How can we tackle salmon stocks crisis?

We’re down to just five million salmon. Last year we caught 50,000 in the UK compared with the 600,000-800,000 we caught each year in the 1960s. Once a quarter of all fish that left UK waters came back to our rivers. Now it is down to five per cent. This is grim stuff. The catches on a few rivers this year are looking rather better than the last few years, but that’s not saying much.

And there’s certainly nothing to suggest a revival in the fish’s fortunes. The time to ask if we can really carry on fishing for what is fast becoming an endangered species (salmon is technically protected by EU legislation) is rapidly approaching, if not here. Most rivers already practise either total catch and release or a fairly extreme version. As usual, the reasons, or possible reasons, for decline are myriad.

There is, of course, the embarrassing possibility that we killed too many in the past and haven’t noticed until it’s all too late.

But then, no one realised that catches once on their way down were going to keep going down. The other reasons for near terminal decline may or may not be: the commercial fishing of sand eels to feed farmed salmon, leaving too few for the wild fish: predation on wild fish of sea lice from fish farms; and longterm changes in farming and forestry which have affected river flows and habitat. And that’s just the ones we know about or can speculate over.

The idea any of the above is going to change in a hurry and save the salmon is certainly wishful thinking. Anything to do with sand eels requires international, ie European, cooperation. Anything to do with fish farms requires the Scottish Government to get tough with the only modern homegrown (with Norwegian money) industry that can be called a success.

The reafforestation of river valleys – assuming deforestation really is a problem – will require adjacent landowners, who may easily not own the salmon fishing rights, to agree to plant up rich alluvial soils with trees. The price of timber being what it is, that could work. But for how long? In five years timber prices could be heading the same way as catches.

Fewer people bother to book fishing holidays in Scotland. They can come for a couple of weeks, rent a house and fish by the day wherever they fancy rather than take an expensive week to catch nothing on once productive beats. The only reasonable course of action is to start stocking rivers as they do in Iceland: pouring huge quantities of smolts, the juvenile salmon ready for sea, into rivers and hoping they come back. With just a five per cent return rate that means an awful lot of smolts. It won’t be easy. n