SPRING FEVER

After a bleak winter and plenty snow, anglers are enjoying idyllic early season conditions, and for Michael Wigan it is the opportune time to observe the patterns of salmon, kelts and ova and their fight for survival

A bleak, snowy winter means ideal conditions for early season anglers, and Michael Wigan is keen to take to the water

The mountain tops and the shoulders are a dazzle of uninterrupted white, flashing in the sun. There are no black corries or dark shelves or steep faces, everything is white. That means deep snow high up.

It’s what an early season angler wants to see. Deep snow high up means water stored for spring fishing. Because the snow is old it is now a crust of congealed crystals and melts slower. If rain, wind, and sun come – and they will – the crust takes longer to melt. Water is stored for the eager spring salmon treading water in the estuary, awaiting the familiar scent of home. The peatland is frozen rock-hard for several feet, promising steady water release. Ice, more stored water, on thousands of acres of hundreds of lochs is many inches thick. Everything looks good.

Kelts roll seawards. The few anglers gingerly tread the frozen land. Standing well back from the brittle ice shelves along banks, they catch occasional kelts. Every season there are stories of ‘well-mended’ kelts, silvery and bright, recognisably left over from last year’s spawning only from their ragged gills and in-drawn stomachs. How these fish become silver again despite not eating is unknown.

Other occupants of the river are the ova. By early February they are ‘eyed-up’. A black dot in the corner of the egg denotes a nascent eye. Expectant mothers getting baby scans are familiar with the signs — though they wouldn’t want to see tails on their embryos.

Salmon eggs have been buried in the gravel since November. Threats exist. If there is a thunderous spate, and gravels are rolled, the eggs risk being washed out and deposited on drying land. Marooned on stones, frost turns the black eye white.

Eggs are lifelines for hungry winter-thinned predators of different kinds. Rolled from their protective redds salmon eggs are protein parcels for trout, and for sawbill ducks like mergansers and goosanders. These river pirates have backward-facing teeth. The slipperiest titbits are locked in a snap-trap. Sawbills throw their throats back to juggle gullets full of salmon eggs, overspilling ova cascading below.

Amazingly, in this boreal landscape one small bird persists, the dipper. The white-chested maroon rockhopper is still there in minus whatever, bobbing up and down. This modest-looking bird actually flies underwater, walking the bottom and using his wings to propel him forward, against the current. Usually he eats freshwater invertebrates. Now, he is after ova. He walks the bottom, flicking over stones, hunting ova. Shallow-buried salmon eggs are vulnerable. The dipper is the early season salmon hunter.

The loch has been frozen side to side for nearly two months. The moor is iron-hard. Seeps and springs become apparent. Upwellings are darkened patches in the ice-scape, green under the snow. They bubble up from new places each year. These seepages are the life-blood of low rivers in parched summers. Some bring out deep-ground copper deposits and show as red holes. Multiple trickles accumulating in a river catchment provide the water cover for salmon eggs, and for the invertebrates which later become food for young growing salmon.

I hear cries of mobbing birds. Above is a sea eagle, vulturine head protruding, barn-door wings slowly flapping. A squad of ravens is diving and twisting to discomfit the mighty scavenger. Flowing water has a use for the sea eagle too. He lands on a river-bend, standing knee-high. Ravens don’t like wet feet. They flap off croaking. Crowddispersal, sea eagle style.

The same aversion to wet feet is evident when gulls are tugging spent or exposed salmon from shallow water. Ravens attend on the shingle behind. When the gulls back out of the water with the fish the ravens hop over for their apportionment.

Roderick Haig-Brown, the Canadian judge and salmon fisherman, living beside a river was inspired to write, ‘A River Never Sleeps’.

Time for another look.

“Rolled from their protective redds, salmon eggs are protein parcels for trout