Salmon and the Wye

Those of you who have followed my blogs and the general theme of what I’ve been pursuing over the last few weeks will have seen clearly the problem that I have been playing around with. This will be my own last word on the subject, I promise you, where I’ll lay all my thoughts bare. The question is whether the River Wye should be restocked with salmon or whether habitat improvement is, in itself, enough of a solution.

Let me make it clear at once, I come down personally on neither one side nor the other. I hear both arguments and I personally am not scientific enough to make any definitive pronouncement. However…

• I admire the Wye and Usk Foundation totally and think the work that they are doing is absolutely excellent. In Simon and Seth, the Foundation is fortunate enough to have two hard-working, very far-sighted men who are doing great things. And of course, the Foundation follows all the good practice of the moment. I think it is fair to say that most fishery scientists believe hugely in the importance of habitat improvement and that this is paramount. Get the river right and the fish will flourish. It’s no point stocking fish into a river that isn’t ripe to entertain them. Faultless.

• If we look at the work of the Wild Trout Trust, this type of initiative seems to work well. Even on my own Norfolk chalkstreams, the increase in wild brown trout is very apparent after work has been done on riffles and spawning beds. Roach are dear to my heart. I believe the same sort of thing is happening down on stretches of the River Avon where the river is being put back to what it once was and the roach are returning. Proof perfect of the Foundation’s stance it would appear.

• However, it might be that salmon face different pressures. After all, they are extremely migratory in a way that wild browns (very often) and roach (never) are. A salmon, born in the upper reaches of the River Wye, before it comes back to spawn and die in a few years time will have travelled thousands of miles and faced awesome predators – not least man. That any salmon return to the Wye is an almost unbelievable miracle. It’s not quite the same for a wild trout in the comparatively placid reaches of the upper Wensum.

• Mike Taylor is the owner of the Red Lion Hotel in Bredwardine on the middle Wye. He’s salmon fished the river for well over thirty years and is largely representative of what a lot of opinion thinks out there on the riverbank as it were. Mike appreciates the work of the Foundation hugely but he compares what they are doing in repairing the headwaters of the Wye to what he might be doing in his own hotel. “It wouldn’t be any use at all me building more and more rooms onto my hotel unless I had the guests to fill them. First of all you get the guests and then you build the rooms. It’s exactly the same with the Wye and salmon. There’s no point preparing miles of headwaters for salmon to spawn if there simply aren’t enough salmon to take up the redds.”

• So, it seems that a lot of interested parties along the Wye would like to see some measure of stocking. The argument that this might interfere with the genetic purity of Wye salmon has been criticised. For example, many Wye salmon were stocked from Germany in the first place. Anglers, in truth, don’t care where their salmon come from or how pure they are providing they are big, wild, silver and abundant. And also, as Mike Taylor pointed out, the Wye has physically changed as a river over the last thirty or forty years. It is now much more of a typical spate river and perhaps a different strain of salmon is required to cope with these different conditions.

• A lot of observers that I questioned pointed out that stocking has done wonders for other rivers. The Tyne in particular is an oft-quoted example of a minor miracle. Can’t help thinking, too, about the work that Peter Mantel has done at Delphi.

Perhaps I’m too black and white on the views of the Foundation. I’d like to think this is a great opportunity for the boys to kick there ideas around. If I have a view, it’s probably that the Foundation’s work is the most vital of all and, in truth, I’m probably seeing more salmon now in 2007 than I would have done in, say, 1997. However, perhaps some salmon could or should actually be restocked. The science of stocking has advanced considerably in recent years and perhaps this could be utilised to minimise the ill effects of stocking a river. It is an intriguing conundrum. The good thing here is that everyone really is singing from the same song sheet. Everybody wants to see Wye salmon flourish once again. As far as I can see, everyone in the picture is incredibly well-meaning and sincere. These are all solid foundations upon which to build.