We were happily stocking our Lathkill Strain brown trout by the thousand back then at 2+ and 3+. They were collected as eggs when the fish were running the big weirs on their way to spawn. I callled them 1st generation stockies and thought they would fit right in. They turned out to be just as bad as 50 generation stockies because they became social soon after hatching and developed without any territorial behaviour. But, business was booming and every one was happy….apart from the river and its inhabitants.
It felt great to hand back our abstraction and trade effluent consents ending over 100 years of fish farming at Haddon while all the time knowing there was no going back. Have a look at this...
Going Wild
I’d heard the rumours, I’d spoken to the experts but as I settle into the fork of an Oak tree, 30 ft up over the River Lathkill, I wanted to see for myself. My colleague had just poured a net full of tame, pond reared brown trout, into the river downstream and we had spent an hour previous threading yellow yarn through the tips of their dorsal fins. Now I see the introductions with their indicator fins come underneath and turn under a weir. They are traveling as a shoal and everywhere around them wild fish are lifting from their lies and hides and are being displaced into the deepest holes.
An hour and one numb leg later it dawns on me just how much damage we have just done. These perfectly suited wild brown trout, spawned in the river above, who are supremely aware of the finite balance between energy lost and food reward gained, have lost their homes. They can no longer feed with a sip here and a slight twist of the fin there for tiny parcels of riverine protein in the shape of nymphs and insects for minimum effort. The etiquette of natural life that comes with a ruthless hierarchy is lost the minute the stock fish slip over the net cord.
As the light hits the water from the east on stocking day +1 I have made my perch more comfortable with a pillow and I am looking for the fishy residents below me. During the night we have lost some fish, not the ones standing me at 210p each but the real ones, the ones who have survived where 99% of their siblings have not. Our yellow finned friends are there, in a silly line, waiting for the daily event that is the man with the feed bucket coming to feed them. Sand Eels, meant for the penguins of the South Atlantic, are sucked off the sea bed, ground to a powder and pressed into pellets for our stew pond trout. A quick phone call to the experts and it is confirmed that only three in each hundred introductions stick around through out the winter and even less of them spawn.
Hmmm, I wonder? Are we really taking non-sustainable marine protein from the south Atlantic, growing trout with it by abstracting water from river and ground to have those fish out-compete or native wild trout and then see those stockies leave themselves? But we’ve been stocking rivers from our own fish farms for 100 years! Do we really need to compound our mistake each spring by stocking virtually empty rivers with fish that make the problem worse?
A pool and riffle sequence is river talk for a fast run plunging into a hole, rising out of the hole across a wide shallow into another hole. We caught up the resident population of a mid summer river across such a section; three stock fish and two wild trout hiding under the far bank. Hardly enough to fill my hollow tooth, as granddad would say, and a poor show for such a rich food supply and excellent water quality. The ‘wildies’ went back but the others didn’t. Let’s spend our time providing habitat for our natives. Two years on with the river and its margins protected behind a buffer fence and a softly engineered new far bank to quicken the flow and boost the green Water Crowfoot and we had a paradise for trout. Our resident population in the little section now pushed forty, all native and happy to stay through the Peak District winters and spawn.
It was then time to talk to the His Lordship and present the case for extending our ‘no stock’ section to the whole lower beat of the river. The reply came and he wants his beat treated the same also, we push our luck and in one truly memorable afternoon we get the nod to close the fish farms and stop stocking the whole three river system. Two winters on and five kilometers of riverside fencing, 300 meters of living willow fence, 30 tones of spawning gravel, two bad backs, hundreds of trees planted in just the right place, deflectors, groins and loads of fun and we have the project well under way.
Boy what a change! Our team effort has paid enormous dividends. A new kingfisher brood emerges from the high earth river bank downstream…..twice through out the summer, such is the supply of fry from our wild trout.
A barn owl has returned after an absence of thirty years and she hunts the vole runs in the tall grass within the safety of our new fence. A small colony of orchids is spotted and reported by excited fishermen, who now contribute by putting the fish back. Water voles plop, bees buzz, butterflies flutter….you get the picture….sanctuary! Even the living willow rods that make up our natty new river banks need to grow somewhere and it is in this willow coppice that we get an interesting development that you wouldn’t guess straight away. The little Dunnock finds ideal nest sites within the willow crown, and what messenger of spring makes all she can of the hospitality of the Dunnock? We aren’t claiming that the rise in the number cuckoos is entirely down to us but the spiritual reward in giving your rivers intelligent river restoration and not taking from the beaks and mouths of some other precarious food chain on the other side of the world makes you believe the wealth of wild life that comes from going wild, is all for you.
The fishermen who contribute to it all are finding things far better too. There are more fish now we don’t stock and because they are returned, the fish are bigger and that monster the size of your leg under the footbridge, the one that would have been killed after making a slip up to a false may fly last year, is the target of many a happy afternoons fly fishing and I guess the foundation of many a nights dream! My ‘Rods’ are always quick to report further riverside developments and record the progress of rehabilitation in the fishing hut log. It makes interesting reading and records the nervous start to the project when all the research, planning and very hard work stood to the test. Could 100 years of river management really be that flawed? Well, yes. The repair job is successfully accomplished by nature over time, if agriculture is fenced out, but it pays to help things along by increasing the habitat for trout in the river and to tell people about it to help spread the message.
I wonder if the lives portrayed by Kenneth Grahame in ‘The Wind in the Willows’ were made possible by a thoughtful land owner and some buffer fencing.
Warren Slaney
Head River Keeper
Haddon Estate
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http://141207.blogspot.com/
http://www.haddonestate.co.uk/rivers/rivers.php
http://www.thepeacockatrowsley.com/fishing.html
Last edited by warrenslaney; 22-08-2007 at 10:14 PM.
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