to put him at odds with this, then the telephones ring, news editors get busy and a view that was originally aimed at an angling audience alone hits several million breakfast tables overnight.
This is why, whatever concerns might exist in angling’s media about creatures other than fish – and concerns do arise from time to time – a cautious and measured response is wisest. The temptation to rant to readers for the sake of short-term impact, needs to be tempered with a realisation that outside eyes will be watching and that long-term damage might ensue.
We have seen it over the years with swans and otters– and with cormorants in particular. All three, at one level or another, can have an impact on our sport but the article that begins with pointing this out, that moves on to an indignant ‘something should be done about it’ (always, note, by someone else) and that then demands that populations of whatever it is be controlled, is destined to become ‘Anglers demand cull of swans/otters/cormorants/ babies/old people/the halt and the lame’, or whatever.
It is then that the perceived, short-term editorial satisfactions of ‘making a stand on behalf of our readers’ as fishing editors love to put it, can lead to huge and lasting damage outside angling. Then it is not swans/otters/cormorants or whatever that is most likely to end up in the dock, but angling itself.
Because of one particular incident I want to focus on cormorants, but there are a couple of points on swans and otters to be made, first.
Swans (dealt with at more length elsewhere) can create two problems when, as sometimes happens, they descend in their scores and their hundreds on a short length of water. The first is that they can make fishing, even the simple act of casting, physically impossible. The second is that they can so denude the water of the plants on which they feed that they devastate the cover and bug life on which fish depend.
Given the right of swans to exist, their grace and beauty, the affection in which the public holds them and the power of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, any approach to problem flocks has to be measured and thought out. It may well be possible to get the public to recognise the birds’ impact on fish and fisheries, but that progress will only come through education and negotiation and it will take many years to achieve.
The same principle applies to otters, which have made a dramatic recovery after numbers collapsed in the second half of the 20th century. This recovery has been stimulated by the release into the wild of artificially reared cubs over a period of years. Through natural breeding and because there is so much virgin territory to be reoccupied, numbers have gone up significantly.
Otters eat fish, but they also have huge territories and so the impact on a given section of a river is likely to be small. It is a different story on lakes, especially if an otter occupies a holt near a commercial stillwater fishery stocked with carp and rears her cubs there. Then, significant numbers of carp – some of them costing thousands of pounds apiece – may be taken, the quality of fishing is likely to decline and the owner’s livelihood may well be threatened. The answer is not for anglers and editors to demand impotently that ‘something be done’ (as some have) but for us all to recognise that the otter, like the swan, is an iconic species much loved by the public and that, if push ever came to shove, the public would unhesitatingly back otters against smelly old fish and those who support them.
The only sensible course of action for anyone concerned for fish and fishing is to accept that the otter is here to stay – I, for one, am delighted about it – and for fishery owners to take whatever steps they can to protect their waters. If fencing and the like cannot be afforded and no public funds are forthcoming to help build them, then the loss of fish will need to be offset through the prices charged: and if the market will not stand that, then the fishery, like any other enterprise caught by changing market conditions, is likely to close. We may think that brutal but the public is likely to see it as simply a fact of life. The only safe and effective solutions to concerns about swans, otters or any other form of wildlife are ones that public opinion will support.
Enter cormorants. If anglers want to see the potential for damage that can be caused by editors getting it wrong, let them consider the impact, many years ago, of a rant against cormorants in a national angling newspaper.
In 1996 a campaign against cormorants was launched by the publication concerned. The report, over several pages, set out the damage that cormorants can do to fisheries, was headlined in huge type on the front page ‘These birds must be killed’ and was accompanied by a picture of a man crouching down with a shotgun at the ready.
The story implied that anglers were shooting cormorants on a large scale and that large numbers more needed to be shot; that organised bands of militants were roaming the countryside blasting at every black bird in sight and that many of their fellows condoned it. The whole episode was a text-book example of how not to handle an emotive issue and, not surprisingly, a national outcry resulted. Many of our fellow-conservationists rightly deplored it. Politicians of varying hues leapt on the bandwagon. Animal rights extremists whipped up the horses. The entire sport, along with its furious and hapless spokesmen, was put on the back foot.
Then the inevitable happened. The media spotlight fell onto something else and the row calmed down. But it left dreadful damage behind. Those images and headlines and that whippedup outcry had gone deep into the public psyche. In the minds of many, the image of angling as a harmless and rather dotty pursuit had been tarnished. We are continuing to live with the consequences. In a climate in which, increasingly, all creatures are seen as fellow passengers on planet earth, angling – given the demise of foxhunting – is now in the sights.
It was all so short-sighted and unnecessary. The issue is not that cormorants do great damage – there is no doubt that, locally, they do – but how best the problem might be tackled. If we are to make real progress on this, as on other sensitive issues, rants must be avoided and loudly condemned when they occur. We need to deal with the world as it exists and not as we would like it to be. We need to deal with facts. Here, in relation to cormorants, are a few.
First, there is no doubt that cormorant numbers are rising rapidly. By the year 2000 it was estimated that there were up to half a million birds in Europe, of which around 15,000 nested in Britain, many of them inland. This indigenous population was even then being steadily supplemented by an influx of birds from the mainland. These incomers boosted the number of birds overwintering here to around 25,000. Around 10,000 of these birds wintered inland and it was recognised that even birds living on the coasts will fly many miles inland to find food. Cormorant numbers have gone on rising ever since. There are single colonies of many hundred of birds close to some of our biggest lakes.
A range of factors is likely to be involved in this population growth. The first is that the free control of cormorants was banned under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, a piece of uk legislation giving effect to the European Union’s Birds Directive. Other factors include the fishing-out by commercial boats of inshore waters where cormorants would normally hunt; the creation of more and more self-stocking reservoirs and lakes as a result of gravel extraction and the like; a growth in the numbers of waters artificially stocked with trout both for food and for sport; a growth in the numbers of heavily stocked commercial coarse fisheries and a reduction in poisons like ddt in the food chain which, in the past, have kept cormorant numbers down.
What has it all meant for anglers? It has given us two problems. The first is the sheer tonnage of fish that cormorants eat. The second is the vast number of fish that the birds injure and kill but do not eat.
At the most conservative estimate (conservative estimates are best because exaggeration simply undermines our case) the average cormorant eats 1lb of fish a day, which means that in a year six birds will eat one ton, 600 birds will eat 100 tons, 6,000 birds will eat 1,000 tons. While grossing up figures gives staggering totals, the net impact of this predation is not easy to calculate, not least because no-one
