NATURE'S WILL
The impressive ability of salmon to adapt to environmental changes
It is one thing to do great work, another to inspire great work. This is the achievement of the late Orri Vigfusson.
There was high anxiety in salmon circles that his departure would see the collapse of his salmon protection deals with the Greenland netsmen and Faroe Islands’ long liners. The reverse has happened. Vigfusson’s successors in the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, partnered with North America’s muscular Atlantic Salmon Federation, have secured a 12-year deal through to 2029 suspending the commercial capture of salmon. Subsistence fishing by locals will continue, as will research into alternative fishery developments.
European, Canadian and American spring salmon can now fatten unthreatened by man in the north-east Atlantic over-winter. The runs which accumulated around Scottish river mouths this spring
‘From a fish standpoint, though, devastation creates habitat’
and early summer were evidence that this arrangement worked. Now it will continue.
It has taken business brains to secure something soundly funded. Vigfusson used to go into crowded and over-heated meeting halls on the Greenland coast and argue for deals without a dollar in his pocket. Once the deal was struck, he knew he could get the funds. It has taken business skill to get this equilibrium nailed down for a proper period. The brokers of the deal have done brilliantly. This is real conservation in action.
Meantime the woes many anglers experienced in a hideously dry summer have been compounded locally by an extraordinary event on the River Helmsdale. On a hillside in the upper catchment, a thunder-plump of abnormal ferocity managed to strip part of a hill down to its rocky bones. A surge of rubble and water cascaded down burns small enough to step over and left behind scalped sheet-rock river-beds twenty metres wide.
Tumbling spate-water has gouged cavities from softer burns and left behind pools that
‘The plume of blue clay and brown silt turned the burns to roasted coffee’
a man could stand in completely underwater. Boulders the size of dodgem cars have been hurtled sideways and stand up-ended at crazy angles. Meantime the plains below have diverted the torrent into braided-out channels, leaving out-washes of white sand shining in the sun.
The plume of blue clay and brown silt turned the burns to roasted coffee. This turbid torrent then hit the main river Helmsdale, discolouring the water for five miles. Later on the brown water ran parallel with clear water, creating a two-tone river.
Anglers were in awe. Beats above the silt avalanche were the same as before and beats far enough away were fishable too. The mid-river section was cloudy and unfishable.
The spontaneous reaction is to deplore such devastation and fracturing of normality. What of those tinkling burns and pretty small pools with dodging tiny trout? The landscape looks smashed.
From a fish standpoint, though, devastation creates habitat. Suddenly there are hundreds of tons of loose gravel, exactly what spawning salmon need for egg depositing. In some parts of Scotland pavement-like spawning redds are being de-compacted with pressure hoses to make for better egg-depositing habitat. That won’t be necessary on large stretches of the Helmsdale for a while. Nature’s cataclysm has provided redding gravel.
Had this occurred in, say, March, salmon eggs would have been ripped from their shallow declivities and tossed downstream into the grateful gullets of trout, eels, and birds. But it happened in June.
Small fish, even in this chaotic geological-scale upheaval, found corners to survive. Their flickering bodies squirt around in the new deeper pools, seeking sanctuary from overhanging banks. Future spates will lift them down to the loch and to pastures new.
Fish zones need refreshment and occasional turbulence. Soporific seasonal repetition spells sterility. If anyone had been there when these thousands of tons of rock had been rolling down the hillside they might have imagined that primeval chaos was nigh. In fact, the scoured landscape is full of promise. Soon the new colonists, tomorrow’s salmon, will take up their abodes.