FASHION VICTIMS

For a long time it was a matter of pride for river managers to remove obstructions to migration Migratory fish face a continual battle to adapt to man-made change, and the reintroduction of the beaver to our waters is only the beginning of their problems,

Migratory fish are suffering at the hands of man and Michael Wigan has had enough

Fashion is a funny old devil. She twists and turns and is hard to follow. Take flows in rivers. For a long time it was a matter of pride for river managers to remove obstructions to migration. Accessing the headwaters has been a duty for well wishers of sea trout and salmon. Fallen tree trunks, shopping trolleys and farm fences impeding flows were taken out. Entire dams have been dismantled. On the Penobscot River in Maine several huge dams were demolished so that salmon could regain their ancestors’ birth places. The best-known in Scotland involved ‘re-watering’ the River Garry feeding the Tay. Government pushed the restoration policy.

Now arrives the beaver, reintroduced after 500 years. Suddenly blocking the flows of rivers, doing the opposite, is a good thing. Natural flows mean dammed rivers, slower meandering waters, and helping siltation by stopping its passage. Beavers will ‘stabilise’ rivers and prevent flooding, even save lives. Collapsing and honeycombed banks are virtuous features, demonstrations of our willingness to restore nature’s pristine state, before farmland was prized and before fishing was a soothing pastime.

The actions of previous generations in maximising Scotland’s limited productive land by channelling flows and draining fields are tossed aside as old-fashioned wrong turns.

The latest requirement is to reduce atmospheric carbon. Green energy must replace energy from burning fossil fuels, unless the fuel is the carbon stored in the lifetime of breathing trees in which case burning it is acceptable, indeed desirable.

Disregarding the physical upheaval of installing wind arrays and the numerous metals mined to manufacture its turbines, windmills are presented as a new horizon. With 17 new offshore wind arrays planned, Scottish seas are being brought to heel and zoned like housing estates. Salmon and smolts threading through the vibrating towers, and across the connecting cables fizzing with potentially confusing magnetic fields, must accommodate a bold tomorrow.

We may look back and wonder that we could so cavalierly erect huge scaffolds in our seas, on the ground floor.

Before wind energy farms were planted on their migration pathways salmon had to contend with the theft of their breeding grounds from another power source, hydro-electric energy. In the 1950s a phase of dam-building spread across Scotland. Rivers were diverted into each other to increase flow, and power industry. East coast rivers fed the west and vice versa.

Water diverted from the source of the River Spey into the headwaters of the Tay is sieved by no less than seven powergenerating stations. We get heat and light, but the breeding salmon find concrete barriers barring access to their nursery gravels. Sometimes there are salmon passes, sometimes not. On the River Conon in Ross-shire, when dams were built blocking three headwater glens to compensate for lost nurseries, the power company built Europe’s largest salmon hatchery, able to incubate several million eggs.

Around Aviemore housing is mushrooming. The houses need what salmon need, water. Developers want new boreholes. The Spey fishery board protests that already a fifth of the natural flow is abstracted, affecting waterways all the way to the sea. It asks that existing boreholes are repaired rather than new ones drilled.

Fashion changed salmon futures when the recent Wildlife and Natural Environment Act prohibited migratory fish from being helped to access completely new territory. No longer would streams above waterfalls be permissible as fresh fertile habitat for young salmon and sea trout. Wild populations were to be confined to their historic homelands.

It is a notion fraught with contradictions. Nature keeps changing. Bird and fish species move northwards as climate softens. What was an impassable waterfall yesterday can become a swimmable torrent with today’s torrential downpours.

Beavers receive pioneering assistance, not salmon. Salmon’s enemies — seals and cormorants — are protected. Is this really wanted? Note: this column is about salmon and trout. Salmon have a following, a constituency. Cormorants may not be a rare breed, cormorant columnists are.