A STEP TOO FAR

Salmon fishing conservation grades are turning a slump into a crisis

It is the season for conservation grades. The Scottish Government decides what rivers once decided for themselves – how many fish go back. Or, how many wild salmon will be eaten in Scotland next year. It excites keen interest.

Marine Scotland is putting the screw on salmon being caught and eaten. Thousands of anglers will be expected to fish in salmon rivers for the express purpose of hooking, landing and putting back again the fish they outwitted. Quite simply, to many it does not make sense.

This is the scale of the restrictions. Category One rivers, where management boards are unfettered and most fish may be killed, have declined by 26 to just 21. Category Two rivers, which must demonstrate active conservation though a few fish may be killed, have shrunk to 27, down from 48. There are now 123 Category Three rivers – those deemed so perilously understocked that killing any fish is prohibited.

All the Category Three rivers will struggle to attract fishermen. Their rod catches, cornerstones of the calculation, will spiral down. Their days of providing sport-to-eat are fading.

Conservation assessments hang on catch records. High catches indicate good river health. So returns submitted to Marine Scotland fundamentally influence next year’s grades. In time this will undermine the accuracy of official catches. When boosting catches boosts the chances of being allowed to eat fresh salmon, frustrated anglers may report imaginary fish.

To many, grading seems unscientific and sometimes arbitrary. On publication in October grades are out-of-date, ignoring catches in the present season. A river with a magnificent run may be saddled with grades based on a previous poor year. And rules are not enforced by the police but by those same privately-employed river bailiffs t he wild fisheries bill wanted stripped of power.

The process of grading measures the ‘wetted area’ of rivers and extrapolates a figure for how many salmon should be there. But salmon do not occupy wetted areas; they occupy running water which sustains them till spawning. The wetted area concept produces higher populations of salmon than actually exist. It follows that rod catches make river populations look worse than they are. Gradings are intrinsically too severe.

Today’sprevailingpublicsentimentistowards restraint and respect, an acknowledgement that being somehow connected to this prize fish is a privilege. When the first leaping salmon is spied, the spring brightens for many country dwellers. The wondrous migration has started, to be followed by the migration of anglers.

In attempting to legislate in this area the authorities are dealing with some delicate, deep, and complex thoughts and feelings.

The wrong signals are emanating. If there are only 48 rivers out of 218 in which salmon may be killed and eaten next year the message is that most rivers are officially failing, in fact in crisis. Outside the West Coast, which is swarming with sea lice, this is highly unlikely to be true.

The downside can be small and faraway communities which benefit economically to an abnormal degree from angling visitors finding their summer shrunk and unenlivened by the few tourists who are happy in the rain. The entire summertime tempo winds down.

Rural governance is mandated to consider the socio-economic effects of policymaking. River conservation grading has been shuffled off-centre, to an abstract zone of impenetrable mathematics posited on non-biological theory, where those qualified to assess the methodologies are often in sharp disagreement. Community health, and insider river knowledge, living realities, are sidelined. It brings one back to the beginning – why was government confident enough of its wisdom to take over what had worked adequately under local control for so long?

‘ Marine Scotland is putting the screw on salmon being caught and eaten’