WHAT TO SPOT
Natural wonders to watch out for this week… Mayflies
Tomorrow I shall make my annual pilgrimage to the River Loddon in Hampshire, in the hope of catching a trout.
I have been coming here with my dad for nearly two decades now, rising at dawn and heading west to the Hampshire chalk stream which winds its way through the Duke of Wellington’s Stratfield Saye estate, gifted by the Crown to Arthur Wellesley as a prize for winning the Battle of Waterloo. In recent years, like the late arrival of the Prussians back in 1815, my wife has joined forces with us.
Both she and my dad are skilled fly-fishing folk, always managing to land a couple of trout between them, but my victories are less clear cut. Often I return home empty-handed.
I console myself with the thought that the process of catching a fish is quite secondary to actually being somewhere as beautiful as the Loddon in the first place.
Standing here on a fine morning, one can spot kingfishers rocketing from the river reeds and making mad dashes downstream, cuckoo flowers lining the riverbank and the occasional marsh harrier swooping in.
In particular tomorrow, I am hoping to see the mayfly. This is the event that all fly fishermen hold in reverence, when conditions are just right for the insects to hatch on the surface.
There are 51 species of mayfly in the UK and at this time of year they undergo a miracle metamorphosis from nymph grubbing along the riverbed to sprouting transparent lacy wings of impossible delicacy.
The newly-hatched mayfly will take flight, display, breed and die all in a matter of hours. Many species do not even feed as adults, as their sole purpose after hatching is to reproduce.
Chalk streams like the Loddon represent some of our most precious and unique environments. There are only 210 of the rivers to be found anywhere in the world, 160 of which are in England and the majority in the Home Counties.
Yet they are also under threat. The 2018 riverfly census, which measures water insect abundance and diversity, found many rivers are suffering from pollution. Mayflies such as the bluewinged olive, a vital part of river ecosystems, have suffered substantial declines – especially so in chalk streams.
This is a matter of great concern, for our relationship with these rivers runs deeper than mere natural assets. Instead they are woven into our national consciousness.
Kenneth Grahame in The Wind in the Willows, Ted Hughes and Sir John Betjeman all devoted some of their finest writing to chalk streams. Another Hampshire river – the Itchen – which flows a few miles away from the Loddon, was where Sir Edward Grey wrote his seminal book Fly Fishing, first published in 1899.
Later, when he was foreign secretary during the First World War, Grey used to retreat to the Itchen for solace and built a cottage on the riverbank for he and his wife Dorothy (the ruins of which can still be seen today).
Grey wrote of May and June being the best time to fish a chalk stream when the riverbank lilac, hawthorn, gorse and laburnum are all in bloom and the fish rise greedily from their pools to feast on the hatching mayfly.
This abbreviated life-cycle means the Latin name for the insects is “ephemera”. Watching the mayflies rise, and fall, makes me think of our own lives in relation to the flowing river and centuries-old trees. Fleeting, in a word.