The Secret Angler

Some years ago at one of the periodic riverfly conferences, the late Peter Lapsley wondered when something would get done with all the fly survey data collected. He couldn’t see much point for volunteers to spend hours sampling rivers and conferences to talk all about it unless something useful was going to come of it. The Riverfly Partnership coordinates all this now; whether they are doing something useful is a matter for discussion, but that deserves a post of its own.

Get togethers for long-winded and possibly ineffectual chinwags on the state of trout rivers are fairly widespread these days. The latest grandly billed  itself as the first UK River Summit, overlooking the many more modestly titled ones held over the years — I’ve even been to one or two myself. Unpromisingly it was organised by a PR firm, the head of which happens to go fishing. Whether the speakers, which included someone from the Angling Trust, Wildfish and Fish Legal, had anything fresh to say will have to wait until the proceedings are published, if indeed they are. No doubt they will have enjoyed their ‘wild food riverside lunch’ — ‘I must be fed’. Not wild trout I trust.

More promising was ‘Owned by everyone? The wonder, plight and future of chalk streams’, hosted by The Cambridge Conservation Initiative. Anglers like a bit of nostalgia and romance, which is perhaps why this talking shop began with a bit of Ted Hughes, his poetry and fishing life and general hand-wringing for what we’ve lost even in the few years since his death. This was followed by the state of the chalk streams, lots of nice pictures followed by dry river beds and a slide on the cheapness of water. Yep, we use too much, therefore.

To relieve the academic stuff, there are presentations on fish filming and drawing, but none of these is going to restore the rivers. Within the lengthy talks — I haven’t listened to them all the way through — there are interesting observations and information amongst the painting and poetry, but much of it we already know. We know the chalk streams and all British rivers are polluted by agriculture and sewage discharge. We know they are heavily abstracted. So we know what to do, as Charles Rangeley-Wilson notes to his credit. He is the person who has embarked on the novel project to restore the River Nar to something like its original state. He is a fan of strategies for environment restoration because that is the way to do things most efficiently. That is true, yet we know that, for example, water metering will reduce water usage by about 20%, investment by water companies will save water and stop sewage discharges.

Rangeley-Wilson thinks it can be done. It can, but political will is needed, and while we are preparing strategies and holding talking shops, things are steadily getting worse.

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Trout & Salmon magazine likes to give space to opinion writers, which often amounts to free advertising for their angling businesses. Simon Cooper is one of them. He’s a middleman who rents out fishing on some of the most expensive chalkstreams in the country. This of course heavily colours much of what he writes. A few years ago he made some dubious arguments against releasing fish . The underlying reason was clearly that catch-and-release is bad for his business. Concern for the environment goes little further than that for too many people, anglers included.

This time he has got his teeth into rewilding, calling it a ‘fad’. Once again the motivation is self interest, though instead of admitting this he makes spurious links to tame dolphins and misrepresents science, then implies we should do nothing at all because it will not solve every problem with the rivers. Cooper also misrepresents rewilding. It is not, as he suggests, an attempt to return the world to biological prehistory: its purpose is to restore the environment to a self-sustaining state, a necessary condition for our own survival, never mind all the other species we’re driving to extinction.

Specifically it is the Environment Agency’s policy on stocking trout that upsets him, yet he doesn’t seem to know what that is. The policy is and has been for some time to allow stocking only with infertile triploid fish, not to ban stocking altogether. Stocking has indeed been shown to reduce fitness of wild populations, at least with the Atlantic salmon, but no one has suggested there are ‘marauding packs of slob trout’ as Cooper does in his tabloidese. The Wild Trout Trust believes that stocking may be unnecessary if habitat is nurtured so that wild trout thrive. As Cooper notes, wild trout are doing well in at least some of the chalk rivers, though they are not as tough as he thinks: they need plenty of clean, cool, well oxygenated water to thrive. He should remind himself of his earlier article which noted the prediction of rivers becoming too warm for trout as climate changes progresses. Like the tabloids, Cooper often contradicts himself.

Apart from interfering with an ecosystem, of which we do a great deal, stocking introduces artificiality into fishing, especially in rivers when stocking is not really necessary. If Cooper sees so many wild fish, why does he wish to continually supplement them? The answer is simple. It’s good business. If a punter shells out a few hundred quid for a day’s fly fishing, they expect a few fish in return, preferably a lot of fish (all knocked on the head). Happy customers are return customers. A day stalking tricky wild fish for maybe one or two caught, or none, is not something many will pay a lot for. But for some of us the difficult wild trout is preferable to half a dozen stockies caught during the mayfly without even moving from the spot.

Rewilding covers a great deal more than brown trout. It’s an important part of maintaining a habitable environment for us, for fish and all wildlife. This is no fad; there is more to fishing than Cooper’s business model. To borrow from his borrowed metaphor about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, it seems he is comfortable so long as he can sit in his deckchair while the ship goes down. I’ll bet he drives a four by four too.

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