Stocking, Diploids, Triploids, and Jumping fish

November 3, 2009

A slightly shorter week last week, I snuck out for half a days fishing and had a day off on the Friday.  My leave is getting slowly used up, but with salmon and trout seasons now closed there are few plans for me to take any more time off!  I ended my salmon season with 0 fish caught and 3 fish lost, two were on my half day on Tuesday, a combination of school boy error and pure bad luck.  I felt better to know that while I had lost two fish from 15:00 on, no one else on that beat had touched a thing since day break when 2 lads landed 3 between them.  I hope to change this next year and really get into the fish but we’ll see if lady luck takes a shine to me!  I hope that everyone else has fared better than me.

With Philip away (fishing no less!!) I had arranged for a day with Kyle Young, those of you who don’t know him, he is the Fisheries Technical Specialist for the EA, a very important man I might add.  He will have the say so on a lot of important fisheries works.  Thank fully every time we have met him the more we feel the trust’s work is in tune with his experience in fisheries - which is pretty vast!

We started by discussing various issues that we have with EA processes that we feel the approach by both the trust and the EA could be improved, we agreed on everything and we now hope that our consents and works will be obtained and completed faster, but I stress it’s not all EA we have some improvements to make!  After that we talked about the up coming fish passage work for 2010, Kyle’s on objection was that we didn’t look at demolition as first option, and we agreed where ever possible demolition of weir should be our first option.  The limiting factors are things such as erosion, flood risk, cost, priority of work and most importantly land owner consent!

This was then followed by a long talk about the Calder and instigating salmon stocks.  There has been much feeling that natural recolonisation would be better for the Calder within the EA.  We disagree, on three counts, water  quality is not pristine and this will have a serious impact on rates of recolonisation, not sufficient adult numbers, and the natural recolonization must get the Calder into “Good ecological Status” by 2027!  The adult numbers were “debated” but catch returns for the Calder in 2007 were low and on the decline, and last year we heard no reports of salmon at Padiham weir – and we made several visits (12 between us to be precise – If you did see some please comment below or email me), this and the deadline for recolonisation settled the debate.  Stocking will be needed, however the EA position is not until we have opened the Calder, as they do not want to see salmon banging their heads on Padiham Weir again.  This stocking program will be carefully devised with appropriate and significant numbers, as well as carefully monitoring of returning adults, juveniles and genetics.

After this we looked at another little trust project, the use of egg nest boxes.  We hope to take this forward in 2010 and incorporate it into a study on effectiveness of the boxes and fry movement.  After discussing this in the office I then took Kyle to our planned sites on the Hodder, he liked all the sites and was quite excited by the quality of the habitat, but depressed by the numbers of barriers and semi-passable barriers.  However these are all things we can work on remedying!

And if that wasn’t enough of a day on Monday, Kyle then came back to the office and we went through last years results, how we gather and analyse our data, what techniques and improvements could be employed, and I gave him a copy of last years report.   At that point we decided to go home as it was 19:30!!!

Tuesday I met Mark Rudd the Catchment Officer for the Hodder and we walked over Easington Beck, Mark wasn’t overly familiar with the beck, but we have found it to be badly under performing, so we found two locations that were in dire need of a habitat scheme, with this agreed the next step is to contact the owners and hopefully get them on board, once they have agreed we will then go about fund raising! 

Wednesday was a boring day of data entry and analysis, 8 hours of this is hard slog, we did slip out for an hour to measure up a weir in Barrowford so we could send our plans and dimensions in for Land Drainage consent.  Once back to the office I dropped the dog home and came back to the office for a meeting.  We were hosting a local region meeting on the Diploid/Triploid stocking policy being brought in by the EA.  The aim of the meeting was to get together some susinct and effective questions to be asked at a workshop on the Policy this Saturday at the Tickled Trout (This is ticket only event).  It started with a short presentation on policy formation and then science form Kyle.  Then lots of discussion, some questions were banded, but I’m not certain that any specifics were decided upon.  It was useful for me to get a good understanding of the EA position and background information.  I have a couple of niggling issues with the policy but I am not opposed to it’s introduction.  This was another late finish, 22:30 and that was with me having to point out that the room was only booked till 22:00!!  I dread to think what time it could have gone on until.

Thursday was more data analysis, nearly their now, I just have to form them into coherent tables and maps!!  In the Afternoon I showed Stephen another project I would like to see on the Hodder, the flow gauging weir on the Lower Hodder although passable does represent a barrier to all fish depending on water height.  We witnessed 7 trout and a salmon attempt the weir during an hour, only 2 trout made it, the first on it’s first attempt, the second on the tenth attempt.  Why is it important to make it more passable, every failed attempt is a loss of calories and a potential injury, this decreases the spawning fitness, they may be lucky and spawn successfully, they maybe slighty less lucky and spawn but lacking body condition the redd might be too shallow, or worst case they don’t spawn at all.  The semi-passable barriers also carry problems!!!!  It is for the above reason that Kyle asked me to plot out every known Barrier and semi-passable barrier so that we can demonstrate just how many problems there are facing our fish, and highlight the need for more money to be spent improving the river – Something that everyone who loves this catchment will agree on.

failed-attempt-good-pic-compress.jpg

A good Brown trout failing to ascend the weir

Posted by Charles Edward Poate | Filed Under General News, Restoration and Conservation Projects, Threats to the River, WFD, Working Partners 

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