rivers for 60 million years. In that immense time it has developed local strains to adapt to local conditions. Then the last Ice Age ended, with a thaw that peeled back the ice-covered land over all Britain north of London. A mere 15,000 years separates us from the frigid conditions that dominated before. In cosmic terms it is a blink in time. Salmon saw pristine territory opening up in front of them, and occupied it.
Rivers in Scotland have plenty in common with other rivers in salmon range. They are spring-fed. These springs can come from hundreds of feet below ground and each one has a differing chemical composition. Also, the springs bubble from the ground loaded with different temperature readings, dependent on their depth.
Variations between springs account for differing populations of salmon. For the scent in each stream, and the mineral contents, differs from that of its neighbour. Salmon have brilliant olfactory senses, being able to pick out the most dilute odours from home-stream chemistry even through a fog of additives and man-made complexities. The fish’s ancestors have used that water and over time adapted to it.
Sometimes that adaptation will translate into an identifiable genetic type. SALSEA went to sea armed in advance with the genetic map of many rivers. The researchers were hunting smolts, young salmon entering an alien saltwater world pregnant with feeding and with threat. What galvanised researchers to go to all this effort? The answer to that question is both simple and complex. At the simple level, it is because the salmon is important enough to justify it – it is a glittering symbol of environmental wellbeing. The complex answer backtracks in time.
In the 1960s European rivers had seen prodigious runs of salmon. The silver bonanza from the spring tides re-ran the programme of fresh shoals arriving through the year and it seemed as certain as the sun dropping in the west that from the start of spring these great leaping, wild, sparkling fish would go on and on revitalising rivers which had gone doggo for the winter.
Then a decline commenced. Fewer and fewer salmon came back in the 1980s, and then the 1990s. The canaries in the mine, or anglers, found their enticing presentations drifting across the stream undisturbed. Nothing jumped. Nothing swirled at the fly. The waters rolled to sea unruffled. The rivers missed their most dramatic occupant.
A few rivers had installed fish counters, usually consisting of electronic beams broken by an upstream-swimming fish, and these counters, logged by computer, were telling an alarming story which backed up the anglers’ perceptions of fewer silver visitors.
It was estimated that in the 1960s and 1970s the population of salmon in the eastern Atlantic was around eight to ten million fish. In America and Canada, where many rivers had been dammed, where forest clearance in river-country had silted up river-beds and traumatised ecosystems, there is another story of dwindling fish, but we will revisit that side of the tale later.
The decline from abundance was giving rise to serious worry.
In places where smolt survival was being measured, such as at Scotland’s North Esk government monitoring station, and the Bush and Burrishoole system in Ireland, young sea-going smolts had once returned as salmon in numbers approaching 15 per cent of the outgoing migration. This figure was falling and falling steadily. It fell to eight and then as low as five per cent. On the River Conon in the northern Scottish Highlands, where they can measure these things, the return rate of smolts in 2011 was four per cent. In some rivers the number will be even less.
For anadromous fish, which live at sea and breed in freshwater rivers, this figure was low – very low. It told scientists that ocean-wide changes were occurring. Somewhere out there a black hole was consuming the small silver fish that used to fatten in the larder of the north-east Atlantic, before returning to their birthplaces in the pebbly streams. In some American rivers spawning pairs were down to a handful of pairs, a chilling brush with death equal to a doomed scenario.
The most obvious subtractions from salmon runs were then looked at and addressed. Salmon netting, which was recorded as having been prosecuted in some parts of the UK and Europe since the twelfth century, was an obvious target. Here was an industrial-scale subtraction, taking fish before they could breed. Furthermore, it violated one of the tenets of modern fisheries management – that you must know what stock of fish you are taking.
Netsmen took salmon offshore as they migrated past. No one had a clear idea which rivers they were due to swim into. A salmon in the net was a salmon in the net; they all looked much the same. They fetched the same price, too. Logic demanded that random salmon capture cease. On the back of the idea that netting was ‘indiscriminate’, harvesting individuals valuable to species survival alongside those from more numerous components of the migration, appeals were launched to save salmon by buying out or leasing netting stations. Many were laid off and mothballed and bought out. In Scotland alone the catch by nets was ratcheted down from around 100,000 salmon a year in 1990 to 13,000 twenty years later.
Salmon netting still exists in a few places in 2013. Norway remains unreconstructed about salmon netting. Scotland has a handful of active netting-stations, resistant to being bought off and encouraged by rising wild salmon prices, England even fewer. The Norwegian Saami people from the far north, with precious little to sustain them, still net salmon on the Arctic coast. In a conservation milestone for salmon, Iceland terminated netting at sea as far back as 1932. Pressed by the European Union, the west-coast Irish drift nets were outlawed in 2007.
The most important salmon-netting haul in modern times was taken off Greenland. It commenced in 1959 when gill-netters working the fjords were startled to find glittering salmon in the mesh. A boom in salmon commenced, which pulled in drift-net fishers close to Greenland’s western shore from Denmark, the Faroes and Norway. The working season was August to October, with the winter iced over. Catches rocketed, peaking at 2,689 tons in 1971. All of a sudden salmon, which are a rare fish in the sea, were being caught like mother cod, which can lay millions of eggs. The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) reckoned the Greenland operation in winter 1972 had removed a third of all the salmon locally present. As more attention was paid to what exactly was being caught the fish were traced to the east coast of America and Canada and, secondly, older female salmon from Scotland.
Something had to be done. The solution was devised by an Icelander called Orri Vigfusson, who is now a household name in salmon conservation. A partner in a herring fishing family that hit hard times when herring runs shifted, Vigfusson was familiar with the vagaries of fishing. Basically in sympathy with remote communities eking out precarious existences, Vigfusson saw that in order to endure the solution had to be fair. An international arm was needed to lend support and the quotas discussed at the negotiating table were assembled by the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organisation (NASCO), a multi-member body formed in 1984.
Encouraging alternative fisheries for the Greenlanders, and with striking success raising money all across salmon range, Vigfusson made his breakthrough leasing arrangement in 1993. The Greenlanders were not sold down the river – far from it. Their argument that the salmon fattened off their coast was accepted. The payment could be seen as a grazing fee. They were paid to abstain from their rightful fishery, beyond a small permitted tonnage for ‘subsistence’. No salmon could be exported.
The agreements have had to be regularly renewed and reassessed, a lack of finality seen by their critics as a weakness. There have been teething troubles. Greenlanders with limited opportunities for economic activity have exceeded quotas. Annual payments have been withdrawn, and then reinstated when malpractices have been straightened out. The way may have been tortuous, but it has succeeded.
A similar arrangement was reached with the Faroe Islanders, who had been shown how to catch salmon on baited long lines by Danish fishermen from the island of Bornholm who had perfected this art in the Baltic. By 1991 Vigfusson had clinched an agreement with the Faroese, made easier because the Icelandic government already had fisheries access arrangements to their seas with their closest neighbours. The Faroese were the only foreign fishermen allowed to catch Icelandic fish.
Vigfusson had shown how to raise money for salmon protection and how to broker international agreements on a new basis. Tirelessly he had circuited the salmon world, flying from one event to the next, rattling in buses round the bumpy roads on the Greenland coast, meeting one fishing community