Magical Creatures
AN APPRECIATION OF LEAPING SALMON
The golden arms of the valley were shrugging off the thick shawl of leaves that had kept the river hidden all summer. A few days previously, the water had slipped over the rocks with a barely audible effervescence, but now I clambered around new storm-swelled pools. In the main channel, a brown torrent surged around fallen branches and a plunging mini waterfall had appeared overnight.
From nowhere, as though it were forged from the river water itself, a huge fish burst upwards, its tail thrashing, swimming through the air. I held my breath as the salmon hung suspended for a moment, only to be reabsorbed by the raging water. One after another, fish after fish tumbled into the bubbling foam. Finally, one careered over the top, still swimming furiously as it landed, and vanished upstream.
Unlike the tiny fry and young parr that flit and hide in the summer pools, mature salmon are all brawn. During a year or more of high seas adventures, they bulk out, turning from ‘smolts’ into adults before returning to the lower river.
Pre-migration, salmon do something counterintuitive: they stop feeding. All their energy goes into breeding readiness. Their stomachs shrink, they absorb their feeding teeth, replacing them with breeding teeth, and some males develop a prominent hook, or ‘kype’, on the tip of their lower jaw. The daredevil leaps I witnessed were performed in a state of starvation. Only the strongest complete their mission and return to the sea to metamorphose back again.
Salmon numbers have fallen in recent years, thanks to factors such as pollution, disease and overfishing, but there is a growing movement to help wild salmon thrive again. Near my home in Cornwall, a project is combining a hatchery with measures to improve the condition of the Loveny and Fowey rivers, supported by local anglers, who have adopted a catch-and-release approach. Migrating sea trout, lampreys, shad and eels could benefit from such schemes, as could the freshwater pearl mussel, which spends part of its early life in the gills of salmonid fish.
Elsewhere, you can experience the autumn salmon migration close to some towns; for instance, the River
Usk in Brecon and the River Tummel fish ladder at Pitlochry Dam offer great access.
Upstream from my waterfall, some of the salmon fleet ran aground. I approached, poised to lend a helping hand, although keeping in mind that it is an offence in the UK to ‘handle salmon in suspicious circumstances’. Fortunately, the salmon flashed into the current without my assistance.
For these fish the prize was in sight. Females would soon dig their gravel ‘redds’ in the riverbed and deposit several thousand peach-coloured eggs. The mature males normally do the job of fertilisation, but it’s not unknown for a juvenile precocious parr to dart in to steal the glory.
I settled on a boulder to watch the leaping fish in the evening light, the movement of the water and the silvery salmon intermingling until they melded into one.