John Bailey on Scottish salmon and Norfolk grayling

I’ve been speaking to Colin, our ghillie on the Tay river, and he says he’s just seen Noah herding sheep, goats and cows towards a big-looking boat. I don’t think he’s joking.

The level is 10 feet up and rising and a salmon for a few days to come is a pipe dream. Mind you, it’s a bit like that any water level in Scotland these days and there’s no one up here with anything like a sunny vision of the future. We’ve come south from the Dee, another of the classic Scottish salmon rivers, and catches are a fraction of those  years ago.

That salmon as a species are teetering on the brink this century is an appalling ecological disaster, yet another example of the dire way we have been abusing our land and waters. This is a looming financial catastrophe as well. Whole river catchments up here depend on the money salmon anglers bring. Jobs on the rivers are obviously at risk, but every hotel we’ve stayed in has been booked out by salmon fishers. This is a sport Scotland and its small rural communities cannot afford to lose.

The proliferation of salmon farming has a lot to answer for... reasons too many to enumerate here. Climate change is having an effect. As the Arctic warms there’s evidence that salmon at sea are having to travel ever further to find their food - with all the attendant risks that entails. More frequent, more devastating, floods, like the one this weekend, are smashing salmon spawning redds. Predation on small salmon smolts going to sea and adult salmon returning from the sea where they have spent some years feeding and maturing, is off the scale. Seal populations have exploded, along with numbers of fish-eating birds like mergansers and cormorants and the ultimate predator, man, is playing a big part, as you’d guess. The suspicion is that Russian fishing fleets are raping the northern Atlantic where the salmon grow, in contravention of all international agreements. That’s not hard to believe…

To this sad litany we have to add the inflexibility of the fishery boards, who refuse to countenance any form of hatcheries or restocking policies. Every ghillie I have spoken to demands that this changes and that there is an admission that every other solution has been tried and found failing.

It’s no different in Norfolk. Talk to the authorities about restocking here and there’s much head shaking and tut-tutting and all the while we see wild fish populations dwindle.

So bad has the salmon fishing been this trip north, that we have fished for grayling as a substitute... a fine one at that.

Norfolk grayling fishing on the Wensum around Fakenham was considered the best in the UK until the Great War when the hatchery folded. Yes, the hatchery that had produced tens of thousands of young grayling and a legendary fishery. There are of course whispers of grayling back here in Norfolk in small numbers, but how great it would be if the Environment Agency had the imagination to restock and get our rivers thriving again. We anglers are not fools. We know that habitat - the shibboleth of every fishery scientist - is centrally important, but there comes a point when fish populations have to be given a helping hand if they are to recover.

I know I have preached this message before, but the definition of madness is doing the same thing eternally with no discernible evidence of success. River fish species east, west, north and south are in most cases crashing and precious little is done. Up here in the last few days I have seen beavers and pine martens, both creatures reintroduced. Beavers are causing forestry damage and in places flooding and the pine martens are killing off the red squirrels. It would seem that reintroductions are fine if they appeal to woke sentiments and folk who don’t even own a pair of wellies. Reintroductions of fish demanded by those who really know what they are talking about are fine to be ignored. It’s a weird world we live in, as well as a wet one!