Wild salmon not such a catch anymore

Charlestown of Aberlour – In the shimmering rapids of the River Spey that cuts through the Scottish Highlands, Ian Gordon casts his line with a languid swish and waits for a salmon to take the fly.

In the early ’70s, when Gordon first fished the Spey as a “wee nipper”, it never took long to catch a bite. But things have changed.

“I would say there are now 20%, maximum, of what there were in the mid80s,” Gordon said near the town of Aberlour, where he runs a tourist fishing company.

Before the numbers started to fall in the ’80s and ’90s, hundreds of thousands of young Atlantic salmon or smolts would migrate to sea from Scotland’s rivers. A quarter would return to their natal rivers to spawn. Today, only around 4% return, according to the Spey Fishery Board.

In Scotland, where anglers abide by a “catch and release” conservation code, the rod catch of 35 693 in 2021, was the lowest number since records began.

The Scottish government, in a report in June, said the numbers were “consistent with a general pattern of decline in numbers of wild salmon returning to Scotland”.

Ecologists and fishermen say multiple factors are behind the decline, including the overfishing of herring and the effect of the warming climate on the salmon’s life cycle.

“Herring used to be abundant around the coastline of the UK,” Gordon says.

“That was a species that all species relied on around the UK. Since the herring got fished out, so the salmon, which come into the ocean as little things, themselves become prey.

“It’s that cycle that gets upset when one species is taken out of the ecosystem.

Further north, outside the town of Bonar Bridge, Andrew Graham-Stewart stands on a bridge surveying a stream.

“We’ve got a real problem happening at sea,” says Graham-Stewart, who is the director of the Wildfish Scotland charity and has fished the local waters since he was a boy.

“Climate change is obviously the primary factor. But when fish go out to sea, they are clearly not finding all the food they need.”

One factor is the loss of trees around the headwaters of Scottish rivers. –