Life of a Chalkstream: June 2022

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.

Wild Atlantic salmon swimming past the cages of their confined brethren

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.

Wild salmon eggs in the River Tyne

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.

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 …..

Robjents shop front

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.

La écopont on the A8

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.

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.