that the birds will get their food from the easiest places (most likely small, heavily stocked waters of the kind anglers have created); and what we know is that the damage comes in the particular, not the general – that is, that the damage done to individual fisheries, whatever is happening to fisheries at large, can be dire.
But that is only part of it. While natural mortalities in fish stocks, spawning failures, predation by other creatures and the like all have to go into the negative mix, so do all those fish not eaten but fatally injured by cormorants. When hunting, cormorants often behave like pack animals or sharks: they seem to go into a feeding frenzy. Then, anglers’ concerns become even more clear. Cormorants have large, sharp, hooked bills and will chase most fish that swim, other than the very largest. The injuries they inflict are quite unmistakable – lines across the sides of a fish showing where the bill has taken hold and one or more short, deep slashes, usually in the belly, where the bill hook has gone in. Fish injured in this way but not eaten, are likely to die quickly from their injuries or to die later from disease.
I can speak of it all personally. For some seasons, many of the fish I have been catching from my local river have shown signs of cormorant damage. I have caught many trout weighing around 3lbs that have had cormorant wounds across their flanks, indicating that they had been attacked by birds even though the birds could not cope with their size. One of the biggest grayling I have ever caught – it came from a stream so small and overgrown I cannot imagine how a cormorant got into it – weighed 2lbs 13oz and had cormorant marks across its sides. On another river I found a 6lbs salmon kelt dying in the margins, with cormorant slashes deep in its gut. A fish farmer I know was able to walk right up to one bird because it had so gorged on small trout that it could not take off.
Many a regular angler has similar stories to tell. There is no doubt that cormorants are not just one more big bird. In large numbers they are an obvious menace to waters within flying distance, whatever statistical evidence might currently be lacking.
Politics, however, is the art of the possible. If the birds cannot be fully controlled – and under both British and European law they cannot – then anglers and those who represent them must make the best use of circumstances as they stand. This is what angling’s representative bodies have been doing, with some limited success. Thanks to their efforts, where significant damage to a fishery can be proven, a licence to shoot a small number of birds as a means of scaring away others (albeit only to make them fly to someone else’s water nearby) can now be obtained.
To gain further concessions will take a steady accumulation of credible case histories, wider research (when did researchers ever recommend less?), bridge-building with other conservation groups, reasoned explanation of our concerns to them, to the public and to the politicians who hold the levers of power and, not least, education of the angling community itself.
An important part of this effort must be to win public recognition of the fact that our environment needs to be seen in the round. Specifically, we need acknowledgement of two points. The first is that, of necessity, we have created on our island a landscape that is wholly artificial – and hence everything within it needs to be managed to maintain balances that, for better or worse, we have long since upset in our search for food, shelter and diversion. The second is conscious acknowledgment that, although they may not be as cuddly or as photogenic as their furred and feathered friends, fish are a part in our wildlife heritage and have a place in that wider equation, too.
In the meantime, any relief from cormorants that can be achieved – tweaks to legislation here, alleviations there – are likely to fall short of what anglers would like to see. High bird numbers, and the problems that come with them, are here for years to come.
They will be around longer – and maybe longer than angling itself – if the hotheads have their way.
I READ somewhere that more books have been written about angling than about any other subject except mathematics. I have no idea who made the calculation, but it was probably a mathematician – and not a very good one, at that.
Even so, there are many thousands of angling books in print and they have come in all guises: factual books, fishing guides and diaries, reminiscences, anthologies like this. A few, among the very best, break new ground – not an easy thing to do in this ancient sport. Others, also among the best, have a literary quality that makes them timeless. Lots, alas, add only to the word mountain.
I WAS fishing with one of my closest friends, a man who, because of his many excellent books and articles, has become a household name in the fly-fishing world. We fell to talking about the tide of angling literature – the hundreds of books, the thousands – that has been published since Dame Juliana Berners gave us the first work on angling in English, in 1496.
My friend and I were as one. We agreed that while there had been works of technical brilliance over the years, and many sublimely written texts, vast numbers of books had contributed nothing, at great length. ‘In fact’, I said, ‘it would be interesting to go the other way, as an exercise – to see how much information you could squeeze into the fewest possible words.’ A light bulb pinged in my head. ‘Actually, the really essential things about angling can be very simply stated. I think I’ll write a new book, myself. It will be called All you Really Need to Know about Fly-fishing. It will be about seven pages long.’
My friend’s stride faltered and his jaw dropped. ‘Blimey’, he said, somehow conveying that his entire past life – all those books, all those articles – was passing before his eyes, ‘you can’t do that, you’ll put me out of business.’
It was a joke, of course, but for all that, the essentials of fly fishing would consume very few trees. I once tried to squeeze quite a few of them into a reply to the youngest reader of The Times to have written to me up to that point. Peter was 13. He enjoyed coarse fishing but, on a holiday in Wales, had seen someone catch a grayling on a dry fly and had been fascinated. His father had suggested he write to me. What exactly was dry fly fishing and how could he get started?
Here, more or less, is what I told him.
Dry fly fishing is a way of catching fish – mostly trout or grayling, but plenty of other species as well – on imitations of the kinds of natural flies they are accustomed to taking from the surface.
To do it, I told Peter, he would be best off with a fly-rod about 9ft long, rated what is called aftm-6. He would need an aftm-6, double-tapered, floating flyline to use with it and a reel to put the line on. This outfit would do the job he wanted and be versatile enough for lots of other fishing as well. He should persuade his father to buy him a couple of lessons with a professional fly-casting instructor. The instructor would teach him how to cast correctly and practice would take care of distance and accuracy. He would also be shown how to do fiddly things like joining a nylon ‘leader’ to the line and a fly to the leader. He would be using only one fly at a time and it would be treated to float. At the water, the aim would be to get that fly to the surface in front of a targeted, rising fish, in a natural and unalarming way.
When Peter approached a river, I said, it should be in the knowledge that a fish is a wild and wary thing, easily ‘put down’. What is more, he should know that in a river fish have to face the flow and so, when they are hungry, they look upstream for the flies and bugs the current brings downstream towards them.
What did all of this mean? It meant that he should avoid alerting the fish to his presence either by the way he dressed or the way he moved and that the best approach to a fish looking upstream was from downstream – from its blind side.
On the
