
ceases to astound me as to how much dead wildlife is to be seen
on our roads; I can guarantee you that when I next jump into my
pick-up for the 3 mile journey to Stockbridge, a series of
country roads followed by a short section of busy A road, I’ll
see at least a dozen corpses in various states on manglement.
Sad
though it is not much goes to waste; crows are particularly fond
of carrion, but I guess that is reflected in their name though
they are not alone in a diet of death. A couple of weeks ago a
large deer lay dead by the road. In the days that followed the
full corpse was gradually reduced to just the head as subsequent
passing cars accidently rearranged the body to expose new flesh
to the scavengers.
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The dead
you see is fairly seasonal. We are just past ground zero month
for grey squirrels. Pheasants are decimated, I suspect in
the true sense of the word, with maybe one in ten knocked down
when released from rearing pens in late summer. Strangely, I
don’t ever recall seeing a dead partridge and very rarely
foxes unless on urban roads. Hares are most commonly killed
around this time of year as the juveniles travel in search of a
new home. Deer and badgers are the daily collateral damage of
metal meeting flesh, but with no apparent seasonality. Rabbits,
despite being prolific are rarely killed and bird deaths, aside
from pheasants, largely random.
In an
article last week, The Economist estimated that 28m
mammals die on European roads each year. My experience, though
highly localised and unscientific, suggest this to be a massive
underestimate and way behind the 300m songbirds estimated to be
killed annually by the UK cat population. The piece in The
Economist was prompted by the building on 19 new ‘green’
bridges across France’s equivalent of the M1, these écoponts built
entirely for the benefit of wildlife, human traffic being banned.
At £4m a
pop these bridges are not cheap and possibly not effective. In
the UK we have flirted with ruinously expensive bat bridges that
research has concluded are utterly worthless. The French
attempts seem more about the toll road corporations
indulging in a bit of green washing with an average of just
5 mammals a day using an écopont.
What’s
to be done? Well, not very much beyond driving with greater
caution. Believe you me, once you’ve tangled with a few deer you
become very much more aware of their habits and likely reactions
to an oncoming vehicle. Of course, we should build those habits of
wildlife into new road and infrastructure constructions, with
tunnels and underpasses being much more effective than bridges.
But actually, what we should do more of is something we’ve
actually been doing well for decades with roadside plantings and
management which have given us thousands of miles of linear
wildlife reserves where nature thrives oblivious to the roar and
dangers of traffic.
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Dipper
nesting on Hampshire rivers after 30 years
The
dipper has something in common with brown trout – its primary
food is Insect larvae and freshwater shrimps, a bird remarkable
in its method of walking into and under water in search of food.
Cinclus
cinclus are
largely absent from chalkstreams, their preferred home the upland
areas of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland and the lowland
rivers of the Southwest. However, this year we have a
recorded nesting pair on the Hampshire chalkstreams for the first
time in 30 years who have subsequently fledged two young.
This
photo of one of the parents taken last week, was sent to me by
Richard Jacobs who told me of arrivals who are doing a bit better
in the breeding stakes than our Eric the Hoopoe.
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Quiz
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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) Who
are the three presenters of The Grand Tour?
2) What
arrived in New York City on this day in 1885?
3) How
any goals did Paul Gascoigne score for England in his 57
appearances 1988-1998? 0, 5, 10, 15 or 20?
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Have a
good weekend.
Best
wishes,
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Quiz answers:
1) Jeremy
Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May
2) The
Statue of Liberty aboard French ship Isere
3) 10
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TIME IS
PRECIOUS. USE IT FISHING
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The Mill,
Heathman Street, Nether Wallop,
Stockbridge,
England SO20 8EW United Kingdom
01264
781988
www.fishingbreaks.co.uk
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