IS IT TOO LATE TO SAVE OUR SALM ON?
As the icon worth £80m to the rural economy vanishes at an alarming rate from Scottish rivers, a passionate plea from an entrepreneur (and devoted angler) who asks...
TEVERY Scottish river is officially classified into one of three categories each year in terms of catches, fishes per female and so on, to assess its overall health. Cat1 means it is ecologically sound; Cat2 is a warning to be careful; and Cat3 means the river is no longer sustainable and you are not allowed to kill any fish in it.
Cat3 was originally marked in blue but was changed to grey shading after people commented that the whole of the West Coast was a big mass of blue.
Coincidentally, that covers the area where most of Scotland’s 240-plus fish farms are based and while there is widespread belief that fish farms have contributed significantly to the demise of wild salmon, it is not the whole story.
We may not have any Cat3s on the East Coast rivers yet, but the crisis facing our industry may yet end up devastating an entire way of life in parts of the Highlands.
We are busy with guests from January 15 until the season ends on October 15. There are 22 rooms at the Meikleour Arms and six in the main house.
On a typical day during this time, perhaps only three rooms will not be filled with fishingrelated guests. But without fishing, I wonder where I will find customers to fill the rooms on weekdays?
Visitors often have a high disposable income. Many are men
who come with their wives, who go shopping or visit local museums and castles.
We employ up to 25 people full-time, including ghillies who can offer everything from vital knowledge to seasoned anglers to fly-fishing lessons to complete novices. Local cooks and cleaners will come in to look after guests in our self-catering luxury accommodation. And let’s not forget the local tackle shop and other businesses.
One recent customer forgot his rod and technical jacket and spent £600 on new ones. That is a lot to a small independent shop – the value of fishing ripples out into the wider community.
Salmon are born in rivers like the Tay and spend the first two or three years there and become smolts, a juvenile fish about the size of a big sardine.
At this age, they start descending the river to the sea, following a mysterious path across the North Atlantic to Greenland, staying there for up to three winters.
Recently, they have stayed away longer. Far fewer have made it back to their spawning grounds in our rivers.
Their journey was always a precarious one, with many salmon falling prey to netsmen and predators (seals and piscivorous birds) then hydro projects and lately, they have faced additional perils, not the least of which is Scotland’s farmed fish industry. Angling is worth around £80million a year alone to Scottish business and sustains 4,300 full-time jobs nationally.
The Scottish Salmon Producers Association is keen to point out these figures are dwarfed by a recent study it commissioned: Scotland’s salmon industry generated more than £1billion turnover last year and an economic impact potentially greater.
The figure £1billion sounds big, but the gross value added is a more modest £365million and the sector only employs 2,300 people.
Salmon fish farms and fish feed manufacturers are mostly owned by Scandinavian firms and, of course, foreign investment is hugely important. However, more needs to be done to ensure that Scotland’s wildlife does not pick up the ecological bill year after year.
But while the fish farms’ growing financial clout cannot be denied, concerns are also
rising about the damage they inflict on the marine environment.
Hundreds of thousands of these essentially domesticated fish have escaped over the years from farms and, through interbreeding, threaten the genetic diversity and survival of our native species.
Their potentially lethal farm-bred diseases and infestations of sea lice could deplete their wild cousins’ falling numbers.
IN Scotland, we have opencaged farming which means that all the waste falls to the seabed and that includes all the chemicals, such as hydrogen peroxide and pesticides that are used to treat fish infections.
As the cages are usually sited at the mouths of estuaries where water flow is optimal, it means smolts heading out to the sea have to cross this dirty water to reach open waters. If you are a big 15lb fish and you have ten to 20 sea lice on you, you will probably survive, but if you are the size of a sardine
the lice will suck the life from you and some baby salmon die before they start their journey to the sea.
A recent scientific study on the sea lice problem claimed that in areas where farms had suffered outbreaks of the disease, lice could directly cause the mortality of up to 50 per cent of all migrating sea trout smolts and up to 86 per cent of all wild salmon smolts.
There are other problems. In the last 20 years, there is no question that the aquaculture industry has scooped up a lot of the wild fish species lower down the food chain, like anchovies, sand eels, and krill, in order to feed their larger, carnivorous farmed species.
It can take up to five pounds of meal made from these smaller fish to produce one pound of a fish like salmon. Wild salmon also rely on these smaller fish – it is the krill, tiny shrimps, that give salmon its natural pinkish colour – and overfishing is having repercussions throughout the ocean ecosystem.
How can we allow this kind of thing to happen? In Norway, for example, farmed salmon are kept either in closed tank systems so there is no leakage into the wild or, if they are farmed in estuary waters there are very strict rules on cleaning to minimise pollution of the natural environment and they are not allowed to pollute the seabed or they face huge fines.
Conservationists do accept, though, that fish farms are not solely to blame for declining salmon. The main problem is at sea and climate change too.
The sea has always been a dangerous place but there are more predators than before, including many more seals since they became a protected species but seals eat salmon and that’s nature.
Also, the mackerel population in the North Atlantic has exploded and that is probably due to warming water temperatures as this species moves further north.
Traditionally, Scotland didn’t have any mackerel fisheries, it was all in Cornwall, but they are everywhere in Scottish waters now. It is a new danger for salmon heading to their feeding grounds as mackerel trawlers tend to scoop them up along with the mackerel in their nets. There is some early scientific evidence that mackerel not only compete with the young salmon for food but will feed on them.
We have noticed changes in weather patterns here in Perthshire too, especially since 2014. We had an unusually dry, hot autumn and catches were down that September.
There was concern that 2015 would be poor but we still managed a good spring – we had fewer fish but they were bigger because they had stayed away at sea for longer.
Water levels have been lower in recent years – we used to have snow on the hills and the spring snowmelt would be fantastic for the health of the river. Apart from last year’s freakish Beast from the East, the last time we had proper snow was in 2010.
When the river is very low, it is better not to fish during the warm hours of the day as fish are stressed. If fish are stressed, they don’t move and won’t take a lure.
In the 1950s, hydro-electric power was needed to help rebuild the UK’s broken post-war economy and large dams were built on the East Coast rivers.
Landowners used the compensation they received to build hatcheries and fish ladders to ensure the salmon’s survival.
Sometimes you can see cormorants on a fish ladder stand waiting for a fish to pop in.
ALL this is a far cry from the days of abundance when line fishing and netting were permitted all year round and Scottish estates would have rules stating staff should not be fed salmon more than four times a week. On the Meikleour Estates, the first record of netting rights dates back to the 14th century.
The acceleration of greed began with Victorian advancements in refrigeration and canning technology with ice houses set up all along the banks of the Tay, which meant salmon could be transported and appear year-round on the tables of London’s top restaurants.
Now, we have a choice to make, between greed and conservation.
My husband inherited farms from his grandfather and we embarked on a vision to develop green tourism, including angling that conserved the salmon stocks.
We brought the Meikleour Arms back into the estate’s ownership while netting ceased in the early 2000s. We implement a 100 per cent catch and release policy for rod fishing throughout the season and operate a Release A Pint scheme which rewards customers who release their fish with a pint of our The Lure of Meikleour ale.
For those who fish, there is always a strong pull to the waters here. In the past, I would often go down and cast with a piece of wool for a fly, idly wondering how many fish were passing my line.
Suddenly, that thought has never seemed more in need of an answer.