Life of a Chalkstream
Life of a Chalkstream
Simon Cooper
Chalkstreams are one of the very few habitats that are nearly exclusive to England. They range far and wide from the famous River Test in Hampshire across eight other counties from Dorset in the west to Yorkshire in the north. Every river is very special in its own right.Brought up in Hampshire, Simon Cooper was lucky enough to have great fly fishing on his doorstep, but as he grew up, got a job and moved away he soon realised what a closed world chalkstreams were unless you were in the know. So with little more than a germ of an idea, a telephone and the book of his fishing contacts, he set out to change that. His passion for all things fly fishing, but in particular the chalkstreams of southern England, shines through in this lyrical and most extraordinary of journeys.We are treated to a year in the life of a chalkstream. From the remarkable spectacle of salmon, sea trout and brown trout spawning in winter, to the stunning sight of emerging water voles in spring and the budding explosion of mayflies in the early days of summer, the author describes the true wonders of life in a chalkstream in his inimitable and evocative voice. He introduces us to the fascinating diversity of life that inhabits its waters and environs – the fish, the angling community, the plant life and the wildlife. We learn how neglect threatens these inhabitants and why the fight to save and restore the chalkstreams is so vital, not only for fishermen, but for anybody who values the beauty of rural England.
COPYRIGHT (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1, London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014.
Text © Simon Cooper 2014
Illustrations © Chris Wormell 2014
Map © Liam Roberts 2014
The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover photographs © Ken Takata. Designed by Kate Gaughran.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007547869
eBook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007547876
Version: 2015-04-22
To Mary and Nigel. For endless encouragement and always being there.
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.
The Brook by Alfred Lord Tennyson
CONTENTS
Cover (#u3da7d79d-c2f0-5230-a285-6217172fbfa5)
Title Page (#u1dd98c5c-2428-5c97-a880-5151fc1cabf1)
Copyright
Dedication (#u851a5ab5-aa6d-5a39-ab87-ce95a7d812c7)
Epigraph (#u6c6bceb3-9822-5f10-aeef-f9d918609a40)
1 Discovery
2 Decline
3 Work begins
4 Spawning and the cycle of life
5 Scar Boy
6 March
7 How I held a trout for warmth
8 Mayday
9 The mayfly
10 Crayfish invasion
11 Midsummer’s Night
12 High summer
13 The English savanna
14 Cams Point
Epilogue
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
1 (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
DISCOVERY (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
FROM A DISTANCE water meadows look unkempt and uninviting, but once you get into them they have a beauty all of their own, with a myriad grasses, flowers and stunted shrubbery growing in an apparently irregular pattern. The pattern is dictated by the cattle that graze the wet pasture of the river valley.
Cattle, sheep and other livestock are the cloven-hoofed landscape gardeners that create the meadows. Without their relentless chewing, battering down the growth, fertilizing the ground and churning up the turf, the fields would soon become a dense, overgrown bramble thicket. Where they graze tight to the sod the sun and light let the buttercups thrive; cowslips spring from the nitrogen-rich manure patches and where their hoofs punch holes in the soil, the rhizomes of the yellow flag iris are split and separated to create fresh growth for the following season.
And sure enough, as I picked my way across the meadows I spied a diverse collection of cattle grazing in the distance, only their upper bodies visible above the pasture. Livestock are also great path-makers. Their sense of direction may be slightly off-kilter, and they may fail to realize that the shortest route between two points is a straight line, but they are canny and I know that if you deviate from the path they’ve trodden you will soon become stuck in boggy ground. So I followed their zigzag path across the field.
Reaching the cattle, a motley collection of brown and white Hereford crosses, black Aberdeen Angus and the pale, long-limbed, lean continental types, I paused to consult the map. The cattle paid me little interest, raising their heads now and then to check me out, but never pausing as they masticated their way through their daily mass of roughage. I’m told that meadow-grazed beef is the sweetest, most tender meat of all but it seemed unfair to share this news with them.
To my right the summer brown of the grassland gave way to a vivid green ribbon, the best indication yet that the river was close by. The dry cattle path petered out, giving way to wet ground poached by a thousand hoofs where the cattle had grazed right up to, and under, a barbed-wire fence. In fact the grass immediately under and just the other side of the fence had been grazed as tightly as a bowling green; proof that – for cattle at least – the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.
Picking the stoutest fence post, I climbed onto the top strand and from this vantage point caught my first view of a sparkling river. I was still separated from the river itself by 30 yards of rushes and as I leapt to the ground the other side I sent up two silent prayers of thanks. First, that I had had the foresight to put on waders – those 30 yards were likely to be slimy, smelly and difficult to negotiate. Second, that the river was fenced, because cattle and rivers simply do not mix. Give cattle a chance to graze right up to the edge of the river and that is what they will do. However, cattle are big, clumsy beasts that don’t mind getting their feet wet in search of that extra special, tasty mouthful. So they yomp up, down and along the edge of the river, gradually destroying the banks and vegetation.
Imagine you have a fenced river corridor that is 50 yards wide. In the middle you have 20 yards of river, a width that the river has arrived at more or less of its own accord to accommodate the variable winter and summer flows. Either side of the river lie 10 yards of semi-aquatic vegetation: plants like rushes, watercress and wild mints that like to live half in and half out of the water. This wet area is the perfect home for the insect life that will ultimately sustain a fly-fishing river. The final outer five yards on either side will be hard bank that contains the river in all but the heaviest of flood conditions and is home for the sedge grasses and tussocks that like their feet dry for most of the year. So far so good. Now take away the fencing. Within a matter of hours the cattle will discover this new Elysium and within a few days the wetland greenery will have been grazed to water level. Not content to leave it alone, the cattle will persistently graze the new shoots. Their strong legs and sharp hoofs will destroy the root structure, slowly killing the plants from below. The first winter flood will wash away the soil, exposing the gravel bed below, and the plants will be unable to re-establish themselves in the faster water. Within a short time the river that was once 20 yards wide is now 40 yards wide, shortly to become 50 as the cattle destroy the hard bank as they lumber in and out of the water. Having a river that’s two and a half times wider might not seem such a bad thing, but assuming the volume of water stays the same, which it will on a chalkstream, the depth will be two and a half times less, and for a trout at least, this is bad news on every level – food, survival and breeding. If you are a trout hanging out in your favourite spot close to the bottom, looking upstream into the column of water above you for stuff to swallow, then the greater the depth, the greater the choice of food, which is why trout tend to gravitate to the deepest pools unless they are in search of particular food or get chased out by bigger trout.
Always on the lookout for food, trout are wary creatures that have plenty of predators. When they are small the greatest danger is other trout or maybe kingfishers, but as they grow larger pike, cormorants, herons and ospreys, otters and mink are ever-present dangers. In every case, except for the smallest of fry, the deeper the water the less likely these threats are to attack the trout, and if they are attacked the depth gives more options for escape. Trout fry on the other hand like to hide out in the reed beds either side of the main channel. More practically, for the survival of the species trout need to lay their eggs in loose gravel that is constantly washed with rapidly flowing, well-oxygenated water that percolates down to the eggs. Take away that speed of flow by spreading it across two and a half times the width and suddenly too little good water will flow over the eggs and they will slowly die due to lack of oxygen.
However, standing just past the fence contemplating striding out across 30 yards of swampy reeds to reach the river I was more concerned for my safety than with any ecological niceties. I have learnt from bitter experience that the worst thing to do is to adopt a bold Neil Armstrong-like moon stride – all that will happen is that your leading leg will disappear into the mud, upending your face into the slime. Far better to shuffle forward, letting the weight of your feet break through the surface and allowing you to sink slowly until you reach firm bottom;
then it is a question of somehow walking/shuffling/pushing your way through the mire with reed roots grabbing at your feet. Each movement that disturbs the mud releases a noxious smell: part methane, part rotting vegetation, part musty odour. Sometimes your passage will bring an oily slick to the surface. And unpleasant though that might be, it does demonstrate what a huge natural filter the river’s edges provide, the excessive nutrients and run-off degrading in the mud rather than being washed directly into the river.
Hindsight suggests that I had not picked the easiest place to get into the river. As it turned out, a few hundred yards upstream the reed margin narrowed to a few feet, but as I stepped out of the reeds I was in the most perfect river, and at that moment it was worth the effort. A fast, clear stream with huge rafts of waving green crowfoot, which is essentially water buttercup with a white rather than yellow flower, filled the river, the gaps interspersed with bright gravel patches. Donning polarized sunglasses to cut out the surface glare I began to scout the depths of the water, picking out the occasional brown trout in the open water and disturbing shoals of grayling as I waded upstream.
Seeing the trout made me happy, but seeing the grayling happier still – not so much from an angling viewpoint but because grayling are an indicator species that confirm the good health of a river. They are far more sensitive than trout to declining water quality, and if they disappear you know you are in for problems. They are not so much the canary in the cage that drops dead when the danger has arrived, but rather the bird that flies away at the first sniff of trouble. As for salmon, my suspicion was that I would see them in the autumn; the Evitt has a reputation for a run – an influx of fish from the sea – that comes in late autumn to spawn, but for now that was simply conjecture.
As I pushed on up the river the morning began to warm up and after a while a hatch of olives appeared above the water. ‘Olives’ is one of those words fishermen bandy about. It is a catch-all name that describes a whole range of insects that are to be found flying on the river, going about their daily business of survival and procreation. They are important to anglers because olives are one of the staple foods in the trout’s diet.
I say ‘appeared’ because it always seems to be that way – one minute there are no insects, the next there is a cloud gathered above the water or alongside the water. For the chalkstream fisherman the sight of a hatch is a promise of things to come, because eventually when those insects alight on the surface of the river, either to lay their eggs or to die, hungry trout will eye them up, rise to the surface and swallow them down along with a gulp of water.
The very essence of dry fly-fishing, dating all the way back to the Macedonians around the time of Christ, is to imitate this process. Take a hook, decorate it with fur and feather to create a fake that looks like the real fly. Tie the hook to the end of your line and then use a rod or cane to cast the fly onto the water so that it lands like thistledown on the surface, thereby imitating the natural landing and fooling the trout into mistaking it for food and making a lunge for it. If all goes according to plan you raise the tip of the rod, tighten the line and set the hook into one very surprised, and soon to be furious and fighting, trout.
In fishing jargon, this is referred to as ‘matching the hatch’ – observing the insects on which the trout are feeding and fishing the artificial imitation. Spend time in the company of anglers reporting back from a day on the river or read the comments in the catch record book and you’ll get a sense of how knowledge of entomology, rudimentary, encyclopedic, or just plain guesswork, dictates the pace of a fishing day. You’ll come across phrases like ‘a great hatch of olives’, ‘plenty of blue-wings about’ or more honestly, ‘couldn’t really make them out – maybe some sort of small olives?’ You will nod your head wisely but will most likely be none the wiser at all and put it down to some riverine double-speak. In an idle moment you might even pause to wonder what this much spoken about ‘olive’ is, but move on quickly – you probably have a life to live.
Actually the truth is you have probably seen olives on thousands of occasions without even registering their existence, for Baetis, to give them one of their more common Latin names, inhabit just about every lake, pond and river in the British Isles. Next time, look out for a small cloud of insects, hovering just above or beside the water – they are certainly some kind of olive that hatch through spring, summer and autumn. An individual olive will look like a round bundle of fur fluttering on the air, keeping in time and close proximity to the hundreds of others, all identical. In fact olives are not round at all, they just look that way, as their wings are a blur to the human eye, beating thousands of times a minute to keep them aloft.
If you can ever get one to alight on your hand they are creatures of the most extraordinary beauty: big black eyes, impressive mandible, large translucent, veined wings and long triple tails shaped like a cat’s whisker that double the length of their tapering, segmented body. In angling parlance they exist as large, medium and small. Large is the size of a blueberry, medium a pea and small an unsplit lentil. As the name suggests, they are olive-coloured or a drab green of varying hues. Sometimes the wings differ in colour from the body, which gives rise to types such as the blue-winged olive, but anglers like to keep their nomenclature simple and to the point, if a little dull. But that said, the blue-winged olive has a hint of the exotic about it, and the claret dun a gravity that suggests it must succeed.
‘Dun’ – there’s another word that creeps out of the angling lexicon, but what on earth does it mean?
Essentially the insects you see in the cloud by the water are at one of the latter four stages of life – egg, nymph, dun and spinner. The first two stages take place in the water, mostly out of sight, while the third and fourth are played out in the air for all to see.
The dun is the olive you can see hovering above the water, flapping his or her wings for all he is worth as he keeps up with the pack. He is, in human terms, a maturing adolescent, just a few hours or at most days old. The pack instinct is part mating ritual, part holding pattern while the body matures and morphs into the next stage: the spinner. Even in the world of drab olives, becoming a spinner equates to a new level of attractiveness – your tails get longer (truly!) and you’ll be a much brighter colour than your previous dun camouflage. This heralds a brief flurry of sexual activity.
Spinners. I have no idea how they got their name. Maybe it describes the mating dance when the pair flies up in unison and then hovers for a moment at the top of the climb before relaxing their wings to spin down on the air. Maybe it is because in olden times people thought the long trail of eggs was something akin to spinning yarn. Or maybe it is the dead insect circling on the current. Whatever the reason the female spinner, ready to lay her eggs, is brighter than in her maiden form. Clearly the consummation brings colour to her wings and body. The egg-laying is a bittersweet moment to watch. On the one hand it is the proof that a new generation is on the way, but on the other that the insect will be dead in a matter of minutes or a few hours at most.
Some days on the river I will see one type of insect to the exclusion of all others, but today was one of those days when the diverse population was out in force; good news for the ever-hungry trout. There is not a lot of nutrition in a tiny insect, even for a trout, so it’s all about the effort/reward equation. A huge fat mayfly – the size of a dandelion head – is worth that extra effort, but the tiny corpse of an olive a gentle slurp. Somewhere in between is the impregnated female, stuffed with energy-rich eggs. The latter is so attractive to fish that fly tiers will add a tiny wrap of yellow thread to the underside of a fly – no more than an eighth of an inch long – to represent the egg sac.
There are dozens of species of fly to be seen. They make their lives on the river, but ultimately the eggs will be laid in one of two ways: on the surface or beneath it. For the angler and casual observer it is the surface layers that are the most interesting, especially the sedges. Sedges, or caddis, are big flies in the general run of a chalkstream. Not as big as the mayfly, but four or five times the size of your average olive. They are very much summer creatures, present beneath the current all year but hatching only in June, July and August. If they look like anything else, it is the common household moth with its wings folded in to create a tent over the body. If that sounds clumsy you would be right. Sedges are clumsy; the worst fliers and worse still at landing. Their approach to the river surface will look fine, but come the final few inches, instead of swooping gently down to clip the water to allow the surface tension to draw the eggs from her body, the female caddis will crash onto the water. Alerted by the commotion, trout from many feet away, even facing in the opposite direction, will turn and make a grab for the egg-laden wreckage. The smaller olives are, by comparison, incredibly delicate, getting within a fraction of an inch of the water before depositing their eggs.
For the angler tying on a sedge imitation this is a moment sent from heaven. There’s no delicate cast required here. No, a splashy cast will do as well, if not better, and the eager trout will do all the work to grab the fly. The olives are a different matter. You will need your thinnest line, your tiniest fly, your most accurate and delicate presentation. And even when you get it perfect, the languid trout, with time to weigh up all the options, will as often as not reject your offering.
It is relatively easy for the sub-surface egg-layers to go about their business unobserved, but the big problem is getting through the surface tension of the water. An insect with wings is quite bulky; it has a large surface area that is gripped by the water. Just sitting on the top and hoping to paddle their way underwater will not work. They need purchase and they find this from the reeds, stones and tree roots emerging from the water. As I pushed upstream on that July morning it was the perfect time of year for the blue-winged olive. And sure enough there they were with their drab olive bodies and translucent blue wings, arrayed along the length of the upright dark green reeds that gently swayed in the margin. Unfortunately there is an unusual predator that lies in wait.
As I watched the olive closest to the water edge down towards the film, and as she forced her body into the water, I could see the six tiny legs straining on the reed, the little suction caps on the feet giving her the leverage required. But in this moment of supreme effort it is the misfortune of the olive that the European eel chooses this very time of year to begin its downward migration to the sea. After ten or fifteen years in a muddy pond Anguilla anguilla heads for the Sargasso Sea, but before the ocean the river provides a welcome source of food. In the shade of the reed it is hard to see the eel going about his business, but in the early morning or late evening you will surely hear them. It is a slurping sound, a bit like a child sucking up the last of a milkshake with a straw, as the eel quite literally sucks the insect into his mouth at the very moment it is caught by the surface tension.
Fortunately there are many more olives than eels to consume them, so very soon the sunken spinners are laying their eggs beneath the surface. These then drift slowly down on the current to lodge in the stones, silt and general debris of the riverbed where they will remain for week or months until they become nymphs and embark on the next stage of life. I am not sure if the spinners themselves are able to hold their breath or even breathe underwater, but it probably does not matter. The time is short between submersion and being spent, namely eggs laid and becoming a semi-lifeless body, tumbling downstream on the current. The spinners that lay on the surface fare no better, collapsing exhausted on the surface, the job done. At first they lie on their sides, with one wing up, but as the life seeps away the other wing collapses and the end finally comes with convulsions that cause the water to ripple outwards around the insect until it stills.
Trout are no respecters of death, and sure enough, just off the main current, in a back eddy I came across a confident trout cruising in the slack water. With his back out of the water and his body submerged to eye level he languidly circled around, his mouth open, the flow of water carrying the spent spinners down his throat. This is the ultimate effort/reward equation and he keeps at it until the surface is cleared. Above him the duns, newly hatched, buzz in the air but he pays them no attention and the insect mortuary empty, he fins down to the deep to await the next funeral cortege.
A chalkstream in summer – June and July – is when it is most alive. It seemed that every step I took that morning, in the river or on the meadows, brought a new discovery. Above the shallows, on a dead branch, a kingfisher waited impatiently for the fry to move into the shallow water as it was gradually warmed by the morning sun. I am not sure kingfishers are really impatient, but the way they cock their head back and forth makes it look that way. I am certain the head-cocking is just to change their angle of vision so that they can see through the surface glare to catch sight of the fish, but for whatever reason, once locked in on the fry a rapid blue streak flashes from branch to water and back again in an instant. Holding the fish crossways in his beak the kingfisher raises his head, straightens his neck, turns the fry head-first and swallows it whole.
With a shake of his feathers, the watch will resume. This is likely to be an all-day affair, because the more the sun shines, the warmer the shallows will become and the more fry will appear in darting shoals. And the kingfisher is on a mission to feed. Somewhere along the bank, in a spot I was yet to locate, was a nest burrowed into the soft soil. In that nest would be maybe up to half a dozen chicks, each of which needs a dozen or more fish a day. That is getting on for a hundred fish. I watched our impatient friend catch four more and then left him to it, making a wide circle around the shallows to leave his hunting ground undisturbed.
By now the geography of the river and the meadows was starting to make some sense, and as I waded upstream the structure of the place began to arrange itself before me. The main river was the spine. Coming in from the left was a bourne, a small stream that only flowed in any significant sense during the winter and early spring, so by now was near to dry. It would remain so until the autumn rains. Cutting off at a sharp angle to the right, heading due north for most of its run, was a carrier, a channel dug by hand many centuries ago whose sole purpose was to flood the meadows from February to May. Now abandoned and choked with overgrowth, the carrier was clearly once pivotal to the water-meadow system. As the channel that moved the water out of the main river across the meadows it had leats or ditches that ran off at regular intervals on both sides as conduits for carrying off the water to flood the fields. But in an arid July the leats were dry and hidden by the summer meadow grasses. Come the winter they would reveal themselves.
As I pushed on up the river the sun burnt off the cloud; it was getting warm but I still had two more things to find: the Drowners House and the brook. Wading in gin-clear water under an azure blue sky is hardly the toughest job in the world, especially in a chalkstream like the Evitt that has no great incline to it. It doesn’t race like a tidal river or rush in torrents like a mountain stream; rather it glided across the face of my waders at a gentle walking pace. Looking upstream from where I was standing I could see a full 300 yards of river ahead, and I’d be hard pushed to swear that I could see a difference in height. In fact I knew that the source, 30 miles from the sea, is only 85 feet above sea level, so that is no more than two inches’ drop in every hundred yards. For potomologists – those who study rivers – this is just about as benign a flow as a river can have.
This is a floodplain that is almost as flat as the river that flows through it, and it was only in the far distance, at least 3 or 4 miles way, that I could see the sheep-grazed downs that gradually rose to a few hundred feet. Long, long ago, in the ice age, the river valley was carved as a shallow ravine, but gradually, over millennia, the water flowing to the sea had left soil, silt, gravel and sand behind after the floods of winter, creating the flat plain on which the water meadows sit today. But nature did not do this all alone; man played his part. It is the conjunction of water with meadows that makes this such a very special landscape. There are meadows the world over, but in very few places has man harnessed the seasonal floods to irrigate and protect the grassland for the sole purpose of making the sward grow faster, lusher and more nutritious for cattle to graze. This ancient agricultural practice has, by chance and unintended consequence, created a home for a unique collection of creatures that are my constant companions.
Through a gap in the reeds I thought I spied what looked like the Drowners House some way across the meadows, with a bedraggled thatched roof covered as much by wild grass and weeds as by darkened straw. Heading for the gap to haul myself out of the river I crossed the path of a water vole swimming fast along the edge of the reeds, hugging the margin for protection. For such small creatures, seemingly so ill-adapted to water, they really can swim fast. In the water there was no way I could keep up in my waders, and on the bank I’d need to maintain a brisk walk as they stretch out their brown furry bodies, nose poked up in the air while their legs paddle like fury.
But this one, in common with all water voles, can only keep up the furious burst of speed for a short while. Quite suddenly he stopped, gave me a look with those little black eyes and with a plop disappeared beneath the surface. Under the surface things are a mad scramble for the water vole. With all that waterproof fur they are naturally buoyant, and their tiny lungs are not suited to holding their breath for long. But he had chosen to dive at this spot for a purpose. Beneath the water he wove between the roots of the reeds, heading for the bank. I could track his progress by the muddy trail he was leaving in the water until he reached the entrance to the burrow. At the tiny hole – no bigger than the size of an egg, just above water level and shiny from constant use, he stretched out the hand-like claws of his front legs, pushed them into the soft soil and using the purchase, squeezed himself inside the burrow.
Like the kingfisher, these are the breeding months for our water vole (Arvicola amphibius), which is now probably into its third or possibly fourth litter of the year, having started back in March. In the burrow, lined with dried grass torn and gathered from the bank above, anywhere between five and eight tiny voles, no bigger than your thumb, will be mewling for food. Back and forward go the adults, for anything up to eighteen hours a day. Fortunately they are pretty promiscuous in their diet on the herbivore scale. Little tooth marks on the reeds and sedges are easy to spot. Wild mint and watercress are chewed with relish, but of all the things it is wild strawberries that they fall on like mammals possessed. But really they will eat anything; the family demands it.
Doing the maths, you’d think that we’d be overrun by water voles by June – after all they are not great travellers and this one nest will have produced fifteen offspring by now. The truth is that being born a water vole is a high-risk incarnation. First, the weather might get you: lengthy bouts of bad weather, or worse still an ill-advised burrow that gets flooded. Inside the burrow you might be generally safe, but the common brown rat or worse still a stoat or mink will make short work of you and your family if you’re discovered. Once outside you are assailed from above and below: owls, buzzards, otters and pike are just four of the predators who see you as a tasty morsel. If you make it to the semi-hibernation of winter you have done well.
By now it was getting a bit hot for trudging across rough meadows in waders, so I took a direct line to the Drowners House, stumbling on the way into what were most likely carrier ditches, still soggy at the bottom beneath the tangled grasses. Ducking down under the oak lintel of the doorless entrance I entered the cool of the house. With no windows it took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the dark, while some streaks of light came through the holes in the dilapidated thatch, illuminating the river that ran beneath the ragged floorboards. A house with a river running through it for no apparent purpose? It could only be for the drowners.
The drowners are long gone, the purpose for their livelihood disappearing when modern agricultural methods consigned the water meadows to history. But for four centuries these were the men who regulated the flow of water from the river, through the drains and carriers dug across the meadows, to quite literally ‘drown’ the late winter and spring grasses in water. Warming the soil and air of the meadows – grass grows at 5°C, chalkstream water is 10°C – plus all the nutrients the water carried with it, was the perfect way to get cattle grazing earlier and thus create heavier crops of hay. Of course all this came at a price in terms of working conditions. Obviously the times when the water levels needed most adjustment, hourly and daily, came when the weather was most foul, so the drowners built these houses. They built them over the water for the same reason they drowned the grass – warmth.
I didn’t need to take out a thermometer to check the temperature inside the house today; I knew it would be exactly the same as the water – 10°C. The thick triple-skinned red-brick walls, damp from the foundations in the wet land, helped keep the place the same temperature all year round. Today I was grateful to find it a full 10° cooler than in the sun outside, but I doubt nearly as grateful as the drowners were when the mercury fell below freezing in winter. Today, other than the house itself, there is not much evidence of the drowners’ tenure. There are soot-blackened nooks hollowed out in the brickwork as candle-holders and some initials carved in the oak beams, but the current residents are mostly house martins that have coated the walls with white guano from their nests in the rafters above.
I found myself a handy log, placed it up against the hut wall and sat down to contemplate my options. To say the river and meadows were in crisis would pitch it too strong. Severe neglect was closer to the truth; a river caught in a spiral of decline. For all the beauty of the river and the wildness of the meadows the creatures were in retreat. With every year that passed the spawning grounds were growing fewer as the streams and carriers progressively became blocked. Along the banks the scrubland was encroaching, eliminating the wide open spaces that natives like the water voles require. In the meadows, without proper grazing, the meadow plants were being crowded out. Untended, the clear, fast chalkstream waters of the floodplain would revert to a swampy morass, with insects like the olives and mayflies disappearing.
It could be saved, but was it worth saving? The answer had to be yes. The question now was how.
I have no hard or fast rule about what to do if you don’t reach hard bottom. Generally if I am still sinking when the gloop reaches my waist I rapidly turn tail to heave myself back onto the firm bank with a fair imitation of an arthritic walrus.
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DECLINE (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
THIS MORNING I found a bat caught on a hook that was dangling from a snagged fishing line on a branch overhanging the river. This is not the first time I have found bats snared like this. Bats with their super sonar hearing home in on a discarded fishing fly mistaking it for a real insect and wham, they are impaled on the hook. Sometimes by the time I find them they have died, but this Daubenton bat, the species that most commonly populate the river valley, was definitely alive and very angry.
I have heard it said that the Daubenton is the only British species to carry the rabies virus. I have no idea whether this is true, but I don’t intend to be the one to find out, so taking my handkerchief I swaddled the bat before snipping the line. Angry does not adequately describe how the brown, furry bat looked at me. The tiny black raisin-like eyes glared at me in pure fury. The pointed leathery ears that indicate the mood of the bat from gently lying back on the head (content) to being at rigid right angles to the head (agitated) were most definitely the latter. As I walked back to the Land Rover to get a pair of forceps to extract the hook from his belly I could feel his bony body twitch and turn in my hand, his head swivelling in an effort to locate the best direction of escape.
Bats have a bad press, but it is hard to feel anything but sympathy for the Daubenton for a moment or two. Though he seems exceedingly ungrateful for my help, at bay the furry head is more reminiscent of a mouse and the pink face, with wisps of downy hair, baby-like. That said, when he opens his mouth to snarl he exposes a vicious jaw full of sharp, ridged incisors designed to crush prey with one bite in flight. At the Land Rover, using an additional cloth I cover his head, trap his wings and expose the underbelly. On his back his hind legs, with claws like a bird but razor-sharp and bristly, struck wildly at the air, trying to get some purchase. The hook was caught in the belly, plumb between the legs, which made some sort of sense, for bats grab for their prey in the air with their feet. Grasping the eye of the hook with the nose of the forceps, I deftly twist my hand to remove it with one smooth movement. I am sure the Daubenton had absolutely no idea what was going on as I shook out the cloth to allow him to fly away. But he seemed to be none the worse for the experience and headed for his roost in one of the trees close by the river.
The Daubenton bats get to become regular companions if I hang around the river late into the evening anytime from May to September. The first few times I see them in May I get to do something of a double-take as the small, unfamiliar black shapes zip around the air. By now in September they are part of the furniture, and I can set my watch by them, as they appear almost exactly ninety minutes after dusk each evening. They are voracious feeders of chalkstream insects; midges are a particular favourite as they can swoop through the clouds of chironomids that gather above the river surface on calm evenings. Sometimes the bats will even take the hatching midge pupa from the surface, trawling their hind legs through the film. I am guessing it is those bristles on their feet that ‘sweep’ up the insects from the water that allow them to do this.
The bats patrol the air close to the river, high above the trees and everywhere in between for hours on end each evening for food, not just singly but in groups appearing from the trees closest to the river where they roost during the day. They sometimes, but not often, make a little squeak in flight. It is often described as a click but it never seems that way to me, but rather like the modulated squeak from a dog toy. But soon I will hardly see or hear them at all as they mate, become solitary and spend the winter in a safe roost.
September, the month of autumn fruitfulness, is a time of departures and preparations – everyone and everything in the river has its way of taking nature’s cue of the impending winter. The adult swans thrash up and down the river to chase away their cygnets, creating chaos for anglers and other birds alike. After a few days the cygnets get the hint and take flight. Woe betide any youngster who tries to return. The male cob swan will have no qualms about a full-on attack, mounting the much smaller cygnet, biting his neck, smashing down with his wings and pushing the young bird beneath the surface until the point is made. The departure of the swallows is altogether a more orderly affair, daily gathering in greater and greater numbers until quite suddenly one day they have gone on the long migration to South Africa, to return in April. Along the banks the water voles revel in the autumn harvest of hazelnuts, blackberries, seeds, acorns and whatever else falls to the ground. In the meadows the farmers put out the cattle to get the last and best of the grazing. In the river the trout, sensing the onset of autumn by the shortening days, start to feed in earnest on a spectacular array of insects that hatch in great numbers to capture the last truly warm days of the year.
For fishermen September is often termed the month ‘the locals go fishing’, on the grounds that it is the best month and best-kept secret in the piscatorial calendar. But maybe, like the creatures, we anglers also sense another season drawing to a close and get just a little frantic to enjoy the last of it before the bar comes down. For me it is always the first flurry of autumn leaves blowing onto the surface of the river that tells me the end of the season is around the corner. If I am fishing it can be a little annoying, difficult to pick out my fly amongst the blow-ins, but whether I’m fishing or just walking the banks, the sight of dead brown leaves makes me sad for the end. But this year I am buoyed by the plans we have to restore Gavelwood, which will start immediately the fishing season has closed and continue through the winter.
Gavelwood, the land, the river, side streams, brook and water meadows, takes its name from a wood that makes up part of this tiny, forgotten part of England. The woodland, a mixture of native trees like oak and ash, is as unkempt as the meadows it borders. Nobody knows where the name came from, but it is clearly marked on the deeds of ownership. The medieval word ‘gavel’ meant to give up something in lieu of rent, so maybe in some distant century the lumber was exchanged for tenure. But here today I am not here for any timber, it is the river that is the draw. A beautiful chalkstream called the Evitt that runs gin-clear, the perfect home for fish and water creatures that thrive in a habitat that is as endangered and as worthy of protection as any tropical rainforest or virgin Arctic tundra.
The water that flows through the chalkstreams is a geological freak of nature, almost unique to England. There are a few chalkstreams in Normandy, northern France, and one is rumoured to exist in New Zealand, but taken as a whole 95 per cent of the planet’s supply of pure chalkstream water exists only in southern England. The water I watch flow by in the river today fell as rain a hundred miles to the north six months ago, was deep underground yesterday and will be in the English Channel in a few hours’ time, a cycle that has been repeating for tens of thousands of years since the last ice age ended.
A chalkstream river valley today is a tamed version of how it started out. After the ice age it would have been little more than a vast, boggy marshland, with no river to speak of but rather thousands of streams, rivulets and watercourses that randomly flowed this way and that. At some point in time, it is hard to say exactly when, the early Britons must have started to use the valleys for a purpose, initially farming, which involved draining the land. Inevitably drainage involved reducing the myriad streams to a few channels, which in turn became the rivers that have evolved into the chalkstreams we have today.
It has been a mighty long process: five or six millennia for sure. The barges that carried the stones for Stonehenge were brought up what is now the Hampshire Avon, probably widened and straightened for the purpose, from where it enters the sea at Christchurch Harbour 33 miles from Amesbury, the Avon’s closest point to Stonehenge. But these incremental activities changed the river valleys very slowly, and it was the advent of the watermills that was to prove the penultimate step on the way to the chalkstream valleys we see now.
Again it is hard to pinpoint precisely when watermills became a regular part of the landscape. One thing is for sure, there are plenty listed in the Domesday Book, so it is fair to assume that the valleys were taking shape to meet the requirements of water power by this time. Essentially the mill wheel requires a good head of water to drive it, so a special channel would be dug to supply the water to drive the wheel. This ‘millpond’ would be controlled by a series of hatches, which when opened would turn the wheel for a few hours. Once depleted, the hatches would be closed and the millpond given time to refill from the river and streams.
The unintended outcome of all this would be to drain the land in the immediate vicinity, which in turn created the most wonderfully rich grazing pasture on the alluvial soil left behind after many millennia of flooding. This bounty of nature did not go unnoticed, so over the centuries that followed the river valley was gradually drained not just for the mills but for farming. The water was concentrated into a single channel which is the River Evitt today, supplemented by the side streams and ditches that provide the drainage.
But the story has one last twist. Having deprived the land of the flooding, the farmers realized that they were taking away one of the very things that had made it so productive in the first place – the nutrient-rich water that every winter washed over it. So around the seventeenth century, as the agricultural revolution took hold, landowners realized that drainage alone was not the answer and that managed flooding would dramatically increase the yield from the land, so the water meadows came into being.
By digging carriers, or leats, quite literally streams that carry water away from the main river, redirecting side streams, filling in others and creating a series of hatches to manage the flow of water, the farmers were able to use the winter and spring flows to flood the meadows from February to May. The term flooding is something of a misnomer; deep, static water over the grass would do little more than rot it away. The skill in floating, the creation of a water-meadow system, is to keep a thin layer of water constantly moving over the surface. The warmth of the water and the protection from frost, plus the nutrients carried in from the river, allow the grass to grow earlier and quicker. When ready for grazing the cattle would be let in, to be taken off when they had eaten it down and the land reflooded. If this all sounds a laborious process, it probably was. It was far beyond the daily regime of the farmers who banded together to employ a drowner, or waterman, who regulated the flows.
Today drowners are a long-distant memory, the advent of artificial fertilizers sounding the death-knell for the meadows from the early 1900s. When the watermills finally stopped grinding a few decades later, the raison d’être for this integrated water system would have all but disappeared except for the fact that somewhere along the line, in the period when the chalkstream valleys went from marshes to meadows, the brown trout had become the dominant species in the river. Never ones to miss an opportunity, anglers soon followed, first for food and then for sport, at which point the chalkstreams became a byword for angling perfection. The drowners and farmers were replaced by river keepers who lavished care on the rivers far beyond the basic needs of an agrarian England.
Fishing, angling, call it what you will, with an insect, worm, net, hook, spear or anything else that captures the fish, is as old as mankind. But as a pastime, done for the pleasure of the activity as much as for the outcome, it has to be credited to the Victorians. They did of course have their antecedents. Dame Juliana Berners, an English nun, wrote A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle in 1496, which can be claimed as the first book about fishing as a sport, although she has been eclipsed in history by Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, which followed 150 years later. But these great anglers and writers were exceptions; for most people trout were there for catching and eating with the minimum of effort. So why the Victorians? Well, it was a coming together of wealth, leisure time, technology, the railways and the insatiable curiosity of a few individuals.
Gavelwood today is a tiny proportion of what was once a huge country estate, running to thousands of acres and 11 miles of the River Evitt. In fact the entire river valley, encompassing all 30 miles of the Evitt from source to estuary, was in the ownership of just three families. Hardly very egalitarian, but those were the times, and for fishing, and the chalkstreams in particular, they proved decisive for the future. Once the fishing craze caught on amongst the landed gentry the rivers became much more than farmland irrigators and power sources for mills. River keepers were employed, banks maintained, fish reared for stocking, river weed cut, predators removed. The water meadows were kept in good shape not just for drowning but fishing as well. Suddenly the owners of the great estates began to value the rivers for the sport they could offer.
As the railways made the countryside more accessible, great houses hosted grand fishing parties. Gunsmiths turned their hands to fine reels, rods, lines, hooks and flies, using the latest techniques and materials. Weekly magazines like The Field and Country Life lionized innovators like Frederic M. Halford, a wealthy industrialist in his own right, who codified fly-fishing in a single book. Fly-fishing went from an obscure pastime to the ‘must do’ sport in a matter of decades. If you fished for salmon Scotland was the place to head for, but for brown trout dry fly-fishing the chalkstreams of southern England were the ultimate destination.
The mayfly period, or Duffers Fortnight, became as much a part of the English season as Ascot or Wimbledon. The future kings of England were elected president of the world’s most exclusive fly-fishing club. Fine tackle manufacturers received the Royal Warrant. Government ministers cut short cabinet meetings to catch the train in time for the evening rise. Eisenhower took time out from the D-Day preparations to fish the River Test. As the fly-fishing craze spread across Europe and the Americas, visitors from abroad took home stories of the fabled chalkstreams which took on deserved iconic status. But time, money and enthusiasm are not always limitless, and as I walked around Gavelwood on this late September day I could chart the progression from a chalkstream paradise to something that is today a shadow of its former self.
Nobody set out to make it so. It was simply another twist in the evolution of the rural landscape. In succession the water meadows, watermills and finally fly-fishing were no longer part of the daily life of Gavelwood as the ownership changed to commercial farming. No longer were the myriad carriers and streams of any use, so they were left to atrophy. The meadows were ploughed, fertilized and sprayed for crops. The river was left untended. Gradually as the diverse habitat disappeared so did the creatures that inhabited the river, banks and meadows.
But three or four decades of neglect did not put Gavelwood beyond redemption.
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WORK BEGINS (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
AS EVER, MY ancient leaking Land Rover provided little protection against the sideways rain of the late October day as I drove down the potholed track to the river. I had hoped for better weather. This was to be a landmark day in the restoration of Gavelwood: our first step towards the re-creation of something special, where the fruits of our dreams and expectations would, at least in part, be rewarded. After a month of back-breaking work North Stream was ready to be opened to fresh, gin-clear, chalkstream water from the Evitt for the first time in four generations.
North Stream is an ancient carrier that connects the main river – the Evitt – with another side stream we call Katherine’s Brook. I say ‘connects’ in the loosest possible sense, because barely a drop of water has flowed through it in living memory. Along its entire length – about half a mile – it should really be a fast-flowing little river that takes the excess flow from the main river into Katherine’s Brook, which in turn will rejoin the main river some 3 miles downstream. Instead the stream was a morass of fallen trees, roots, bushes, debris and mud.
I parked up close to the junction of the main river, where there is a set of hatches, built long ago, to control the flow of water into North Stream. Back in July, when we had first conceived the restoration plan, those hatches were almost invisible. On the river side a thick margin of reeds had choked what would have been the funnel-shaped entrance to the river. Today, the weeks of work had revealed three upright pillars of limestone, about the size of a tall man, set into the bank. They are slightly pockmarked in places, but generally washed smooth by centuries of water. The fronts of the pillars are V-shaped to deflect the current, and running down each inside edge is a groove into which are slotted oak boards – these regulate the amount of water that flows from the main river into North Stream. The oak is newly sawn, a lovely bright honey yellow that would, in a few months, turn to a silver grey. But for now their newness is proof that the hatches are repaired and ready to play their part in the rebirth of North Stream.
With everything Gavelwood has to offer – miles of main river, side streams and hundreds of acres of water meadows – North Stream might seem an unlikely candidate for the first step in the restoration. At first glance, if you noticed it at all, it looks marginal. It is not very wide – a reasonably agile person with a short run-up could leap it in most places – and is fairly straight, without any particular features that catch the eye. My suspicion is that given a few more years it would have disappeared entirely to become a soggy ribbon across a water meadow, its original purpose long forgotten. But the first time I saw it I knew it had the potential to become the most wonderful spawning stream for trout, salmon and maybe even grayling.
On that first visit as I walked down the bank, occasionally pushing aside the branches of the bushes and trees that choked the channel, a few small, bright pockets of gravel glinted back at me, lit by the rays of sunshine that cut through the gaps in the foliage; the gravel kept free from silt by the spring heads that bubbled up from deep below. Loose, well-oxygenated gravel is vital for spawning trout. It is the place the gravid female lays her eggs and the home for the ova as they metamorphose from eggs to tiny fry, out of sight from the many predators that see them as a nutritious food source. My hunch was that beneath the silt and overgrowth North Stream was a gravel haven and finding out was not going to be very difficult.
In fact it proved harder than I thought. A combination of wicked stinging nettles that are at their fiercest in the high summer, plus the barbs of the hawthorn and the clawing tendrils of the wild roses forced me back each time I tried to push my way down the bank. Eventually I came across an ash tree that had fallen across the river, flattening my access. Using a tree branch for support I slowly lowered one foot into the shallow water, letting my weight push it down through the thick mud, hoping that I would make contact with the riverbed before the water reached the top of my boots. Fortunately I did, and the firm base beneath my boots told me I had reached the best kind of rock bottom. I jiggled my feet and through the thick rubber soles I could feel the friable gravel. As I waded upstream I kicked away at the silt bottom to expose what I had hoped for – gravel the entire length of the stream. The further I waded up the more certain I became of the plan to have North Stream ready for autumn spawning – with clean, bright gravel where the trout eggs would be nurtured by a constant flow of fresh water from the main river. Yes, the timetable was tight and yes, the work would be hard, but at that moment to miss yet another year, after the decades of decline, seemed positively criminal.
I plotted the timetable as I walked. We needed to be finished by 1 November. River Evitt trout typically start the act of spawning around mid-December, but they would need at least a month to grow familiar with their new environment before beginning courtship. To have us clumping around would put an end to that before it even started. The trout fishing season ends on 30 September. It would be tempting to start clearing the stream earlier, but our downstream neighbours, not to mention our own anglers, who regularly fished at Gavelwood, would not thank me for sending muddy water and debris their way. So we had four weeks to take what looked like a clogged ditch and transform it into a piscatorial love nest and nursery.
There are two ways to restore a river: the easy but expensive and the cheaper but hard. The easy but expensive way involves signing up an ecological consultant who will start by carrying out a painstaking survey (at your cost) of the river and surrounding land. Every tree will be plotted, the curvature of each bend delineated and the depth of the pools plumbed. Soil and water samples will be analysed, flow rates monitored and the wildlife censused. In return for a mighty fee you will receive a mighty document with maps, drawings, graphs, commentary and appendices. You’ll read it. Actually you won’t – you will read the two-page executive summary at the front and glance through the rest. Fortunately your fee includes a presentation, so you head for the consultancy offices. Having been ushered into the boardroom by a receptionist you are then glad-handed by the team. Everything is very exciting and the possibilities immense. You can only agree, but how do I do it, you ask. At this point the meeting gets serious. Sitting across the table from you is the Chief Executive, who takes a copy of the report and places it squarely on the table in front of you.
‘May I be frank with you, Mr Cooper?’
My advice to you at this point is to say no and leave; no good can ever come with a person who opens with this line. But you are curious, so you invite the man to continue. He opens by telling you what you know already. The report on the table is the perfect guide to do-it-yourself restoration. Everyone around the table knows this, but our wily Chief Executive casts a fly into your path he knows you will take.
‘How much were you planning to spend on the project?’ he asks innocently. You quote a number, faintly embarrassed that you thought it could be done for so little. He purses his lips. ‘Here’s the thing,’ he says. ‘You will do an OK job with that budget, but this is such a very exciting project, the potential so immense, that we should think big. Let’s quadruple your budget, apply for funding, and in the end you’ll only have to dip into your own pocket for a fraction of what you originally thought.’
The lure of his fly is too much and you rise to it like the greedy chap you are. The thought of twenty grand’s worth of work for the cost of five is too much to resist. Leaving the room an hour later you have been truly hooked and landed. The consultants are delighted (but not surprised) with a new contract to seek out funding and manage the project when the grants roll in. You are of course still on the hook for their fees if the funding never shows up, but that is a discussion left for another day.
But I don’t much like easy and expensive. It takes too long, the finished job is never as good, and it seems a bit immoral to me that half the money will go to consultants, however expert. And quite frankly, where is the fun in handing the project over to strangers? I wanted to get my hands dirty: stand in the river, look upstream and with a trout’s-eye view of the world fine-tune the work as I went along.
But all this was still ahead of us when my team and I gathered in August to make plans for North Stream’s restoration. It was not the best month to do our kind of survey – the undergrowth at its most dense, the flow almost non-existent – but we could see enough to make some educated guesses. The work was going to be done by Steve, Dan, myself and a team of irregular helpers.
Steve is the closest thing we have to a full-time river keeper. A retired fireman who looks forty but is in fact fifty-five, he runs triathlons just for the hell of it. He can, and does, work all day felling trees, cutting weed and hammering in fence posts. He is in fact more of a coarse angler, and Gavelwood sort of inherited him when some local lakes closed down.
Dan is young. We tease him for being young and he mocks us for being old. In his early twenties, Dan is on a sabbatical year from his university ecology course. I have a feeling he may have dropped out for good, but it is a suspicion I have kept to myself.
The irregulars are a band of loyal fishermen and locals who simply like to help. They turn up as they wish, or Steve will put out a call when he needs some extra hands. It seems to work and every few months I put some cash behind the bar at the pub for an evening of merriment. Work on the river next day is sparsely attended.
On that particular August morning Steve, Dan and I had gathered at Bailey Bridge, a steel latticework bridge of the same name that was invented by the British army. You used to see them all over the river valleys at one time, but most have rotted and rusted away. Built of light steel and wood, in sections small enough to be lifted into place by hand, they were ideal for bridging meadow streams. Designed to take the weight of a tank, they were much loved by farmers, not least because they were easy to ‘liberate’ from the nearby military camps on Salisbury Plain if you drank with a friendly sergeant major.
Our bridge looked to me like it was getting towards the end of its life, but we estimated that by replacing a few of the wooden boards and repainting the metalwork we could eke a few more years out of it. I had my doubts about its inherent strength but Steve was prepared to test it out by the simple act of driving a tractor and laden trailer over it. Sometimes he worries me.
The first decision we needed to make was whether to clear one or both banks along North Stream. Both sides were equally overgrown, and there are merits whichever way you choose to go. In sheer practical terms opting for a single-bank restoration halves not just the work required for the initial clearance but also regular maintenance in the years to come. With our tight timetable it was an attractive proposition, but ultimately we had to decide on what was best for the wildlife, the river and the fishing.
Stepping off Bailey Bridge and towards the stream, our path was blocked by chest-high stinging nettles. Nettles are no great friends of ours – sure, they are much loved by caterpillars, who feed voraciously on them, but for the river keeper and angler they are a menace. They grow fast, crowd out more useful bankside plants and sting like crazy. Fortunately getting rid of them is not hard, at least if you have someone like Dan to do the work. Nettles are nitrogen addicts – in their effort to run wild they suck every last drop of nutrient out of the ground. But when they die back in the autumn the rotting stems and leaves put nitrogen back into the soil ready for next year. However, cut the nettles down and rake away the cuttings and you deprive the next generation of their nitrogen fix. Other species soon encroach on the ground left bare and new plants thrive in place of the nettles. For Dan a couple of weeks with a scythe and rake were on the cards.
Beyond the nettles and bordering the stream was the scrubby woodland that ran the length of North Stream. On both banks it was 10–15 yards wide, because some years earlier it had been fenced off. The fence was pretty much all but gone, save for a few posts and rusting strands of barbed wire that would no doubt trip us up at some point. The main growth was really stunted hawthorn, which had done us something of a favour in the absence of the fence, by keeping the cattle away from the banks and out of the river. Pretty in its own way, and home to the hawthorn fly, we mulled over how many of these bushes-cum-trees should stay, be trimmed or cut down. I am a huge fan of hawthorn. It is the constituent element of every hedge in the chalk valleys and in April its vivid lime-green leaves and white or red flowers are the first tangible proof of spring’s arrival. Admittedly the flowering bushes do emit the most awful stench, which makes you think there is a rotting corpse under every hedgerow, but once you know what it is it does not seem that bad.
What’s more, the hawthorn fly or St Mark’s fly (Bibio marci, so called because it hatches around St Mark’s Day on 25 April) causes much excitement among fly-fishermen in the first few weeks of the season, not least because trout go on quite the feeding frenzy when these clumsy fliers drop onto the river surface. The fly has no real connection with the river, so why trout go mad for these freakish-looking creatures is a mystery about which one can only hazard a guess. At first glance the hawthorn fly looks like an athletic housefly, but at second you’ll see its long spindly legs dangling below it, like the undercarriage of an aircraft, with big knuckles for knees and so hairy you might even stroke them. The flies don’t live for long, maybe a week at most, having emerged from larvae in the soil beneath the hawthorn bushes. Once hatched they hug the hedgerows for protection from the wind, but from time to time an unexpected gust will whisk them across the meadows. From this point on things get tricky. They are, without shelter, the most hopeless fliers and you will see them buffeted by the breeze. Occasionally when the wind drops they regain control, but it will be short-lived and once over water they will plop onto the surface. Unable to break free of the surface tension they are easy pickings for the trout.
Along the length of North Stream and among the hawthorn are a few spindly ash, plus some alders, clumps of hazel, brambles and wild roses. The trees we wanted to keep we marked green, those we would thin, blue, and the rest – marked red – were to be cleared. It soon grew abundantly obvious that on this bank there was not much to preserve, whilst on the opposite side pretty well everything, bar a few branches that were falling into the river, could remain undisturbed as a sanctuary for the creatures that live along the riverbank.
Part of the restoration process is about letting light back into the river and onto the riverbed itself so that the weed there can grow. The term weed does these river plants like crowfoot, starwort and water celery something of a disservice. Weed implies that they are invasive and bad, but the reverse is true. The right river weed, in the right river, is home to nymphs, snails and all manner of tiny aquatic creatures. It provides cover for fish, shade from the sun and refuge from predators. And as a filter for the water, a healthy river needs healthy weed, and that will only grow with sunlight. It is hard to say anything bad about weed, and a chalkstream without it is on a downward spiral.
Removing a fair amount of the thicket growth along the south-facing bank was going to suit us very well. In this respect clearing the north bank alone would not have helped, because as the sun tracks east to west across the sky during the day it would have left the stream perpetually in shade. If you ever doubt how bad perpetual darkness is for the ecosystem of a river, glance under a bridge one day; it will be as bleak as the surface of the moon. That said, our work was far from about eliminating all shade; trout and all the creatures thrive best where there is a mix of light and dappled shade, so before we took the saw to any bush or tree we cocked our heads to each in turn to decide stay, trim or go.
All the way up North Stream the stream itself was no great issue for us. Sure there were plenty of branches and stumps to pull out, but the dark shade had pretty well prevented anything growing. Once the obstructions were removed the sheer volume of water over the winter would flush away the mud and slime. That was of course always assuming we were able to open up the Portland hatches.
Removing the decades of compacted silt could be done by hand but it would be long and laborious, so we elected to bring in a digger to do the job. Machines are great, but sometimes you have to go easy with them or risk doing damage to the very things you wish to preserve. The Portland hatches were a case in point. They had stood the test of around 500 years because they had been carefully constructed with strong foundations. Smash those with the digger bucket and our problems would multiply.
Steve produced a steel rod with a T-bar handle. Jumping down onto the silt he pushed the rod into the ground until at around 5 foot down we heard a muffled clunk. He tapped the rod up and down twice to confirm that he had hit something solid. Over the next hour, working like an avalanche rescue team on snow, we each took a rod, gradually mapping out the depth and extent of the stone slabs ready for the digger to do the hard graft once the season had closed.
There is never what I would call a really good time to embark on a restoration; every month, every time of year has its merits, but inevitably there is disruption to the natural order of things – removing the bad and encouraging the good. The bad comes in all shapes and sizes: people, fish, animals, mammals and even plants. Yes, there are even bad plants on the chalkstreams, the most invidious of which has its origins on the foothills of the Himalayas.
My problem with Himalayan balsam is that I rather like it. The tall plants stand high above the surrounding vegetation in vast swathes and the light red-pink funnel flowers are a sea of colour that gently waves in the late summer breeze. The smell from the flowers envelops the riverbank. It is a dry, sweet smell – lightly medicinal and cathartic at the same time. It is completely alien to anything else that grows in the meadows. It looks different, smells different and has the most amazing way of distributing seeds when the flowers have died and the tall plants are denuded of leaves, just leaving brown seed pods. Brush past the balsam and the seed pods burst with an audible ‘pop’, shooting their kernels yards around. It happens with quite some force; you will feel the sting if they bounce off your face or hands. Young children love to grasp the plant at the base, shaking it with all their might while the rat-a-tat of seeds sails harmlessly above them.
Imported as an exotic species from Nepal in the early 1800s, Himalayan balsam is now established in Britain, but has had particular success on rivers where the seeds, which can survive two years, are distributed by the water. As a single plant it is no great problem, but that is not in the nature of Himalayan balsam. It is an invader that grows faster than any native plants, shading out and eventually killing all others. Walk the banks in October where the balsam has taken hold, and the area looks like a wasteland. Everything beneath the balsam is dead. In truth it looks like the ground has been sprayed with a toxic weedkiller, and come winter, that soil is bare and ripe to be washed into the river.
Fortunately for me and river keepers everywhere, Himalayan balsam is an enemy that can be defeated. For now, in October, there is not much I can do, but come early summer when the balsam pops its heads above the surrounding growth we will walk through the meadows pulling out the plants by hand. Mercifully they are shallow-rooted, so they come out easily or snap off at the base like soggy celery. However, not all my enemies are so easily defeated.
Mink have thrived in the abandoned Gavelwood. Wily creatures, the thick undergrowth and clogged streams are heaven-sent for this predatory invader. Predatory they certainly are. Fish, water voles, field mice, duck chicks, frogs, baby moorhens, even rabbits – if it moves mink will eat it. The mink I see at Gavelwood are American mink – Neovison vison – which first arrived about a century ago as escapees from the fur farms that were established between the world wars. Despite their fearsome reputation they are really quite cute; I always think they look like a bigger, elongated version of their favourite prey, the water vole. Mink have the most beautiful dark brown fur, almost black in some light. Strangely, though all the mink you spot today are this colour, they all originated from the light-coloured mink imported by the fur trade. Clearly, however, being white in green meadows was a poor lifestyle choice. After a century of wild living it is a moot point as to whether mink can still be regarded as an invader. Non-native definitely; indigenous never; but successful settlers yes. They took hold at precisely the same time that the otters declined. It was no fault of the mink that the otter almost became extinct in Britain, but nature abhors a vacuum.
On that filthy late October day the success of our survey and the work Steve had done with the digger was there to see. The silt and mud were gone, smeared over the grassland around the hatches. The wet surface of the slabs on the base of the river glinted back at me. Some of them were truly huge; a full 10 feet square and nearly a foot thick. One could only wonder at how they were ever put into position all those centuries ago. The digger stood by ready to drag out the reeds within the hour.
I wasn’t exactly sure where Steve, Dan and the irregulars were working that morning, but the whine of the chainsaw through the rain from somewhere far downstream gave me a rough idea, so I followed the noise. For all our hard work over the past month North Stream really looked in quite a sorry state. I am tempted to say worse than when we had started, but it is always this way, a sort of darkness before the dawn.
The ground along the bank was churned up; deep ruts showed where the tractor had strained and dug deep to pull out the worst of the trees. Every so often I would come across a round circle of ash where the lads had lit fires to burn up the detritus. There was a pile of tree stumps, too big to burn and unwieldy to cut up, so they would be taken away to be dumped and end their lives in a rotting heap. This would be a paradise for woodpeckers seeking easy food and a palatial home for woodlice. From time to time I came across some long, straight tree limbs which had been carefully trimmed and set aside. This was our kind of recycling; logs and branches that would be useful for building weirs, flow deflectors and groynes in the river when we reached the next stage of the restoration.
The entire bank was pockmarked by tree stumps, cut level with the ground: the cream white of the ash; dark red of the alder and burnt orange of the hawthorn. The hazels looked like bundles of cigarette filters pushed into the ground. The fact is we only pulled out the stumps we had to; by far the most were left in the ground. There is no point in ripping them out, as the root structure will live for years and bind the bank together. Some of the stumps will sprout again, indeed species like the alder thrive as a result of the extreme pruning. And as North Stream evolves over the coming years, we’ll let some grow back into mature trees for cover, shade or simply extra interest.
If I thought the banks looked bad, the stream itself looked worse. The water reflected the sky; it was dark and gloomy. Barely flowing, the surface was covered in twigs, chainsaw shavings, dead leaves and chopped vegetation. On the far bank the bushes and trees had shed all their leaves, the spindly branches dripping from the rain. The only comfort I took was in the windbreak they provided from the north wind whipping the rain across the meadows. A north wind is the enemy of all fly-fishers – the cold kills off hatch and stops the fish feeding, which gives rise to that old saw, ‘When the wind is from the north only the foolish angler sets forth.’ However, today was not the day to worry about the north wind, which is an almost daily occurrence in winter, sweeping as it does down the river valley. Days like this are always the fun parts of a restoration, when months of planning and weeks of work come to fruition. Today all we needed to do was dig out the plug of reeds, lift the boards in the Portland hatches and let the river flow in. And that is what we did.
Steve used the digger to scoop out the reeds and we laid them to one side. The flag irises, with their yellow flowers that bloom in May and June, were too beautiful to discard, so we’d replant the rhizome roots down North Stream to kick-start the regrowth in the spring in the parts of the stream left bare by their removal. The reeds gone, the water started to build up against the honey-yellow oak boards. These boards are never completely watertight; water weeps through the gaps between them. So as the flow backed up and the pressure increased, water squirted through the holes as if from a hosepipe. We were ready to open up. Standing on the bridge boards over the hatches we worked in pairs to lift the top boards out. The lower four quickly followed and within moments the fast flow from the Evitt rushed into North Stream. Like excited schoolboys we followed the bulge of water as it forced its way downstream. From time to time it came across an obstruction. Then the water would begin to back up, but when the force grew too strong the obstruction would give way and the flow continued. On it went down North Stream, carrying the mud and debris in its path. Under Bailey Bridge and the final straight to the main river. Standing by the deflector we watched the confluence of the two currents, the first time anyone had seen this for maybe forty or fifty years. True it wasn’t the prettiest of sights, with the dirty water of North Stream adding a nasty stain to the clarity of the Evitt, but the knowledge that our plan had worked was enough for now. Given a few weeks North Stream would flush itself clean, and then the fish would return.
4 (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
SPAWNING AND THE CYCLE OF LIFE (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
AFTER THE FRENETIC activity of summer I miss my riverside companions on a winter dawn morning. No reed-chewing water voles suspiciously eyeing my progress along the riverbank, plopping for safety under the water if I come too close. No dew-laden spider webs strung between the purple loosestrife, glinting in the rising sun, as an eager arachnid crabs with intent across the translucent filament harvesting the victims of the night. Even the rabbits have gone, and as for the lolloping hares, no chance of any of those until spring. But even if it is all quiet along the banks, in the ever-clear water of the chalkstream the game is on to create the next generation of trout and salmon.
Trout and salmon are often spoken of in the same breath, but they are in many respects as close to each other in genetic terms as a horse is to a zebra. For a fly-fisherman they define what you are on a river. As salmon and trout are two distinct breeds, so are the men that fish for them. Not to announce which you are, even though you might fish for both, is like saying you support the Manchester football team. United or City? Salmon or trout? Both are equally tribal.
For fish whose subsequent lives will diverge so totally they begin life in the same gravel beds, of the same rivers, at precisely the same time of year. In lives that will span five to seven years some brown trout will travel no more than a few hundred yards from their birthplace, whereas the salmon has a round trip of some 4,000 miles to complete its life cycle. While we may think of a salmon as a river fish, in fact the greatest proportion of its life is spent at sea. These salmon are Atlantic salmon – Salmo salar. Defined as anadromous, their natural habitat is the sea, but they must return to the river of their birth to spawn. The eggs are laid in a river and that first year of life, as they grow from fry to parr and then smolt, is all spent in fresh water. But no chalkstream could ever provide enough food for a salmon to grow to maturity, so at a year old, measuring no more than 6 inches long, they head for the ocean and the food-rich waters off Greenland. It is an epic journey that begins and ends in a stream no more than 15 yards wide and a few feet deep.
The spawning grounds created by salmon and trout in the gravel riverbed are known as redds, and the sight of the first redds, be it in October or November, is something of a red-letter day for us chalkstream watchers. Indeed, redd-spotting becomes something of an obsession from around October time. I say ‘around’ because rivers don’t obey the Gregorian calendar. Like the snowdrops in your garden that appear in January one year and February the next, the creatures of the river adapt their habits according to what’s happening around them, which is in turn dictated by the climate. And not only the weather of now; the effects of a dry summer or harsh winter for instance, may linger many months or years to come.
I’ll get excited text messages from river keepers: Seen a redd today. First of the year!!!!!!!!!!!
. It is exciting because amid the gloom of late autumn and the winding down of a fishing season, it is a small ray of hope for things to come, however distant. It is also proof that as a river keeper you are doing something right. Your river is so damn perfect that fish want to breed in it. How good is that?
Walking beside the river, you will find the redds are easy to spot once you know what you are looking for: pale lozenge-shaped indentations on the river bottom, with a mound of gravel at the downstream end. Brushed clean of silt and debris, they shine out like lights compared with the surrounding gravel. Sometimes there is just one, sometimes a cluster, but it is the size that immediately marks out the difference between a trout and a salmon redd: the former about the size of a snowshoe, the latter a good-sized door mat. And there is more latent intent about the salmon redd; it will be dug deeper, down to the hard base beneath the gravel. Random gravel stones from the digging will be scattered far and wide across the riverbed. The mound of stones at the end will be much higher and more pronounced. Redds are, of course, made by the fish themselves to harness the flow of well-oxygenated water through the loose gravel to incubate their eggs, and oftentimes the hen will lay in more than one redd. Laying in a single redd is quite literally putting your eggs in one basket, and that basic instinct to perpetuate the species drives the hen to hedge her bets by laying in a series of redds, maybe with other hens. But we have to track back in time to appreciate how and why we have arrived at this point.
From my daily walks up and down the river the progress of the trout from an everyday Salmo trutta to a body quivering as if electrocuted whilst he releases his milt over the eggs is far easier to track than that of Salmo salar, the Atlantic salmon. It is in September that I start to see the first signs of spawning in the trout, who start to change in appearance in the weeks before they start the actual process of cutting redds and spawning. Suddenly that headlong pursuit of every item of food to feed on in preparation for the winter ahead slackens off. The fish are just as active, but not for food. Somewhere in their fishy brain the search for food is replaced by the search for a mate. The change sweeps over their body and suddenly that golden-brown complexion is replaced by a fierce red blush along both flanks. The males sprout a vicious-looking hook – a kype – on their jaw. The kype is largely for show, but it does make an otherwise innocuous-looking trout look like someone you would not want to mess with.
During this time the salmon are absent from this river, still making their way along the English Channel from the Atlantic to pick up the scent of their birth river somewhere on the south coast. How salmon navigate the entire journey to the far side of the Atlantic to the waters off Greenland and back again remains something of a mystery. The position of the sun, the stars and the gravitational pull of the earth are all cited as guides, but it is certain that the final leg of the journey is determined by smell.
Salmon never look to me like creatures that depend on smell for survival – their incredible ability to leap huge waterfalls or swim unceasingly for months on end seem more important – but smell is the thing. Early on in their lives they imprint the odour of their birth river onto a hormone that is secreted in the thyroid gland; it stays with them for evermore. Their hormonal library of smells is highly selective; only the ones that really matter make it onto the data bank. Likewise they will log the odour of their brothers and sisters in the river, picking up their scent in later years when the shoals are travelling across the ocean.
By the time our salmon sniffs the first scent of home, he or she has surmounted incredible odds to make it thus far. Of those 5,000 eggs laid three years ago in the River Evitt, our salar is probably the sole survivor, or at best one of two. And the dangers are far from over. Ravenous seals are gathering for an autumn feast and the drift nets in the estuary are laid in wait. It is the misfortune of salmon that they make such good eating, though it should be of no surprise. They are super-fit and have spent the past two to three years in the beautifully clean water of the Greenland Sea eating nothing but squid, shrimp, crustaceans, small cod and mackerel.
As far back as medieval times salmon has commanded a premium price, so the ever-resourceful coastal communities around Britain developed the highly efficient drift net to capture the salmon returning from the sea. There are all manner of types of drift netting, each of which has evolved for the particular locality, but the principle holds good for them all: wait for the tide to go out and then set your nets in such a way that they intercept the salmon travelling towards the estuary bottleneck on the inbound tide.
Travelling around the coastline of Britain you will see all sorts of weird and wonderful nets rigged up to capture salmon, though they are becoming fewer. Declining runs of salmon, fierce campaigning by conservation groups to have the nets removed and the harsh demands of a truly hard and difficult job are all contributing to the decline.
The simplest form of drift netting is a long net, anything from 30 yards to a few hundred, and 5 to 10 feet deep, that is slung across the tide, supported by floats along the upper edge. In shallow water it will be held in place at each end by a man holding a pole; in deeper water by boats. As the tide races through, the salmon follow, to get caught in the mesh of the net. The netsmen gather the ends of the net into a circle, capturing the salmon by hand as the circle gets smaller.
Not surprisingly this fast, efficient method is the one most favoured by poachers, but it is the fixed nets that are more typical of traditional salmon netting in the estuaries: wooden posts supporting nets that face the incoming tide. Sometimes the nets will be shaped like giant boxes as large as a van, 10 to 15 feet above the beach level, open on one side. Other times they are funnel-shaped. Or most simply, nets loosely slung between posts like a garden fence. One way or another they are doing the same job of entangling the salmon, which become more trapped the more they struggle. As the tide ebbs some of the fish will escape, but once the nets are exposed to the air the salmon don’t have long to last and the netsmen will appear to complete the harvest.
Fortunately for our salmon heading for the Evitt, these dangers are slight. The seal population along the south coast is sparse compared with say the northwest of Scotland and the estuary netting is now less common than it once was. Ahead is the brackish water of the estuary and beyond that the purity of the chalkstream water, although this change from seawater to fresh will quickly change our salmon’s physiology as the body cells, body and organs adapt for the months to come. Such problems do not trouble our brown trout, whose sole mission at this point is to find a mate. No swimming over thousands of miles for him. His potential partner may be one of the other trout that have lived within a few hundred yards of him for all their lives. There never seems to me any great logic or grand plan to the way trout choose their partners. There will be a bit of swimming around, occasionally another male will sidle up beside a paired female to be promptly chased away, but on the whole it all seems to happen at random. Or that is how it looks to me with my bank-down view, but scientists think there is more to it than this, and that even fish have that ‘eyes across a crowded room’ moment when the right mate comes into view. Nobody knows exactly what is going on in and around those redds, but somehow skin colour, conformation, size, pheromones or possibly a mix of these and other factors combine to make their choice a complex matter.
You would think that the trout at Gavelwood would get used to me – after all, they must see me just about every day. But they never seem to. The only time they are oblivious to my presence is at spawning. Every other time they will bolt for cover if I disturb them. But at spawning I can stand on the bank almost directly above them and wave my arms about like a lunatic and they will carry on with their business. If I am in the river I can damn nearly step over them in my waders as they fin away one side or another to let me pass, to return to the same spot in my wake. The creation of the redd and the spawning to follow is all-consuming, but in their enthusiasm for each other the trout also forget about their most dangerous predator, the otter.
Otters are an ever-present but rarely glimpsed part of the Gavelwood family, about whom I have mixed feelings. On the one hand I should celebrate their existence, having come back in great numbers from the brink of extinction. But on the other they are one of the best fish-eating machines invented by Mother Nature. In ten months out of twelve it will be rare for me to see an otter, though most days I will be able to tell they have passed through. They are nocturnal creatures, using the river as their highway, travelling as much as 20 or 30 miles in a night. A paw print in a muddy bank, crushed grass where they slide into the river, and spraints, or dung, are all telltale signs, as is the corpse of a fish. In winter the latter will be barely recognizable as a fish: a few bits of fin, skin and scale in an area of flattened grass where the otter will have settled down to eat. If it is, or was, a gravid female trout there will be a scattering of eggs to add to the mix of body parts, which is sad in its own way, though they will rarely go to waste as the moorhens and water voles, or maybe a passing fox, are more than happy to feast on this unexpected bounty.
Every time I see the dog otter – I think we must have just the one – I am struck by his size and lithe movement. He is around twenty pounds in weight; put in context that is about twice the weight of a domestic cat. And like a cat he is incredibly supple; he doesn’t dive or jump into the river, he pours himself in, barely making a ripple. Once in the water, despite his bulk, he is hard to spot, but I’ll be able to track his underwater progress by the surge he creates on the surface. Some yards downstream he will pop his head out of the water, swivel around to check he has put sufficient distance between us and continue on his way at a more leisurely pace.
It is that bulk that makes the otter a deadly predator, because the bulk requires constant nutrition. It is reckoned that an adult male has to consume 10 per cent of his body weight each day to survive the winter. That is a two-pound fish, which is a big fish for the Evitt. More realistically we are talking about a whole bunch of smaller fish from trout, grayling and eels right down to the tiniest, like bullheads. Of course my otter’s diet is not pescatarian – frogs, crayfish, birds and water voles are all fair game – but in winter there are meagre pickings, so a careless spawning trout is a tempting prospect.
Come the summer things are very different; food abounds and so do the otters, which often become my evening companions when I stay late to fish the evening rise. I always hear them before I see them. Otters have this high-pitched ‘eek’ noise that they ping across the meadows like sonar to keep in touch with each other; it is the mother’s way of tracking the pups. As night falls the parents seem perfectly content to let the young ones range all over Gavelwood. I can become caught in this crossfire of constant eeking, and it is not a noise you have to strain to hear. It is incredibly insistent and frequent, though the frequency is a good indicator of how well things are going. I reckon that a contented otter eeks every thirty seconds; if one becomes distressed the frequency escalates until it becomes almost continuous. And it lasts all night or until the family move on to another part of the river.
These long, light summer nights are part of the growing-up phase for the pups, when the parents bring them out from the birthing holt to learn how to explore and hunt. Strangely, unlike most other species that become fiercely protective of their young, otters are more playful. They will often swim and hunt together in the river, just keeping a weather eye out for me. Otters are pretty well the top of the food chain and they regard humans as more of an oddity than a threat. However, lower down the chain the poor fish truly suffer.
Two fit adult otters, plus three or four ravenous, growing pups, seem to be the usual summer contingent that I will see in the twilight and on into the early hours of the morning. The solitary otter I see in the winter is a stealthy hunter, but in the summer the pack instinct takes over. Pike Pool, about halfway down the main river, is our deepest part of the Evitt and is the favourite place for the family to gather for a hunting lesson. The pool, which starts when the river makes an abrupt 90-degree turn, goes down to about 15 feet, constantly eroded by the water as it hits the opposite bank and swirls in back eddies before the gradient reasserts the natural order of things and the water heads downstream as it should. Along the bank stands a line of alder trees and the roots grow down into the water. Beneath the roots is a huge undercut, the perfect refuge for the fish and eels, or so they think.
The family will not so much hunt in a pack, but they do hunt collectively – rapidly diving and surfacing across the pool with their wet, brown fur glinting in the moonlight. They pause for just a moment to catch their breath before diving again. One can only imagine the massive panic in the fish community as they flee for safety in the dark recesses under the tree roots. And safe it is from every predator other than the otter. For herons and cormorants the fish are protected once out of sight. For mink they are too deep. Pike usually give up after a single attack. But otters are persistent. Once they have the fish cornered, they will dive and dive again. As the hunt becomes more frantic and the effort greater, they will emit a sharp cough when they surface to grab a breath. Inevitably they succeed and the victorious otters will slither out of the water onto the base of the tree to start devouring their catch. They sit back on their haunches, holding the fish in front of them using the sharp claws of their webbed feet for purchase, and then tear at the body, starting with the head. It is violent and fast. From the other side of the river I can hear the flesh being torn apart. Strangely they are not competitive about the catch; they wait their turn. When one has had enough he or she will lay what is left down for another to pick it up.
I have never yet seen the otters catch a salmon; maybe they are too big or simply swim away fast rather than hide. Trout are the most common, eels not far behind, and grayling the most prized – in winter they devour every last morsel of the latter. In the summer part-eaten fish or eels, too big for the otter pups to finish, are common. With the eels the head seems to be the only bit they like to eat; decapitated eels are a common sight in the morning dew. I usually kick them back into the river for the crayfish. I used to throw the part-eaten fish into the field – dead fish on the riverbed can look alarming to visitors – but since I have discovered that otters are partial to a five-day-old, decomposed trout I also kick them back in on the grounds that it might save the life of another fish.
It is something of a fallacy that trout love the fastest water in a section of a river to live out their lives; in fact almost the reverse is true. The older and bigger a trout becomes, the more he or she gravitates to the deeper, slower parts, so autumn is the only time we get to have a good look at the long-term residents who are the brood stock for the next generation. If you are a tiny little juvenile trout the fast, shallow water is a great place to grow up because you have the place to yourself. For the bigger trout the effort of holding station in the riffles, the fast-flowing shallow water that separates the pools, is too much for any possible rewards and the risk from predators like herons very high. But for the little, tiny trout even a good-sized pebble will provide shelter from the flow whilst waiting for a tasty nymph to come tumbling by. Predators? Well, when you are small it is all about the lesser of evils. Yes, you could be plucked from the stream by a kingfisher, but in truth your greatest danger lies from the very adult trout that probably spawned you. The one thing all fish love to eat is other fish.
The trout I hoped would gather on the gravel beds in North Stream would be fast developers to do so at three years; four is more common and it is the females who first seek out the ideal patch to set up the nursery. It is true that fish often head upstream to spawn to seek out the purest water and best laying gravel, but unlike say Pacific salmon that congregate in the uppermost point of a river in a giant, swirling pink mass, brown trout are smarter than that. Quite frankly they travel only as far as they need to travel, be it a metre or a mile, which is why I had high hopes for our newly restored stream. Brown trout are eminently practical when it comes to spawning; if they have to travel 20 miles upstream to find the perfect place and mate they will do it, but if both are within a few yards, why bother? I was hoping North Stream would be that place, the breeding ground for the trout that inhabited Gavelwood already. The main river was fine, but the stream would be better with more places for redds and a better nursery for the eggs once hatched. From my point of view, it was all about making it easy for the female, because creating a redd is tough work. She positions herself over the chosen spot and then with flicks of the tail or a sideways movement of the body gradually dislodges a few pieces of gravel at a time. With thousands of movements, executed thousands of times over a period of days, gradually an indentation is cut in the gravel of the riverbed. Some of the stones get carried away on the current, but others gradually pile up in a mound at the downstream end of the cut. This mound, seemingly an unimportant by-product of the excavation, will in fact be vitally important when the females come to lay their eggs. But for now our female has to seek out the right location for her redd. The main river is just too fast in most places, as no sooner will she start to dig a hole than the rapid flow will scour it flat again, and even if she succeeded, when it comes to mating the eggs would be whipped away in the current before fertilization had had a chance to take place. So in the search for the ideal spot I am hoping that the trout moving upstream will turn right into the relative calm of North Stream to check it out.
Every action in a river causes some sort of reaction, so digging up the riverbed, however well intentioned, causes all sorts of commotion for other river creatures, and in this particular case the tiny ones. The gravel riverbed is home to millions of invertebrates, animals like snails, bloodworms, nymphs and shrimps, which thrive in the constant temperature of the chalkstream water. While 10ºC might be a very cold bath for humans, for this group it is perfect. And if they thrive, so do the creatures that eat them, namely the fish. Fish are opportunists. Unlike people they don’t have a routine that tells them it will be lunch at such and such a time. If food comes along they eat it and the moment that the redd cutting begins I will see the yearlings – fish under twelve months old – gathering below the cutting area to start hoovering up the unfortunate invertebrates, who can only drift helpless on the current until they either get caught in some weed, float down to the bottom or get swallowed. It must also be said that the yearlings, or parr, are not just there for the food; as eager adolescents they are standing by to add their bit to the spawning process. These ‘sneakers’ as they are called will slip between the adults at the crucial moment. Whether they contribute much in a normal year is debatable, but nature brings them to sexual maturity early as a back-up plan. In a bad year, maybe caused by low water or some other natural disaster that prevents enough males making it to the redds, there will at least be someone there to complete the job.
Fish are not beyond digging into the gravel themselves to find food. Watch a grayling in a river and you will see him go tail up, push his snout down into the gravel and with a puff of silt around his head suck up a shrimp. But why go to all that effort when a redd-making trout does the work for you? This is a winter feast that will only be bettered by the trout eggs themselves. And in the hot summer days, when anglers start to feel the heat and the fish get lazy, there are opportunities for both to capitalize on the dislodged food sites. At four or five spots across Gavelwood water meadows I have places where the cattle can either wade across the river or get into it to drink. As your average bovine drinks around seven gallons a day, maybe twice as much in hot weather, that is a lot of getting in and out of the river. And every time they do it stirs up the riverbed, uprooting the inhabitants. Trout get to know this, so they wait downstream, only moving out from the shade when the muddied water gives them notice of food to come. I do the same, and a well-cast shrimp imitation as the clouded water starts to clear will often turn a dead afternoon into a successful one.
The gravel of North Stream was abundant, but the decades of neglect had left it rock-hard, without the winter floods to break up the surface and sweep away the silt that had formed a crust. Within a week of reopening the Stream the worst of the silt and mud had been washed away to reveal plenty of potential spawning grounds, but when I tested them out the reality was depressing. Jabbing a garden fork into random sections of the riverbed I was mostly rewarded with a bruised hand. The tines would barely penetrate more than an inch or two. This was bad news. If I could not break through with a steel fork then the trout would find the same and keep moving on upstream to abandon North Stream. There were two options – do nothing or intervene.
Do nothing is not so bad if you don’t mind waiting for years. Gradually, nature, in the form of exceptionally heavy winter flows, would break up the surface into the loose gravel that a trout might easily dislodge. But I didn’t feel inclined to wait for years, so intervention, in the form of gravel-blasting, was the remedy. Gravel-blasting is not the nuclear solution it might at first sound. You take a high-pressure water pump with a steel probe on the end, stand yourself in the river, press the probe down into the gravel to a depth of about 6 inches and then wait while the water from the pump does the work, washing away the decades of silt that was binding together the gravel stones. When the water starts to run clear, you pull the probe out and push it back into the gravel a foot or so away. For the first ten minutes this is a fun job, but after a while the novelty palls. It is effective, however, and when you stand on the bank to admire your handiwork there is always a certain amount of satisfaction – the riverbed looks like a freshly plumped pillow and the gravel will positively glisten.
While the trout are starting to weigh up the options of North Stream, our salmon pick up the pace as the scent of the home river gets stronger. Past Land’s End they start to hug the coastline, the beaches of Cornwall then Devon almost in sight. Gradually the pack thins out as one by one they peel off for rivers like the Dart, Exe and Camel. For the remainder the chalk cliffs of the Jurassic Coast are the marker that these salmon are heading for the chalkstream rivers of Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. Yet the salmon might be less eager to make the transition from salt water to fresh if they knew that the change signals the end for most of them: nineteen out of every twenty salmon are certain to be dead within a few months. The odds are much worse for the males than females, but they know nothing of this, so the urge to procreate impels them forward.
Why do they die? From the very moment our salmon enters the fresh water he or she stops feeding. And this cessation is absolute. Not a single calorie of nutrition will be consumed until the salmon returns to the sea or more probably dies. During the time of its life when food is most needed there is none. Day after day the fish swims upstream against the current, navigating weirs, dams and obstacles whilst the body adapts to the change from salt to fresh water, losing weight and condition. In the confines of the river a new raft of predators awaits; otters, pike, herons, cormorants and even fishermen line up for a piece of the action. These are not good odds, and at the head of the river the body-sapping ritual of mating will deliver the death blow to nearly all who make it that far. At Gavelwood we are about 35 miles up from the coast, more or less two-thirds of the way up the river system. For a salmon, a chalkstream like our Evitt is an easy run: no massive waterfalls to leap over or fierce currents to swim against. The greatest point of difficulty is Middle Mill, 5 miles up from the sea. At one time this was the biggest flour-grinding mill in the county, capturing the entire river flow to drive two enormous waterwheels. Below the mill races is the mill pool, a huge expanse of swirling water, which is the first place the salmon rest up on their run inland.
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Simon Cooper
Chalkstreams are one of the very few habitats that are nearly exclusive to England. They range far and wide from the famous River Test in Hampshire across eight other counties from Dorset in the west to Yorkshire in the north. Every river is very special in its own right.Brought up in Hampshire, Simon Cooper was lucky enough to have great fly fishing on his doorstep, but as he grew up, got a job and moved away he soon realised what a closed world chalkstreams were unless you were in the know. So with little more than a germ of an idea, a telephone and the book of his fishing contacts, he set out to change that. His passion for all things fly fishing, but in particular the chalkstreams of southern England, shines through in this lyrical and most extraordinary of journeys.We are treated to a year in the life of a chalkstream. From the remarkable spectacle of salmon, sea trout and brown trout spawning in winter, to the stunning sight of emerging water voles in spring and the budding explosion of mayflies in the early days of summer, the author describes the true wonders of life in a chalkstream in his inimitable and evocative voice. He introduces us to the fascinating diversity of life that inhabits its waters and environs – the fish, the angling community, the plant life and the wildlife. We learn how neglect threatens these inhabitants and why the fight to save and restore the chalkstreams is so vital, not only for fishermen, but for anybody who values the beauty of rural England.
COPYRIGHT (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1, London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014.
Text © Simon Cooper 2014
Illustrations © Chris Wormell 2014
Map © Liam Roberts 2014
The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover photographs © Ken Takata. Designed by Kate Gaughran.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007547869
eBook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007547876
Version: 2015-04-22
To Mary and Nigel. For endless encouragement and always being there.
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.
The Brook by Alfred Lord Tennyson
CONTENTS
Cover (#u3da7d79d-c2f0-5230-a285-6217172fbfa5)
Title Page (#u1dd98c5c-2428-5c97-a880-5151fc1cabf1)
Copyright
Dedication (#u851a5ab5-aa6d-5a39-ab87-ce95a7d812c7)
Epigraph (#u6c6bceb3-9822-5f10-aeef-f9d918609a40)
1 Discovery
2 Decline
3 Work begins
4 Spawning and the cycle of life
5 Scar Boy
6 March
7 How I held a trout for warmth
8 Mayday
9 The mayfly
10 Crayfish invasion
11 Midsummer’s Night
12 High summer
13 The English savanna
14 Cams Point
Epilogue
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
1 (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
DISCOVERY (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
FROM A DISTANCE water meadows look unkempt and uninviting, but once you get into them they have a beauty all of their own, with a myriad grasses, flowers and stunted shrubbery growing in an apparently irregular pattern. The pattern is dictated by the cattle that graze the wet pasture of the river valley.
Cattle, sheep and other livestock are the cloven-hoofed landscape gardeners that create the meadows. Without their relentless chewing, battering down the growth, fertilizing the ground and churning up the turf, the fields would soon become a dense, overgrown bramble thicket. Where they graze tight to the sod the sun and light let the buttercups thrive; cowslips spring from the nitrogen-rich manure patches and where their hoofs punch holes in the soil, the rhizomes of the yellow flag iris are split and separated to create fresh growth for the following season.
And sure enough, as I picked my way across the meadows I spied a diverse collection of cattle grazing in the distance, only their upper bodies visible above the pasture. Livestock are also great path-makers. Their sense of direction may be slightly off-kilter, and they may fail to realize that the shortest route between two points is a straight line, but they are canny and I know that if you deviate from the path they’ve trodden you will soon become stuck in boggy ground. So I followed their zigzag path across the field.
Reaching the cattle, a motley collection of brown and white Hereford crosses, black Aberdeen Angus and the pale, long-limbed, lean continental types, I paused to consult the map. The cattle paid me little interest, raising their heads now and then to check me out, but never pausing as they masticated their way through their daily mass of roughage. I’m told that meadow-grazed beef is the sweetest, most tender meat of all but it seemed unfair to share this news with them.
To my right the summer brown of the grassland gave way to a vivid green ribbon, the best indication yet that the river was close by. The dry cattle path petered out, giving way to wet ground poached by a thousand hoofs where the cattle had grazed right up to, and under, a barbed-wire fence. In fact the grass immediately under and just the other side of the fence had been grazed as tightly as a bowling green; proof that – for cattle at least – the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.
Picking the stoutest fence post, I climbed onto the top strand and from this vantage point caught my first view of a sparkling river. I was still separated from the river itself by 30 yards of rushes and as I leapt to the ground the other side I sent up two silent prayers of thanks. First, that I had had the foresight to put on waders – those 30 yards were likely to be slimy, smelly and difficult to negotiate. Second, that the river was fenced, because cattle and rivers simply do not mix. Give cattle a chance to graze right up to the edge of the river and that is what they will do. However, cattle are big, clumsy beasts that don’t mind getting their feet wet in search of that extra special, tasty mouthful. So they yomp up, down and along the edge of the river, gradually destroying the banks and vegetation.
Imagine you have a fenced river corridor that is 50 yards wide. In the middle you have 20 yards of river, a width that the river has arrived at more or less of its own accord to accommodate the variable winter and summer flows. Either side of the river lie 10 yards of semi-aquatic vegetation: plants like rushes, watercress and wild mints that like to live half in and half out of the water. This wet area is the perfect home for the insect life that will ultimately sustain a fly-fishing river. The final outer five yards on either side will be hard bank that contains the river in all but the heaviest of flood conditions and is home for the sedge grasses and tussocks that like their feet dry for most of the year. So far so good. Now take away the fencing. Within a matter of hours the cattle will discover this new Elysium and within a few days the wetland greenery will have been grazed to water level. Not content to leave it alone, the cattle will persistently graze the new shoots. Their strong legs and sharp hoofs will destroy the root structure, slowly killing the plants from below. The first winter flood will wash away the soil, exposing the gravel bed below, and the plants will be unable to re-establish themselves in the faster water. Within a short time the river that was once 20 yards wide is now 40 yards wide, shortly to become 50 as the cattle destroy the hard bank as they lumber in and out of the water. Having a river that’s two and a half times wider might not seem such a bad thing, but assuming the volume of water stays the same, which it will on a chalkstream, the depth will be two and a half times less, and for a trout at least, this is bad news on every level – food, survival and breeding. If you are a trout hanging out in your favourite spot close to the bottom, looking upstream into the column of water above you for stuff to swallow, then the greater the depth, the greater the choice of food, which is why trout tend to gravitate to the deepest pools unless they are in search of particular food or get chased out by bigger trout.
Always on the lookout for food, trout are wary creatures that have plenty of predators. When they are small the greatest danger is other trout or maybe kingfishers, but as they grow larger pike, cormorants, herons and ospreys, otters and mink are ever-present dangers. In every case, except for the smallest of fry, the deeper the water the less likely these threats are to attack the trout, and if they are attacked the depth gives more options for escape. Trout fry on the other hand like to hide out in the reed beds either side of the main channel. More practically, for the survival of the species trout need to lay their eggs in loose gravel that is constantly washed with rapidly flowing, well-oxygenated water that percolates down to the eggs. Take away that speed of flow by spreading it across two and a half times the width and suddenly too little good water will flow over the eggs and they will slowly die due to lack of oxygen.
However, standing just past the fence contemplating striding out across 30 yards of swampy reeds to reach the river I was more concerned for my safety than with any ecological niceties. I have learnt from bitter experience that the worst thing to do is to adopt a bold Neil Armstrong-like moon stride – all that will happen is that your leading leg will disappear into the mud, upending your face into the slime. Far better to shuffle forward, letting the weight of your feet break through the surface and allowing you to sink slowly until you reach firm bottom;
then it is a question of somehow walking/shuffling/pushing your way through the mire with reed roots grabbing at your feet. Each movement that disturbs the mud releases a noxious smell: part methane, part rotting vegetation, part musty odour. Sometimes your passage will bring an oily slick to the surface. And unpleasant though that might be, it does demonstrate what a huge natural filter the river’s edges provide, the excessive nutrients and run-off degrading in the mud rather than being washed directly into the river.
Hindsight suggests that I had not picked the easiest place to get into the river. As it turned out, a few hundred yards upstream the reed margin narrowed to a few feet, but as I stepped out of the reeds I was in the most perfect river, and at that moment it was worth the effort. A fast, clear stream with huge rafts of waving green crowfoot, which is essentially water buttercup with a white rather than yellow flower, filled the river, the gaps interspersed with bright gravel patches. Donning polarized sunglasses to cut out the surface glare I began to scout the depths of the water, picking out the occasional brown trout in the open water and disturbing shoals of grayling as I waded upstream.
Seeing the trout made me happy, but seeing the grayling happier still – not so much from an angling viewpoint but because grayling are an indicator species that confirm the good health of a river. They are far more sensitive than trout to declining water quality, and if they disappear you know you are in for problems. They are not so much the canary in the cage that drops dead when the danger has arrived, but rather the bird that flies away at the first sniff of trouble. As for salmon, my suspicion was that I would see them in the autumn; the Evitt has a reputation for a run – an influx of fish from the sea – that comes in late autumn to spawn, but for now that was simply conjecture.
As I pushed on up the river the morning began to warm up and after a while a hatch of olives appeared above the water. ‘Olives’ is one of those words fishermen bandy about. It is a catch-all name that describes a whole range of insects that are to be found flying on the river, going about their daily business of survival and procreation. They are important to anglers because olives are one of the staple foods in the trout’s diet.
I say ‘appeared’ because it always seems to be that way – one minute there are no insects, the next there is a cloud gathered above the water or alongside the water. For the chalkstream fisherman the sight of a hatch is a promise of things to come, because eventually when those insects alight on the surface of the river, either to lay their eggs or to die, hungry trout will eye them up, rise to the surface and swallow them down along with a gulp of water.
The very essence of dry fly-fishing, dating all the way back to the Macedonians around the time of Christ, is to imitate this process. Take a hook, decorate it with fur and feather to create a fake that looks like the real fly. Tie the hook to the end of your line and then use a rod or cane to cast the fly onto the water so that it lands like thistledown on the surface, thereby imitating the natural landing and fooling the trout into mistaking it for food and making a lunge for it. If all goes according to plan you raise the tip of the rod, tighten the line and set the hook into one very surprised, and soon to be furious and fighting, trout.
In fishing jargon, this is referred to as ‘matching the hatch’ – observing the insects on which the trout are feeding and fishing the artificial imitation. Spend time in the company of anglers reporting back from a day on the river or read the comments in the catch record book and you’ll get a sense of how knowledge of entomology, rudimentary, encyclopedic, or just plain guesswork, dictates the pace of a fishing day. You’ll come across phrases like ‘a great hatch of olives’, ‘plenty of blue-wings about’ or more honestly, ‘couldn’t really make them out – maybe some sort of small olives?’ You will nod your head wisely but will most likely be none the wiser at all and put it down to some riverine double-speak. In an idle moment you might even pause to wonder what this much spoken about ‘olive’ is, but move on quickly – you probably have a life to live.
Actually the truth is you have probably seen olives on thousands of occasions without even registering their existence, for Baetis, to give them one of their more common Latin names, inhabit just about every lake, pond and river in the British Isles. Next time, look out for a small cloud of insects, hovering just above or beside the water – they are certainly some kind of olive that hatch through spring, summer and autumn. An individual olive will look like a round bundle of fur fluttering on the air, keeping in time and close proximity to the hundreds of others, all identical. In fact olives are not round at all, they just look that way, as their wings are a blur to the human eye, beating thousands of times a minute to keep them aloft.
If you can ever get one to alight on your hand they are creatures of the most extraordinary beauty: big black eyes, impressive mandible, large translucent, veined wings and long triple tails shaped like a cat’s whisker that double the length of their tapering, segmented body. In angling parlance they exist as large, medium and small. Large is the size of a blueberry, medium a pea and small an unsplit lentil. As the name suggests, they are olive-coloured or a drab green of varying hues. Sometimes the wings differ in colour from the body, which gives rise to types such as the blue-winged olive, but anglers like to keep their nomenclature simple and to the point, if a little dull. But that said, the blue-winged olive has a hint of the exotic about it, and the claret dun a gravity that suggests it must succeed.
‘Dun’ – there’s another word that creeps out of the angling lexicon, but what on earth does it mean?
Essentially the insects you see in the cloud by the water are at one of the latter four stages of life – egg, nymph, dun and spinner. The first two stages take place in the water, mostly out of sight, while the third and fourth are played out in the air for all to see.
The dun is the olive you can see hovering above the water, flapping his or her wings for all he is worth as he keeps up with the pack. He is, in human terms, a maturing adolescent, just a few hours or at most days old. The pack instinct is part mating ritual, part holding pattern while the body matures and morphs into the next stage: the spinner. Even in the world of drab olives, becoming a spinner equates to a new level of attractiveness – your tails get longer (truly!) and you’ll be a much brighter colour than your previous dun camouflage. This heralds a brief flurry of sexual activity.
Spinners. I have no idea how they got their name. Maybe it describes the mating dance when the pair flies up in unison and then hovers for a moment at the top of the climb before relaxing their wings to spin down on the air. Maybe it is because in olden times people thought the long trail of eggs was something akin to spinning yarn. Or maybe it is the dead insect circling on the current. Whatever the reason the female spinner, ready to lay her eggs, is brighter than in her maiden form. Clearly the consummation brings colour to her wings and body. The egg-laying is a bittersweet moment to watch. On the one hand it is the proof that a new generation is on the way, but on the other that the insect will be dead in a matter of minutes or a few hours at most.
Some days on the river I will see one type of insect to the exclusion of all others, but today was one of those days when the diverse population was out in force; good news for the ever-hungry trout. There is not a lot of nutrition in a tiny insect, even for a trout, so it’s all about the effort/reward equation. A huge fat mayfly – the size of a dandelion head – is worth that extra effort, but the tiny corpse of an olive a gentle slurp. Somewhere in between is the impregnated female, stuffed with energy-rich eggs. The latter is so attractive to fish that fly tiers will add a tiny wrap of yellow thread to the underside of a fly – no more than an eighth of an inch long – to represent the egg sac.
There are dozens of species of fly to be seen. They make their lives on the river, but ultimately the eggs will be laid in one of two ways: on the surface or beneath it. For the angler and casual observer it is the surface layers that are the most interesting, especially the sedges. Sedges, or caddis, are big flies in the general run of a chalkstream. Not as big as the mayfly, but four or five times the size of your average olive. They are very much summer creatures, present beneath the current all year but hatching only in June, July and August. If they look like anything else, it is the common household moth with its wings folded in to create a tent over the body. If that sounds clumsy you would be right. Sedges are clumsy; the worst fliers and worse still at landing. Their approach to the river surface will look fine, but come the final few inches, instead of swooping gently down to clip the water to allow the surface tension to draw the eggs from her body, the female caddis will crash onto the water. Alerted by the commotion, trout from many feet away, even facing in the opposite direction, will turn and make a grab for the egg-laden wreckage. The smaller olives are, by comparison, incredibly delicate, getting within a fraction of an inch of the water before depositing their eggs.
For the angler tying on a sedge imitation this is a moment sent from heaven. There’s no delicate cast required here. No, a splashy cast will do as well, if not better, and the eager trout will do all the work to grab the fly. The olives are a different matter. You will need your thinnest line, your tiniest fly, your most accurate and delicate presentation. And even when you get it perfect, the languid trout, with time to weigh up all the options, will as often as not reject your offering.
It is relatively easy for the sub-surface egg-layers to go about their business unobserved, but the big problem is getting through the surface tension of the water. An insect with wings is quite bulky; it has a large surface area that is gripped by the water. Just sitting on the top and hoping to paddle their way underwater will not work. They need purchase and they find this from the reeds, stones and tree roots emerging from the water. As I pushed upstream on that July morning it was the perfect time of year for the blue-winged olive. And sure enough there they were with their drab olive bodies and translucent blue wings, arrayed along the length of the upright dark green reeds that gently swayed in the margin. Unfortunately there is an unusual predator that lies in wait.
As I watched the olive closest to the water edge down towards the film, and as she forced her body into the water, I could see the six tiny legs straining on the reed, the little suction caps on the feet giving her the leverage required. But in this moment of supreme effort it is the misfortune of the olive that the European eel chooses this very time of year to begin its downward migration to the sea. After ten or fifteen years in a muddy pond Anguilla anguilla heads for the Sargasso Sea, but before the ocean the river provides a welcome source of food. In the shade of the reed it is hard to see the eel going about his business, but in the early morning or late evening you will surely hear them. It is a slurping sound, a bit like a child sucking up the last of a milkshake with a straw, as the eel quite literally sucks the insect into his mouth at the very moment it is caught by the surface tension.
Fortunately there are many more olives than eels to consume them, so very soon the sunken spinners are laying their eggs beneath the surface. These then drift slowly down on the current to lodge in the stones, silt and general debris of the riverbed where they will remain for week or months until they become nymphs and embark on the next stage of life. I am not sure if the spinners themselves are able to hold their breath or even breathe underwater, but it probably does not matter. The time is short between submersion and being spent, namely eggs laid and becoming a semi-lifeless body, tumbling downstream on the current. The spinners that lay on the surface fare no better, collapsing exhausted on the surface, the job done. At first they lie on their sides, with one wing up, but as the life seeps away the other wing collapses and the end finally comes with convulsions that cause the water to ripple outwards around the insect until it stills.
Trout are no respecters of death, and sure enough, just off the main current, in a back eddy I came across a confident trout cruising in the slack water. With his back out of the water and his body submerged to eye level he languidly circled around, his mouth open, the flow of water carrying the spent spinners down his throat. This is the ultimate effort/reward equation and he keeps at it until the surface is cleared. Above him the duns, newly hatched, buzz in the air but he pays them no attention and the insect mortuary empty, he fins down to the deep to await the next funeral cortege.
A chalkstream in summer – June and July – is when it is most alive. It seemed that every step I took that morning, in the river or on the meadows, brought a new discovery. Above the shallows, on a dead branch, a kingfisher waited impatiently for the fry to move into the shallow water as it was gradually warmed by the morning sun. I am not sure kingfishers are really impatient, but the way they cock their head back and forth makes it look that way. I am certain the head-cocking is just to change their angle of vision so that they can see through the surface glare to catch sight of the fish, but for whatever reason, once locked in on the fry a rapid blue streak flashes from branch to water and back again in an instant. Holding the fish crossways in his beak the kingfisher raises his head, straightens his neck, turns the fry head-first and swallows it whole.
With a shake of his feathers, the watch will resume. This is likely to be an all-day affair, because the more the sun shines, the warmer the shallows will become and the more fry will appear in darting shoals. And the kingfisher is on a mission to feed. Somewhere along the bank, in a spot I was yet to locate, was a nest burrowed into the soft soil. In that nest would be maybe up to half a dozen chicks, each of which needs a dozen or more fish a day. That is getting on for a hundred fish. I watched our impatient friend catch four more and then left him to it, making a wide circle around the shallows to leave his hunting ground undisturbed.
By now the geography of the river and the meadows was starting to make some sense, and as I waded upstream the structure of the place began to arrange itself before me. The main river was the spine. Coming in from the left was a bourne, a small stream that only flowed in any significant sense during the winter and early spring, so by now was near to dry. It would remain so until the autumn rains. Cutting off at a sharp angle to the right, heading due north for most of its run, was a carrier, a channel dug by hand many centuries ago whose sole purpose was to flood the meadows from February to May. Now abandoned and choked with overgrowth, the carrier was clearly once pivotal to the water-meadow system. As the channel that moved the water out of the main river across the meadows it had leats or ditches that ran off at regular intervals on both sides as conduits for carrying off the water to flood the fields. But in an arid July the leats were dry and hidden by the summer meadow grasses. Come the winter they would reveal themselves.
As I pushed on up the river the sun burnt off the cloud; it was getting warm but I still had two more things to find: the Drowners House and the brook. Wading in gin-clear water under an azure blue sky is hardly the toughest job in the world, especially in a chalkstream like the Evitt that has no great incline to it. It doesn’t race like a tidal river or rush in torrents like a mountain stream; rather it glided across the face of my waders at a gentle walking pace. Looking upstream from where I was standing I could see a full 300 yards of river ahead, and I’d be hard pushed to swear that I could see a difference in height. In fact I knew that the source, 30 miles from the sea, is only 85 feet above sea level, so that is no more than two inches’ drop in every hundred yards. For potomologists – those who study rivers – this is just about as benign a flow as a river can have.
This is a floodplain that is almost as flat as the river that flows through it, and it was only in the far distance, at least 3 or 4 miles way, that I could see the sheep-grazed downs that gradually rose to a few hundred feet. Long, long ago, in the ice age, the river valley was carved as a shallow ravine, but gradually, over millennia, the water flowing to the sea had left soil, silt, gravel and sand behind after the floods of winter, creating the flat plain on which the water meadows sit today. But nature did not do this all alone; man played his part. It is the conjunction of water with meadows that makes this such a very special landscape. There are meadows the world over, but in very few places has man harnessed the seasonal floods to irrigate and protect the grassland for the sole purpose of making the sward grow faster, lusher and more nutritious for cattle to graze. This ancient agricultural practice has, by chance and unintended consequence, created a home for a unique collection of creatures that are my constant companions.
Through a gap in the reeds I thought I spied what looked like the Drowners House some way across the meadows, with a bedraggled thatched roof covered as much by wild grass and weeds as by darkened straw. Heading for the gap to haul myself out of the river I crossed the path of a water vole swimming fast along the edge of the reeds, hugging the margin for protection. For such small creatures, seemingly so ill-adapted to water, they really can swim fast. In the water there was no way I could keep up in my waders, and on the bank I’d need to maintain a brisk walk as they stretch out their brown furry bodies, nose poked up in the air while their legs paddle like fury.
But this one, in common with all water voles, can only keep up the furious burst of speed for a short while. Quite suddenly he stopped, gave me a look with those little black eyes and with a plop disappeared beneath the surface. Under the surface things are a mad scramble for the water vole. With all that waterproof fur they are naturally buoyant, and their tiny lungs are not suited to holding their breath for long. But he had chosen to dive at this spot for a purpose. Beneath the water he wove between the roots of the reeds, heading for the bank. I could track his progress by the muddy trail he was leaving in the water until he reached the entrance to the burrow. At the tiny hole – no bigger than the size of an egg, just above water level and shiny from constant use, he stretched out the hand-like claws of his front legs, pushed them into the soft soil and using the purchase, squeezed himself inside the burrow.
Like the kingfisher, these are the breeding months for our water vole (Arvicola amphibius), which is now probably into its third or possibly fourth litter of the year, having started back in March. In the burrow, lined with dried grass torn and gathered from the bank above, anywhere between five and eight tiny voles, no bigger than your thumb, will be mewling for food. Back and forward go the adults, for anything up to eighteen hours a day. Fortunately they are pretty promiscuous in their diet on the herbivore scale. Little tooth marks on the reeds and sedges are easy to spot. Wild mint and watercress are chewed with relish, but of all the things it is wild strawberries that they fall on like mammals possessed. But really they will eat anything; the family demands it.
Doing the maths, you’d think that we’d be overrun by water voles by June – after all they are not great travellers and this one nest will have produced fifteen offspring by now. The truth is that being born a water vole is a high-risk incarnation. First, the weather might get you: lengthy bouts of bad weather, or worse still an ill-advised burrow that gets flooded. Inside the burrow you might be generally safe, but the common brown rat or worse still a stoat or mink will make short work of you and your family if you’re discovered. Once outside you are assailed from above and below: owls, buzzards, otters and pike are just four of the predators who see you as a tasty morsel. If you make it to the semi-hibernation of winter you have done well.
By now it was getting a bit hot for trudging across rough meadows in waders, so I took a direct line to the Drowners House, stumbling on the way into what were most likely carrier ditches, still soggy at the bottom beneath the tangled grasses. Ducking down under the oak lintel of the doorless entrance I entered the cool of the house. With no windows it took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the dark, while some streaks of light came through the holes in the dilapidated thatch, illuminating the river that ran beneath the ragged floorboards. A house with a river running through it for no apparent purpose? It could only be for the drowners.
The drowners are long gone, the purpose for their livelihood disappearing when modern agricultural methods consigned the water meadows to history. But for four centuries these were the men who regulated the flow of water from the river, through the drains and carriers dug across the meadows, to quite literally ‘drown’ the late winter and spring grasses in water. Warming the soil and air of the meadows – grass grows at 5°C, chalkstream water is 10°C – plus all the nutrients the water carried with it, was the perfect way to get cattle grazing earlier and thus create heavier crops of hay. Of course all this came at a price in terms of working conditions. Obviously the times when the water levels needed most adjustment, hourly and daily, came when the weather was most foul, so the drowners built these houses. They built them over the water for the same reason they drowned the grass – warmth.
I didn’t need to take out a thermometer to check the temperature inside the house today; I knew it would be exactly the same as the water – 10°C. The thick triple-skinned red-brick walls, damp from the foundations in the wet land, helped keep the place the same temperature all year round. Today I was grateful to find it a full 10° cooler than in the sun outside, but I doubt nearly as grateful as the drowners were when the mercury fell below freezing in winter. Today, other than the house itself, there is not much evidence of the drowners’ tenure. There are soot-blackened nooks hollowed out in the brickwork as candle-holders and some initials carved in the oak beams, but the current residents are mostly house martins that have coated the walls with white guano from their nests in the rafters above.
I found myself a handy log, placed it up against the hut wall and sat down to contemplate my options. To say the river and meadows were in crisis would pitch it too strong. Severe neglect was closer to the truth; a river caught in a spiral of decline. For all the beauty of the river and the wildness of the meadows the creatures were in retreat. With every year that passed the spawning grounds were growing fewer as the streams and carriers progressively became blocked. Along the banks the scrubland was encroaching, eliminating the wide open spaces that natives like the water voles require. In the meadows, without proper grazing, the meadow plants were being crowded out. Untended, the clear, fast chalkstream waters of the floodplain would revert to a swampy morass, with insects like the olives and mayflies disappearing.
It could be saved, but was it worth saving? The answer had to be yes. The question now was how.
I have no hard or fast rule about what to do if you don’t reach hard bottom. Generally if I am still sinking when the gloop reaches my waist I rapidly turn tail to heave myself back onto the firm bank with a fair imitation of an arthritic walrus.
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DECLINE (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
THIS MORNING I found a bat caught on a hook that was dangling from a snagged fishing line on a branch overhanging the river. This is not the first time I have found bats snared like this. Bats with their super sonar hearing home in on a discarded fishing fly mistaking it for a real insect and wham, they are impaled on the hook. Sometimes by the time I find them they have died, but this Daubenton bat, the species that most commonly populate the river valley, was definitely alive and very angry.
I have heard it said that the Daubenton is the only British species to carry the rabies virus. I have no idea whether this is true, but I don’t intend to be the one to find out, so taking my handkerchief I swaddled the bat before snipping the line. Angry does not adequately describe how the brown, furry bat looked at me. The tiny black raisin-like eyes glared at me in pure fury. The pointed leathery ears that indicate the mood of the bat from gently lying back on the head (content) to being at rigid right angles to the head (agitated) were most definitely the latter. As I walked back to the Land Rover to get a pair of forceps to extract the hook from his belly I could feel his bony body twitch and turn in my hand, his head swivelling in an effort to locate the best direction of escape.
Bats have a bad press, but it is hard to feel anything but sympathy for the Daubenton for a moment or two. Though he seems exceedingly ungrateful for my help, at bay the furry head is more reminiscent of a mouse and the pink face, with wisps of downy hair, baby-like. That said, when he opens his mouth to snarl he exposes a vicious jaw full of sharp, ridged incisors designed to crush prey with one bite in flight. At the Land Rover, using an additional cloth I cover his head, trap his wings and expose the underbelly. On his back his hind legs, with claws like a bird but razor-sharp and bristly, struck wildly at the air, trying to get some purchase. The hook was caught in the belly, plumb between the legs, which made some sort of sense, for bats grab for their prey in the air with their feet. Grasping the eye of the hook with the nose of the forceps, I deftly twist my hand to remove it with one smooth movement. I am sure the Daubenton had absolutely no idea what was going on as I shook out the cloth to allow him to fly away. But he seemed to be none the worse for the experience and headed for his roost in one of the trees close by the river.
The Daubenton bats get to become regular companions if I hang around the river late into the evening anytime from May to September. The first few times I see them in May I get to do something of a double-take as the small, unfamiliar black shapes zip around the air. By now in September they are part of the furniture, and I can set my watch by them, as they appear almost exactly ninety minutes after dusk each evening. They are voracious feeders of chalkstream insects; midges are a particular favourite as they can swoop through the clouds of chironomids that gather above the river surface on calm evenings. Sometimes the bats will even take the hatching midge pupa from the surface, trawling their hind legs through the film. I am guessing it is those bristles on their feet that ‘sweep’ up the insects from the water that allow them to do this.
The bats patrol the air close to the river, high above the trees and everywhere in between for hours on end each evening for food, not just singly but in groups appearing from the trees closest to the river where they roost during the day. They sometimes, but not often, make a little squeak in flight. It is often described as a click but it never seems that way to me, but rather like the modulated squeak from a dog toy. But soon I will hardly see or hear them at all as they mate, become solitary and spend the winter in a safe roost.
September, the month of autumn fruitfulness, is a time of departures and preparations – everyone and everything in the river has its way of taking nature’s cue of the impending winter. The adult swans thrash up and down the river to chase away their cygnets, creating chaos for anglers and other birds alike. After a few days the cygnets get the hint and take flight. Woe betide any youngster who tries to return. The male cob swan will have no qualms about a full-on attack, mounting the much smaller cygnet, biting his neck, smashing down with his wings and pushing the young bird beneath the surface until the point is made. The departure of the swallows is altogether a more orderly affair, daily gathering in greater and greater numbers until quite suddenly one day they have gone on the long migration to South Africa, to return in April. Along the banks the water voles revel in the autumn harvest of hazelnuts, blackberries, seeds, acorns and whatever else falls to the ground. In the meadows the farmers put out the cattle to get the last and best of the grazing. In the river the trout, sensing the onset of autumn by the shortening days, start to feed in earnest on a spectacular array of insects that hatch in great numbers to capture the last truly warm days of the year.
For fishermen September is often termed the month ‘the locals go fishing’, on the grounds that it is the best month and best-kept secret in the piscatorial calendar. But maybe, like the creatures, we anglers also sense another season drawing to a close and get just a little frantic to enjoy the last of it before the bar comes down. For me it is always the first flurry of autumn leaves blowing onto the surface of the river that tells me the end of the season is around the corner. If I am fishing it can be a little annoying, difficult to pick out my fly amongst the blow-ins, but whether I’m fishing or just walking the banks, the sight of dead brown leaves makes me sad for the end. But this year I am buoyed by the plans we have to restore Gavelwood, which will start immediately the fishing season has closed and continue through the winter.
Gavelwood, the land, the river, side streams, brook and water meadows, takes its name from a wood that makes up part of this tiny, forgotten part of England. The woodland, a mixture of native trees like oak and ash, is as unkempt as the meadows it borders. Nobody knows where the name came from, but it is clearly marked on the deeds of ownership. The medieval word ‘gavel’ meant to give up something in lieu of rent, so maybe in some distant century the lumber was exchanged for tenure. But here today I am not here for any timber, it is the river that is the draw. A beautiful chalkstream called the Evitt that runs gin-clear, the perfect home for fish and water creatures that thrive in a habitat that is as endangered and as worthy of protection as any tropical rainforest or virgin Arctic tundra.
The water that flows through the chalkstreams is a geological freak of nature, almost unique to England. There are a few chalkstreams in Normandy, northern France, and one is rumoured to exist in New Zealand, but taken as a whole 95 per cent of the planet’s supply of pure chalkstream water exists only in southern England. The water I watch flow by in the river today fell as rain a hundred miles to the north six months ago, was deep underground yesterday and will be in the English Channel in a few hours’ time, a cycle that has been repeating for tens of thousands of years since the last ice age ended.
A chalkstream river valley today is a tamed version of how it started out. After the ice age it would have been little more than a vast, boggy marshland, with no river to speak of but rather thousands of streams, rivulets and watercourses that randomly flowed this way and that. At some point in time, it is hard to say exactly when, the early Britons must have started to use the valleys for a purpose, initially farming, which involved draining the land. Inevitably drainage involved reducing the myriad streams to a few channels, which in turn became the rivers that have evolved into the chalkstreams we have today.
It has been a mighty long process: five or six millennia for sure. The barges that carried the stones for Stonehenge were brought up what is now the Hampshire Avon, probably widened and straightened for the purpose, from where it enters the sea at Christchurch Harbour 33 miles from Amesbury, the Avon’s closest point to Stonehenge. But these incremental activities changed the river valleys very slowly, and it was the advent of the watermills that was to prove the penultimate step on the way to the chalkstream valleys we see now.
Again it is hard to pinpoint precisely when watermills became a regular part of the landscape. One thing is for sure, there are plenty listed in the Domesday Book, so it is fair to assume that the valleys were taking shape to meet the requirements of water power by this time. Essentially the mill wheel requires a good head of water to drive it, so a special channel would be dug to supply the water to drive the wheel. This ‘millpond’ would be controlled by a series of hatches, which when opened would turn the wheel for a few hours. Once depleted, the hatches would be closed and the millpond given time to refill from the river and streams.
The unintended outcome of all this would be to drain the land in the immediate vicinity, which in turn created the most wonderfully rich grazing pasture on the alluvial soil left behind after many millennia of flooding. This bounty of nature did not go unnoticed, so over the centuries that followed the river valley was gradually drained not just for the mills but for farming. The water was concentrated into a single channel which is the River Evitt today, supplemented by the side streams and ditches that provide the drainage.
But the story has one last twist. Having deprived the land of the flooding, the farmers realized that they were taking away one of the very things that had made it so productive in the first place – the nutrient-rich water that every winter washed over it. So around the seventeenth century, as the agricultural revolution took hold, landowners realized that drainage alone was not the answer and that managed flooding would dramatically increase the yield from the land, so the water meadows came into being.
By digging carriers, or leats, quite literally streams that carry water away from the main river, redirecting side streams, filling in others and creating a series of hatches to manage the flow of water, the farmers were able to use the winter and spring flows to flood the meadows from February to May. The term flooding is something of a misnomer; deep, static water over the grass would do little more than rot it away. The skill in floating, the creation of a water-meadow system, is to keep a thin layer of water constantly moving over the surface. The warmth of the water and the protection from frost, plus the nutrients carried in from the river, allow the grass to grow earlier and quicker. When ready for grazing the cattle would be let in, to be taken off when they had eaten it down and the land reflooded. If this all sounds a laborious process, it probably was. It was far beyond the daily regime of the farmers who banded together to employ a drowner, or waterman, who regulated the flows.
Today drowners are a long-distant memory, the advent of artificial fertilizers sounding the death-knell for the meadows from the early 1900s. When the watermills finally stopped grinding a few decades later, the raison d’être for this integrated water system would have all but disappeared except for the fact that somewhere along the line, in the period when the chalkstream valleys went from marshes to meadows, the brown trout had become the dominant species in the river. Never ones to miss an opportunity, anglers soon followed, first for food and then for sport, at which point the chalkstreams became a byword for angling perfection. The drowners and farmers were replaced by river keepers who lavished care on the rivers far beyond the basic needs of an agrarian England.
Fishing, angling, call it what you will, with an insect, worm, net, hook, spear or anything else that captures the fish, is as old as mankind. But as a pastime, done for the pleasure of the activity as much as for the outcome, it has to be credited to the Victorians. They did of course have their antecedents. Dame Juliana Berners, an English nun, wrote A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle in 1496, which can be claimed as the first book about fishing as a sport, although she has been eclipsed in history by Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, which followed 150 years later. But these great anglers and writers were exceptions; for most people trout were there for catching and eating with the minimum of effort. So why the Victorians? Well, it was a coming together of wealth, leisure time, technology, the railways and the insatiable curiosity of a few individuals.
Gavelwood today is a tiny proportion of what was once a huge country estate, running to thousands of acres and 11 miles of the River Evitt. In fact the entire river valley, encompassing all 30 miles of the Evitt from source to estuary, was in the ownership of just three families. Hardly very egalitarian, but those were the times, and for fishing, and the chalkstreams in particular, they proved decisive for the future. Once the fishing craze caught on amongst the landed gentry the rivers became much more than farmland irrigators and power sources for mills. River keepers were employed, banks maintained, fish reared for stocking, river weed cut, predators removed. The water meadows were kept in good shape not just for drowning but fishing as well. Suddenly the owners of the great estates began to value the rivers for the sport they could offer.
As the railways made the countryside more accessible, great houses hosted grand fishing parties. Gunsmiths turned their hands to fine reels, rods, lines, hooks and flies, using the latest techniques and materials. Weekly magazines like The Field and Country Life lionized innovators like Frederic M. Halford, a wealthy industrialist in his own right, who codified fly-fishing in a single book. Fly-fishing went from an obscure pastime to the ‘must do’ sport in a matter of decades. If you fished for salmon Scotland was the place to head for, but for brown trout dry fly-fishing the chalkstreams of southern England were the ultimate destination.
The mayfly period, or Duffers Fortnight, became as much a part of the English season as Ascot or Wimbledon. The future kings of England were elected president of the world’s most exclusive fly-fishing club. Fine tackle manufacturers received the Royal Warrant. Government ministers cut short cabinet meetings to catch the train in time for the evening rise. Eisenhower took time out from the D-Day preparations to fish the River Test. As the fly-fishing craze spread across Europe and the Americas, visitors from abroad took home stories of the fabled chalkstreams which took on deserved iconic status. But time, money and enthusiasm are not always limitless, and as I walked around Gavelwood on this late September day I could chart the progression from a chalkstream paradise to something that is today a shadow of its former self.
Nobody set out to make it so. It was simply another twist in the evolution of the rural landscape. In succession the water meadows, watermills and finally fly-fishing were no longer part of the daily life of Gavelwood as the ownership changed to commercial farming. No longer were the myriad carriers and streams of any use, so they were left to atrophy. The meadows were ploughed, fertilized and sprayed for crops. The river was left untended. Gradually as the diverse habitat disappeared so did the creatures that inhabited the river, banks and meadows.
But three or four decades of neglect did not put Gavelwood beyond redemption.
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WORK BEGINS (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
AS EVER, MY ancient leaking Land Rover provided little protection against the sideways rain of the late October day as I drove down the potholed track to the river. I had hoped for better weather. This was to be a landmark day in the restoration of Gavelwood: our first step towards the re-creation of something special, where the fruits of our dreams and expectations would, at least in part, be rewarded. After a month of back-breaking work North Stream was ready to be opened to fresh, gin-clear, chalkstream water from the Evitt for the first time in four generations.
North Stream is an ancient carrier that connects the main river – the Evitt – with another side stream we call Katherine’s Brook. I say ‘connects’ in the loosest possible sense, because barely a drop of water has flowed through it in living memory. Along its entire length – about half a mile – it should really be a fast-flowing little river that takes the excess flow from the main river into Katherine’s Brook, which in turn will rejoin the main river some 3 miles downstream. Instead the stream was a morass of fallen trees, roots, bushes, debris and mud.
I parked up close to the junction of the main river, where there is a set of hatches, built long ago, to control the flow of water into North Stream. Back in July, when we had first conceived the restoration plan, those hatches were almost invisible. On the river side a thick margin of reeds had choked what would have been the funnel-shaped entrance to the river. Today, the weeks of work had revealed three upright pillars of limestone, about the size of a tall man, set into the bank. They are slightly pockmarked in places, but generally washed smooth by centuries of water. The fronts of the pillars are V-shaped to deflect the current, and running down each inside edge is a groove into which are slotted oak boards – these regulate the amount of water that flows from the main river into North Stream. The oak is newly sawn, a lovely bright honey yellow that would, in a few months, turn to a silver grey. But for now their newness is proof that the hatches are repaired and ready to play their part in the rebirth of North Stream.
With everything Gavelwood has to offer – miles of main river, side streams and hundreds of acres of water meadows – North Stream might seem an unlikely candidate for the first step in the restoration. At first glance, if you noticed it at all, it looks marginal. It is not very wide – a reasonably agile person with a short run-up could leap it in most places – and is fairly straight, without any particular features that catch the eye. My suspicion is that given a few more years it would have disappeared entirely to become a soggy ribbon across a water meadow, its original purpose long forgotten. But the first time I saw it I knew it had the potential to become the most wonderful spawning stream for trout, salmon and maybe even grayling.
On that first visit as I walked down the bank, occasionally pushing aside the branches of the bushes and trees that choked the channel, a few small, bright pockets of gravel glinted back at me, lit by the rays of sunshine that cut through the gaps in the foliage; the gravel kept free from silt by the spring heads that bubbled up from deep below. Loose, well-oxygenated gravel is vital for spawning trout. It is the place the gravid female lays her eggs and the home for the ova as they metamorphose from eggs to tiny fry, out of sight from the many predators that see them as a nutritious food source. My hunch was that beneath the silt and overgrowth North Stream was a gravel haven and finding out was not going to be very difficult.
In fact it proved harder than I thought. A combination of wicked stinging nettles that are at their fiercest in the high summer, plus the barbs of the hawthorn and the clawing tendrils of the wild roses forced me back each time I tried to push my way down the bank. Eventually I came across an ash tree that had fallen across the river, flattening my access. Using a tree branch for support I slowly lowered one foot into the shallow water, letting my weight push it down through the thick mud, hoping that I would make contact with the riverbed before the water reached the top of my boots. Fortunately I did, and the firm base beneath my boots told me I had reached the best kind of rock bottom. I jiggled my feet and through the thick rubber soles I could feel the friable gravel. As I waded upstream I kicked away at the silt bottom to expose what I had hoped for – gravel the entire length of the stream. The further I waded up the more certain I became of the plan to have North Stream ready for autumn spawning – with clean, bright gravel where the trout eggs would be nurtured by a constant flow of fresh water from the main river. Yes, the timetable was tight and yes, the work would be hard, but at that moment to miss yet another year, after the decades of decline, seemed positively criminal.
I plotted the timetable as I walked. We needed to be finished by 1 November. River Evitt trout typically start the act of spawning around mid-December, but they would need at least a month to grow familiar with their new environment before beginning courtship. To have us clumping around would put an end to that before it even started. The trout fishing season ends on 30 September. It would be tempting to start clearing the stream earlier, but our downstream neighbours, not to mention our own anglers, who regularly fished at Gavelwood, would not thank me for sending muddy water and debris their way. So we had four weeks to take what looked like a clogged ditch and transform it into a piscatorial love nest and nursery.
There are two ways to restore a river: the easy but expensive and the cheaper but hard. The easy but expensive way involves signing up an ecological consultant who will start by carrying out a painstaking survey (at your cost) of the river and surrounding land. Every tree will be plotted, the curvature of each bend delineated and the depth of the pools plumbed. Soil and water samples will be analysed, flow rates monitored and the wildlife censused. In return for a mighty fee you will receive a mighty document with maps, drawings, graphs, commentary and appendices. You’ll read it. Actually you won’t – you will read the two-page executive summary at the front and glance through the rest. Fortunately your fee includes a presentation, so you head for the consultancy offices. Having been ushered into the boardroom by a receptionist you are then glad-handed by the team. Everything is very exciting and the possibilities immense. You can only agree, but how do I do it, you ask. At this point the meeting gets serious. Sitting across the table from you is the Chief Executive, who takes a copy of the report and places it squarely on the table in front of you.
‘May I be frank with you, Mr Cooper?’
My advice to you at this point is to say no and leave; no good can ever come with a person who opens with this line. But you are curious, so you invite the man to continue. He opens by telling you what you know already. The report on the table is the perfect guide to do-it-yourself restoration. Everyone around the table knows this, but our wily Chief Executive casts a fly into your path he knows you will take.
‘How much were you planning to spend on the project?’ he asks innocently. You quote a number, faintly embarrassed that you thought it could be done for so little. He purses his lips. ‘Here’s the thing,’ he says. ‘You will do an OK job with that budget, but this is such a very exciting project, the potential so immense, that we should think big. Let’s quadruple your budget, apply for funding, and in the end you’ll only have to dip into your own pocket for a fraction of what you originally thought.’
The lure of his fly is too much and you rise to it like the greedy chap you are. The thought of twenty grand’s worth of work for the cost of five is too much to resist. Leaving the room an hour later you have been truly hooked and landed. The consultants are delighted (but not surprised) with a new contract to seek out funding and manage the project when the grants roll in. You are of course still on the hook for their fees if the funding never shows up, but that is a discussion left for another day.
But I don’t much like easy and expensive. It takes too long, the finished job is never as good, and it seems a bit immoral to me that half the money will go to consultants, however expert. And quite frankly, where is the fun in handing the project over to strangers? I wanted to get my hands dirty: stand in the river, look upstream and with a trout’s-eye view of the world fine-tune the work as I went along.
But all this was still ahead of us when my team and I gathered in August to make plans for North Stream’s restoration. It was not the best month to do our kind of survey – the undergrowth at its most dense, the flow almost non-existent – but we could see enough to make some educated guesses. The work was going to be done by Steve, Dan, myself and a team of irregular helpers.
Steve is the closest thing we have to a full-time river keeper. A retired fireman who looks forty but is in fact fifty-five, he runs triathlons just for the hell of it. He can, and does, work all day felling trees, cutting weed and hammering in fence posts. He is in fact more of a coarse angler, and Gavelwood sort of inherited him when some local lakes closed down.
Dan is young. We tease him for being young and he mocks us for being old. In his early twenties, Dan is on a sabbatical year from his university ecology course. I have a feeling he may have dropped out for good, but it is a suspicion I have kept to myself.
The irregulars are a band of loyal fishermen and locals who simply like to help. They turn up as they wish, or Steve will put out a call when he needs some extra hands. It seems to work and every few months I put some cash behind the bar at the pub for an evening of merriment. Work on the river next day is sparsely attended.
On that particular August morning Steve, Dan and I had gathered at Bailey Bridge, a steel latticework bridge of the same name that was invented by the British army. You used to see them all over the river valleys at one time, but most have rotted and rusted away. Built of light steel and wood, in sections small enough to be lifted into place by hand, they were ideal for bridging meadow streams. Designed to take the weight of a tank, they were much loved by farmers, not least because they were easy to ‘liberate’ from the nearby military camps on Salisbury Plain if you drank with a friendly sergeant major.
Our bridge looked to me like it was getting towards the end of its life, but we estimated that by replacing a few of the wooden boards and repainting the metalwork we could eke a few more years out of it. I had my doubts about its inherent strength but Steve was prepared to test it out by the simple act of driving a tractor and laden trailer over it. Sometimes he worries me.
The first decision we needed to make was whether to clear one or both banks along North Stream. Both sides were equally overgrown, and there are merits whichever way you choose to go. In sheer practical terms opting for a single-bank restoration halves not just the work required for the initial clearance but also regular maintenance in the years to come. With our tight timetable it was an attractive proposition, but ultimately we had to decide on what was best for the wildlife, the river and the fishing.
Stepping off Bailey Bridge and towards the stream, our path was blocked by chest-high stinging nettles. Nettles are no great friends of ours – sure, they are much loved by caterpillars, who feed voraciously on them, but for the river keeper and angler they are a menace. They grow fast, crowd out more useful bankside plants and sting like crazy. Fortunately getting rid of them is not hard, at least if you have someone like Dan to do the work. Nettles are nitrogen addicts – in their effort to run wild they suck every last drop of nutrient out of the ground. But when they die back in the autumn the rotting stems and leaves put nitrogen back into the soil ready for next year. However, cut the nettles down and rake away the cuttings and you deprive the next generation of their nitrogen fix. Other species soon encroach on the ground left bare and new plants thrive in place of the nettles. For Dan a couple of weeks with a scythe and rake were on the cards.
Beyond the nettles and bordering the stream was the scrubby woodland that ran the length of North Stream. On both banks it was 10–15 yards wide, because some years earlier it had been fenced off. The fence was pretty much all but gone, save for a few posts and rusting strands of barbed wire that would no doubt trip us up at some point. The main growth was really stunted hawthorn, which had done us something of a favour in the absence of the fence, by keeping the cattle away from the banks and out of the river. Pretty in its own way, and home to the hawthorn fly, we mulled over how many of these bushes-cum-trees should stay, be trimmed or cut down. I am a huge fan of hawthorn. It is the constituent element of every hedge in the chalk valleys and in April its vivid lime-green leaves and white or red flowers are the first tangible proof of spring’s arrival. Admittedly the flowering bushes do emit the most awful stench, which makes you think there is a rotting corpse under every hedgerow, but once you know what it is it does not seem that bad.
What’s more, the hawthorn fly or St Mark’s fly (Bibio marci, so called because it hatches around St Mark’s Day on 25 April) causes much excitement among fly-fishermen in the first few weeks of the season, not least because trout go on quite the feeding frenzy when these clumsy fliers drop onto the river surface. The fly has no real connection with the river, so why trout go mad for these freakish-looking creatures is a mystery about which one can only hazard a guess. At first glance the hawthorn fly looks like an athletic housefly, but at second you’ll see its long spindly legs dangling below it, like the undercarriage of an aircraft, with big knuckles for knees and so hairy you might even stroke them. The flies don’t live for long, maybe a week at most, having emerged from larvae in the soil beneath the hawthorn bushes. Once hatched they hug the hedgerows for protection from the wind, but from time to time an unexpected gust will whisk them across the meadows. From this point on things get tricky. They are, without shelter, the most hopeless fliers and you will see them buffeted by the breeze. Occasionally when the wind drops they regain control, but it will be short-lived and once over water they will plop onto the surface. Unable to break free of the surface tension they are easy pickings for the trout.
Along the length of North Stream and among the hawthorn are a few spindly ash, plus some alders, clumps of hazel, brambles and wild roses. The trees we wanted to keep we marked green, those we would thin, blue, and the rest – marked red – were to be cleared. It soon grew abundantly obvious that on this bank there was not much to preserve, whilst on the opposite side pretty well everything, bar a few branches that were falling into the river, could remain undisturbed as a sanctuary for the creatures that live along the riverbank.
Part of the restoration process is about letting light back into the river and onto the riverbed itself so that the weed there can grow. The term weed does these river plants like crowfoot, starwort and water celery something of a disservice. Weed implies that they are invasive and bad, but the reverse is true. The right river weed, in the right river, is home to nymphs, snails and all manner of tiny aquatic creatures. It provides cover for fish, shade from the sun and refuge from predators. And as a filter for the water, a healthy river needs healthy weed, and that will only grow with sunlight. It is hard to say anything bad about weed, and a chalkstream without it is on a downward spiral.
Removing a fair amount of the thicket growth along the south-facing bank was going to suit us very well. In this respect clearing the north bank alone would not have helped, because as the sun tracks east to west across the sky during the day it would have left the stream perpetually in shade. If you ever doubt how bad perpetual darkness is for the ecosystem of a river, glance under a bridge one day; it will be as bleak as the surface of the moon. That said, our work was far from about eliminating all shade; trout and all the creatures thrive best where there is a mix of light and dappled shade, so before we took the saw to any bush or tree we cocked our heads to each in turn to decide stay, trim or go.
All the way up North Stream the stream itself was no great issue for us. Sure there were plenty of branches and stumps to pull out, but the dark shade had pretty well prevented anything growing. Once the obstructions were removed the sheer volume of water over the winter would flush away the mud and slime. That was of course always assuming we were able to open up the Portland hatches.
Removing the decades of compacted silt could be done by hand but it would be long and laborious, so we elected to bring in a digger to do the job. Machines are great, but sometimes you have to go easy with them or risk doing damage to the very things you wish to preserve. The Portland hatches were a case in point. They had stood the test of around 500 years because they had been carefully constructed with strong foundations. Smash those with the digger bucket and our problems would multiply.
Steve produced a steel rod with a T-bar handle. Jumping down onto the silt he pushed the rod into the ground until at around 5 foot down we heard a muffled clunk. He tapped the rod up and down twice to confirm that he had hit something solid. Over the next hour, working like an avalanche rescue team on snow, we each took a rod, gradually mapping out the depth and extent of the stone slabs ready for the digger to do the hard graft once the season had closed.
There is never what I would call a really good time to embark on a restoration; every month, every time of year has its merits, but inevitably there is disruption to the natural order of things – removing the bad and encouraging the good. The bad comes in all shapes and sizes: people, fish, animals, mammals and even plants. Yes, there are even bad plants on the chalkstreams, the most invidious of which has its origins on the foothills of the Himalayas.
My problem with Himalayan balsam is that I rather like it. The tall plants stand high above the surrounding vegetation in vast swathes and the light red-pink funnel flowers are a sea of colour that gently waves in the late summer breeze. The smell from the flowers envelops the riverbank. It is a dry, sweet smell – lightly medicinal and cathartic at the same time. It is completely alien to anything else that grows in the meadows. It looks different, smells different and has the most amazing way of distributing seeds when the flowers have died and the tall plants are denuded of leaves, just leaving brown seed pods. Brush past the balsam and the seed pods burst with an audible ‘pop’, shooting their kernels yards around. It happens with quite some force; you will feel the sting if they bounce off your face or hands. Young children love to grasp the plant at the base, shaking it with all their might while the rat-a-tat of seeds sails harmlessly above them.
Imported as an exotic species from Nepal in the early 1800s, Himalayan balsam is now established in Britain, but has had particular success on rivers where the seeds, which can survive two years, are distributed by the water. As a single plant it is no great problem, but that is not in the nature of Himalayan balsam. It is an invader that grows faster than any native plants, shading out and eventually killing all others. Walk the banks in October where the balsam has taken hold, and the area looks like a wasteland. Everything beneath the balsam is dead. In truth it looks like the ground has been sprayed with a toxic weedkiller, and come winter, that soil is bare and ripe to be washed into the river.
Fortunately for me and river keepers everywhere, Himalayan balsam is an enemy that can be defeated. For now, in October, there is not much I can do, but come early summer when the balsam pops its heads above the surrounding growth we will walk through the meadows pulling out the plants by hand. Mercifully they are shallow-rooted, so they come out easily or snap off at the base like soggy celery. However, not all my enemies are so easily defeated.
Mink have thrived in the abandoned Gavelwood. Wily creatures, the thick undergrowth and clogged streams are heaven-sent for this predatory invader. Predatory they certainly are. Fish, water voles, field mice, duck chicks, frogs, baby moorhens, even rabbits – if it moves mink will eat it. The mink I see at Gavelwood are American mink – Neovison vison – which first arrived about a century ago as escapees from the fur farms that were established between the world wars. Despite their fearsome reputation they are really quite cute; I always think they look like a bigger, elongated version of their favourite prey, the water vole. Mink have the most beautiful dark brown fur, almost black in some light. Strangely, though all the mink you spot today are this colour, they all originated from the light-coloured mink imported by the fur trade. Clearly, however, being white in green meadows was a poor lifestyle choice. After a century of wild living it is a moot point as to whether mink can still be regarded as an invader. Non-native definitely; indigenous never; but successful settlers yes. They took hold at precisely the same time that the otters declined. It was no fault of the mink that the otter almost became extinct in Britain, but nature abhors a vacuum.
On that filthy late October day the success of our survey and the work Steve had done with the digger was there to see. The silt and mud were gone, smeared over the grassland around the hatches. The wet surface of the slabs on the base of the river glinted back at me. Some of them were truly huge; a full 10 feet square and nearly a foot thick. One could only wonder at how they were ever put into position all those centuries ago. The digger stood by ready to drag out the reeds within the hour.
I wasn’t exactly sure where Steve, Dan and the irregulars were working that morning, but the whine of the chainsaw through the rain from somewhere far downstream gave me a rough idea, so I followed the noise. For all our hard work over the past month North Stream really looked in quite a sorry state. I am tempted to say worse than when we had started, but it is always this way, a sort of darkness before the dawn.
The ground along the bank was churned up; deep ruts showed where the tractor had strained and dug deep to pull out the worst of the trees. Every so often I would come across a round circle of ash where the lads had lit fires to burn up the detritus. There was a pile of tree stumps, too big to burn and unwieldy to cut up, so they would be taken away to be dumped and end their lives in a rotting heap. This would be a paradise for woodpeckers seeking easy food and a palatial home for woodlice. From time to time I came across some long, straight tree limbs which had been carefully trimmed and set aside. This was our kind of recycling; logs and branches that would be useful for building weirs, flow deflectors and groynes in the river when we reached the next stage of the restoration.
The entire bank was pockmarked by tree stumps, cut level with the ground: the cream white of the ash; dark red of the alder and burnt orange of the hawthorn. The hazels looked like bundles of cigarette filters pushed into the ground. The fact is we only pulled out the stumps we had to; by far the most were left in the ground. There is no point in ripping them out, as the root structure will live for years and bind the bank together. Some of the stumps will sprout again, indeed species like the alder thrive as a result of the extreme pruning. And as North Stream evolves over the coming years, we’ll let some grow back into mature trees for cover, shade or simply extra interest.
If I thought the banks looked bad, the stream itself looked worse. The water reflected the sky; it was dark and gloomy. Barely flowing, the surface was covered in twigs, chainsaw shavings, dead leaves and chopped vegetation. On the far bank the bushes and trees had shed all their leaves, the spindly branches dripping from the rain. The only comfort I took was in the windbreak they provided from the north wind whipping the rain across the meadows. A north wind is the enemy of all fly-fishers – the cold kills off hatch and stops the fish feeding, which gives rise to that old saw, ‘When the wind is from the north only the foolish angler sets forth.’ However, today was not the day to worry about the north wind, which is an almost daily occurrence in winter, sweeping as it does down the river valley. Days like this are always the fun parts of a restoration, when months of planning and weeks of work come to fruition. Today all we needed to do was dig out the plug of reeds, lift the boards in the Portland hatches and let the river flow in. And that is what we did.
Steve used the digger to scoop out the reeds and we laid them to one side. The flag irises, with their yellow flowers that bloom in May and June, were too beautiful to discard, so we’d replant the rhizome roots down North Stream to kick-start the regrowth in the spring in the parts of the stream left bare by their removal. The reeds gone, the water started to build up against the honey-yellow oak boards. These boards are never completely watertight; water weeps through the gaps between them. So as the flow backed up and the pressure increased, water squirted through the holes as if from a hosepipe. We were ready to open up. Standing on the bridge boards over the hatches we worked in pairs to lift the top boards out. The lower four quickly followed and within moments the fast flow from the Evitt rushed into North Stream. Like excited schoolboys we followed the bulge of water as it forced its way downstream. From time to time it came across an obstruction. Then the water would begin to back up, but when the force grew too strong the obstruction would give way and the flow continued. On it went down North Stream, carrying the mud and debris in its path. Under Bailey Bridge and the final straight to the main river. Standing by the deflector we watched the confluence of the two currents, the first time anyone had seen this for maybe forty or fifty years. True it wasn’t the prettiest of sights, with the dirty water of North Stream adding a nasty stain to the clarity of the Evitt, but the knowledge that our plan had worked was enough for now. Given a few weeks North Stream would flush itself clean, and then the fish would return.
4 (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
SPAWNING AND THE CYCLE OF LIFE (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)
AFTER THE FRENETIC activity of summer I miss my riverside companions on a winter dawn morning. No reed-chewing water voles suspiciously eyeing my progress along the riverbank, plopping for safety under the water if I come too close. No dew-laden spider webs strung between the purple loosestrife, glinting in the rising sun, as an eager arachnid crabs with intent across the translucent filament harvesting the victims of the night. Even the rabbits have gone, and as for the lolloping hares, no chance of any of those until spring. But even if it is all quiet along the banks, in the ever-clear water of the chalkstream the game is on to create the next generation of trout and salmon.
Trout and salmon are often spoken of in the same breath, but they are in many respects as close to each other in genetic terms as a horse is to a zebra. For a fly-fisherman they define what you are on a river. As salmon and trout are two distinct breeds, so are the men that fish for them. Not to announce which you are, even though you might fish for both, is like saying you support the Manchester football team. United or City? Salmon or trout? Both are equally tribal.
For fish whose subsequent lives will diverge so totally they begin life in the same gravel beds, of the same rivers, at precisely the same time of year. In lives that will span five to seven years some brown trout will travel no more than a few hundred yards from their birthplace, whereas the salmon has a round trip of some 4,000 miles to complete its life cycle. While we may think of a salmon as a river fish, in fact the greatest proportion of its life is spent at sea. These salmon are Atlantic salmon – Salmo salar. Defined as anadromous, their natural habitat is the sea, but they must return to the river of their birth to spawn. The eggs are laid in a river and that first year of life, as they grow from fry to parr and then smolt, is all spent in fresh water. But no chalkstream could ever provide enough food for a salmon to grow to maturity, so at a year old, measuring no more than 6 inches long, they head for the ocean and the food-rich waters off Greenland. It is an epic journey that begins and ends in a stream no more than 15 yards wide and a few feet deep.
The spawning grounds created by salmon and trout in the gravel riverbed are known as redds, and the sight of the first redds, be it in October or November, is something of a red-letter day for us chalkstream watchers. Indeed, redd-spotting becomes something of an obsession from around October time. I say ‘around’ because rivers don’t obey the Gregorian calendar. Like the snowdrops in your garden that appear in January one year and February the next, the creatures of the river adapt their habits according to what’s happening around them, which is in turn dictated by the climate. And not only the weather of now; the effects of a dry summer or harsh winter for instance, may linger many months or years to come.
I’ll get excited text messages from river keepers: Seen a redd today. First of the year!!!!!!!!!!!
. It is exciting because amid the gloom of late autumn and the winding down of a fishing season, it is a small ray of hope for things to come, however distant. It is also proof that as a river keeper you are doing something right. Your river is so damn perfect that fish want to breed in it. How good is that?
Walking beside the river, you will find the redds are easy to spot once you know what you are looking for: pale lozenge-shaped indentations on the river bottom, with a mound of gravel at the downstream end. Brushed clean of silt and debris, they shine out like lights compared with the surrounding gravel. Sometimes there is just one, sometimes a cluster, but it is the size that immediately marks out the difference between a trout and a salmon redd: the former about the size of a snowshoe, the latter a good-sized door mat. And there is more latent intent about the salmon redd; it will be dug deeper, down to the hard base beneath the gravel. Random gravel stones from the digging will be scattered far and wide across the riverbed. The mound of stones at the end will be much higher and more pronounced. Redds are, of course, made by the fish themselves to harness the flow of well-oxygenated water through the loose gravel to incubate their eggs, and oftentimes the hen will lay in more than one redd. Laying in a single redd is quite literally putting your eggs in one basket, and that basic instinct to perpetuate the species drives the hen to hedge her bets by laying in a series of redds, maybe with other hens. But we have to track back in time to appreciate how and why we have arrived at this point.
From my daily walks up and down the river the progress of the trout from an everyday Salmo trutta to a body quivering as if electrocuted whilst he releases his milt over the eggs is far easier to track than that of Salmo salar, the Atlantic salmon. It is in September that I start to see the first signs of spawning in the trout, who start to change in appearance in the weeks before they start the actual process of cutting redds and spawning. Suddenly that headlong pursuit of every item of food to feed on in preparation for the winter ahead slackens off. The fish are just as active, but not for food. Somewhere in their fishy brain the search for food is replaced by the search for a mate. The change sweeps over their body and suddenly that golden-brown complexion is replaced by a fierce red blush along both flanks. The males sprout a vicious-looking hook – a kype – on their jaw. The kype is largely for show, but it does make an otherwise innocuous-looking trout look like someone you would not want to mess with.
During this time the salmon are absent from this river, still making their way along the English Channel from the Atlantic to pick up the scent of their birth river somewhere on the south coast. How salmon navigate the entire journey to the far side of the Atlantic to the waters off Greenland and back again remains something of a mystery. The position of the sun, the stars and the gravitational pull of the earth are all cited as guides, but it is certain that the final leg of the journey is determined by smell.
Salmon never look to me like creatures that depend on smell for survival – their incredible ability to leap huge waterfalls or swim unceasingly for months on end seem more important – but smell is the thing. Early on in their lives they imprint the odour of their birth river onto a hormone that is secreted in the thyroid gland; it stays with them for evermore. Their hormonal library of smells is highly selective; only the ones that really matter make it onto the data bank. Likewise they will log the odour of their brothers and sisters in the river, picking up their scent in later years when the shoals are travelling across the ocean.
By the time our salmon sniffs the first scent of home, he or she has surmounted incredible odds to make it thus far. Of those 5,000 eggs laid three years ago in the River Evitt, our salar is probably the sole survivor, or at best one of two. And the dangers are far from over. Ravenous seals are gathering for an autumn feast and the drift nets in the estuary are laid in wait. It is the misfortune of salmon that they make such good eating, though it should be of no surprise. They are super-fit and have spent the past two to three years in the beautifully clean water of the Greenland Sea eating nothing but squid, shrimp, crustaceans, small cod and mackerel.
As far back as medieval times salmon has commanded a premium price, so the ever-resourceful coastal communities around Britain developed the highly efficient drift net to capture the salmon returning from the sea. There are all manner of types of drift netting, each of which has evolved for the particular locality, but the principle holds good for them all: wait for the tide to go out and then set your nets in such a way that they intercept the salmon travelling towards the estuary bottleneck on the inbound tide.
Travelling around the coastline of Britain you will see all sorts of weird and wonderful nets rigged up to capture salmon, though they are becoming fewer. Declining runs of salmon, fierce campaigning by conservation groups to have the nets removed and the harsh demands of a truly hard and difficult job are all contributing to the decline.
The simplest form of drift netting is a long net, anything from 30 yards to a few hundred, and 5 to 10 feet deep, that is slung across the tide, supported by floats along the upper edge. In shallow water it will be held in place at each end by a man holding a pole; in deeper water by boats. As the tide races through, the salmon follow, to get caught in the mesh of the net. The netsmen gather the ends of the net into a circle, capturing the salmon by hand as the circle gets smaller.
Not surprisingly this fast, efficient method is the one most favoured by poachers, but it is the fixed nets that are more typical of traditional salmon netting in the estuaries: wooden posts supporting nets that face the incoming tide. Sometimes the nets will be shaped like giant boxes as large as a van, 10 to 15 feet above the beach level, open on one side. Other times they are funnel-shaped. Or most simply, nets loosely slung between posts like a garden fence. One way or another they are doing the same job of entangling the salmon, which become more trapped the more they struggle. As the tide ebbs some of the fish will escape, but once the nets are exposed to the air the salmon don’t have long to last and the netsmen will appear to complete the harvest.
Fortunately for our salmon heading for the Evitt, these dangers are slight. The seal population along the south coast is sparse compared with say the northwest of Scotland and the estuary netting is now less common than it once was. Ahead is the brackish water of the estuary and beyond that the purity of the chalkstream water, although this change from seawater to fresh will quickly change our salmon’s physiology as the body cells, body and organs adapt for the months to come. Such problems do not trouble our brown trout, whose sole mission at this point is to find a mate. No swimming over thousands of miles for him. His potential partner may be one of the other trout that have lived within a few hundred yards of him for all their lives. There never seems to me any great logic or grand plan to the way trout choose their partners. There will be a bit of swimming around, occasionally another male will sidle up beside a paired female to be promptly chased away, but on the whole it all seems to happen at random. Or that is how it looks to me with my bank-down view, but scientists think there is more to it than this, and that even fish have that ‘eyes across a crowded room’ moment when the right mate comes into view. Nobody knows exactly what is going on in and around those redds, but somehow skin colour, conformation, size, pheromones or possibly a mix of these and other factors combine to make their choice a complex matter.
You would think that the trout at Gavelwood would get used to me – after all, they must see me just about every day. But they never seem to. The only time they are oblivious to my presence is at spawning. Every other time they will bolt for cover if I disturb them. But at spawning I can stand on the bank almost directly above them and wave my arms about like a lunatic and they will carry on with their business. If I am in the river I can damn nearly step over them in my waders as they fin away one side or another to let me pass, to return to the same spot in my wake. The creation of the redd and the spawning to follow is all-consuming, but in their enthusiasm for each other the trout also forget about their most dangerous predator, the otter.
Otters are an ever-present but rarely glimpsed part of the Gavelwood family, about whom I have mixed feelings. On the one hand I should celebrate their existence, having come back in great numbers from the brink of extinction. But on the other they are one of the best fish-eating machines invented by Mother Nature. In ten months out of twelve it will be rare for me to see an otter, though most days I will be able to tell they have passed through. They are nocturnal creatures, using the river as their highway, travelling as much as 20 or 30 miles in a night. A paw print in a muddy bank, crushed grass where they slide into the river, and spraints, or dung, are all telltale signs, as is the corpse of a fish. In winter the latter will be barely recognizable as a fish: a few bits of fin, skin and scale in an area of flattened grass where the otter will have settled down to eat. If it is, or was, a gravid female trout there will be a scattering of eggs to add to the mix of body parts, which is sad in its own way, though they will rarely go to waste as the moorhens and water voles, or maybe a passing fox, are more than happy to feast on this unexpected bounty.
Every time I see the dog otter – I think we must have just the one – I am struck by his size and lithe movement. He is around twenty pounds in weight; put in context that is about twice the weight of a domestic cat. And like a cat he is incredibly supple; he doesn’t dive or jump into the river, he pours himself in, barely making a ripple. Once in the water, despite his bulk, he is hard to spot, but I’ll be able to track his underwater progress by the surge he creates on the surface. Some yards downstream he will pop his head out of the water, swivel around to check he has put sufficient distance between us and continue on his way at a more leisurely pace.
It is that bulk that makes the otter a deadly predator, because the bulk requires constant nutrition. It is reckoned that an adult male has to consume 10 per cent of his body weight each day to survive the winter. That is a two-pound fish, which is a big fish for the Evitt. More realistically we are talking about a whole bunch of smaller fish from trout, grayling and eels right down to the tiniest, like bullheads. Of course my otter’s diet is not pescatarian – frogs, crayfish, birds and water voles are all fair game – but in winter there are meagre pickings, so a careless spawning trout is a tempting prospect.
Come the summer things are very different; food abounds and so do the otters, which often become my evening companions when I stay late to fish the evening rise. I always hear them before I see them. Otters have this high-pitched ‘eek’ noise that they ping across the meadows like sonar to keep in touch with each other; it is the mother’s way of tracking the pups. As night falls the parents seem perfectly content to let the young ones range all over Gavelwood. I can become caught in this crossfire of constant eeking, and it is not a noise you have to strain to hear. It is incredibly insistent and frequent, though the frequency is a good indicator of how well things are going. I reckon that a contented otter eeks every thirty seconds; if one becomes distressed the frequency escalates until it becomes almost continuous. And it lasts all night or until the family move on to another part of the river.
These long, light summer nights are part of the growing-up phase for the pups, when the parents bring them out from the birthing holt to learn how to explore and hunt. Strangely, unlike most other species that become fiercely protective of their young, otters are more playful. They will often swim and hunt together in the river, just keeping a weather eye out for me. Otters are pretty well the top of the food chain and they regard humans as more of an oddity than a threat. However, lower down the chain the poor fish truly suffer.
Two fit adult otters, plus three or four ravenous, growing pups, seem to be the usual summer contingent that I will see in the twilight and on into the early hours of the morning. The solitary otter I see in the winter is a stealthy hunter, but in the summer the pack instinct takes over. Pike Pool, about halfway down the main river, is our deepest part of the Evitt and is the favourite place for the family to gather for a hunting lesson. The pool, which starts when the river makes an abrupt 90-degree turn, goes down to about 15 feet, constantly eroded by the water as it hits the opposite bank and swirls in back eddies before the gradient reasserts the natural order of things and the water heads downstream as it should. Along the bank stands a line of alder trees and the roots grow down into the water. Beneath the roots is a huge undercut, the perfect refuge for the fish and eels, or so they think.
The family will not so much hunt in a pack, but they do hunt collectively – rapidly diving and surfacing across the pool with their wet, brown fur glinting in the moonlight. They pause for just a moment to catch their breath before diving again. One can only imagine the massive panic in the fish community as they flee for safety in the dark recesses under the tree roots. And safe it is from every predator other than the otter. For herons and cormorants the fish are protected once out of sight. For mink they are too deep. Pike usually give up after a single attack. But otters are persistent. Once they have the fish cornered, they will dive and dive again. As the hunt becomes more frantic and the effort greater, they will emit a sharp cough when they surface to grab a breath. Inevitably they succeed and the victorious otters will slither out of the water onto the base of the tree to start devouring their catch. They sit back on their haunches, holding the fish in front of them using the sharp claws of their webbed feet for purchase, and then tear at the body, starting with the head. It is violent and fast. From the other side of the river I can hear the flesh being torn apart. Strangely they are not competitive about the catch; they wait their turn. When one has had enough he or she will lay what is left down for another to pick it up.
I have never yet seen the otters catch a salmon; maybe they are too big or simply swim away fast rather than hide. Trout are the most common, eels not far behind, and grayling the most prized – in winter they devour every last morsel of the latter. In the summer part-eaten fish or eels, too big for the otter pups to finish, are common. With the eels the head seems to be the only bit they like to eat; decapitated eels are a common sight in the morning dew. I usually kick them back into the river for the crayfish. I used to throw the part-eaten fish into the field – dead fish on the riverbed can look alarming to visitors – but since I have discovered that otters are partial to a five-day-old, decomposed trout I also kick them back in on the grounds that it might save the life of another fish.
It is something of a fallacy that trout love the fastest water in a section of a river to live out their lives; in fact almost the reverse is true. The older and bigger a trout becomes, the more he or she gravitates to the deeper, slower parts, so autumn is the only time we get to have a good look at the long-term residents who are the brood stock for the next generation. If you are a tiny little juvenile trout the fast, shallow water is a great place to grow up because you have the place to yourself. For the bigger trout the effort of holding station in the riffles, the fast-flowing shallow water that separates the pools, is too much for any possible rewards and the risk from predators like herons very high. But for the little, tiny trout even a good-sized pebble will provide shelter from the flow whilst waiting for a tasty nymph to come tumbling by. Predators? Well, when you are small it is all about the lesser of evils. Yes, you could be plucked from the stream by a kingfisher, but in truth your greatest danger lies from the very adult trout that probably spawned you. The one thing all fish love to eat is other fish.
The trout I hoped would gather on the gravel beds in North Stream would be fast developers to do so at three years; four is more common and it is the females who first seek out the ideal patch to set up the nursery. It is true that fish often head upstream to spawn to seek out the purest water and best laying gravel, but unlike say Pacific salmon that congregate in the uppermost point of a river in a giant, swirling pink mass, brown trout are smarter than that. Quite frankly they travel only as far as they need to travel, be it a metre or a mile, which is why I had high hopes for our newly restored stream. Brown trout are eminently practical when it comes to spawning; if they have to travel 20 miles upstream to find the perfect place and mate they will do it, but if both are within a few yards, why bother? I was hoping North Stream would be that place, the breeding ground for the trout that inhabited Gavelwood already. The main river was fine, but the stream would be better with more places for redds and a better nursery for the eggs once hatched. From my point of view, it was all about making it easy for the female, because creating a redd is tough work. She positions herself over the chosen spot and then with flicks of the tail or a sideways movement of the body gradually dislodges a few pieces of gravel at a time. With thousands of movements, executed thousands of times over a period of days, gradually an indentation is cut in the gravel of the riverbed. Some of the stones get carried away on the current, but others gradually pile up in a mound at the downstream end of the cut. This mound, seemingly an unimportant by-product of the excavation, will in fact be vitally important when the females come to lay their eggs. But for now our female has to seek out the right location for her redd. The main river is just too fast in most places, as no sooner will she start to dig a hole than the rapid flow will scour it flat again, and even if she succeeded, when it comes to mating the eggs would be whipped away in the current before fertilization had had a chance to take place. So in the search for the ideal spot I am hoping that the trout moving upstream will turn right into the relative calm of North Stream to check it out.
Every action in a river causes some sort of reaction, so digging up the riverbed, however well intentioned, causes all sorts of commotion for other river creatures, and in this particular case the tiny ones. The gravel riverbed is home to millions of invertebrates, animals like snails, bloodworms, nymphs and shrimps, which thrive in the constant temperature of the chalkstream water. While 10ºC might be a very cold bath for humans, for this group it is perfect. And if they thrive, so do the creatures that eat them, namely the fish. Fish are opportunists. Unlike people they don’t have a routine that tells them it will be lunch at such and such a time. If food comes along they eat it and the moment that the redd cutting begins I will see the yearlings – fish under twelve months old – gathering below the cutting area to start hoovering up the unfortunate invertebrates, who can only drift helpless on the current until they either get caught in some weed, float down to the bottom or get swallowed. It must also be said that the yearlings, or parr, are not just there for the food; as eager adolescents they are standing by to add their bit to the spawning process. These ‘sneakers’ as they are called will slip between the adults at the crucial moment. Whether they contribute much in a normal year is debatable, but nature brings them to sexual maturity early as a back-up plan. In a bad year, maybe caused by low water or some other natural disaster that prevents enough males making it to the redds, there will at least be someone there to complete the job.
Fish are not beyond digging into the gravel themselves to find food. Watch a grayling in a river and you will see him go tail up, push his snout down into the gravel and with a puff of silt around his head suck up a shrimp. But why go to all that effort when a redd-making trout does the work for you? This is a winter feast that will only be bettered by the trout eggs themselves. And in the hot summer days, when anglers start to feel the heat and the fish get lazy, there are opportunities for both to capitalize on the dislodged food sites. At four or five spots across Gavelwood water meadows I have places where the cattle can either wade across the river or get into it to drink. As your average bovine drinks around seven gallons a day, maybe twice as much in hot weather, that is a lot of getting in and out of the river. And every time they do it stirs up the riverbed, uprooting the inhabitants. Trout get to know this, so they wait downstream, only moving out from the shade when the muddied water gives them notice of food to come. I do the same, and a well-cast shrimp imitation as the clouded water starts to clear will often turn a dead afternoon into a successful one.
The gravel of North Stream was abundant, but the decades of neglect had left it rock-hard, without the winter floods to break up the surface and sweep away the silt that had formed a crust. Within a week of reopening the Stream the worst of the silt and mud had been washed away to reveal plenty of potential spawning grounds, but when I tested them out the reality was depressing. Jabbing a garden fork into random sections of the riverbed I was mostly rewarded with a bruised hand. The tines would barely penetrate more than an inch or two. This was bad news. If I could not break through with a steel fork then the trout would find the same and keep moving on upstream to abandon North Stream. There were two options – do nothing or intervene.
Do nothing is not so bad if you don’t mind waiting for years. Gradually, nature, in the form of exceptionally heavy winter flows, would break up the surface into the loose gravel that a trout might easily dislodge. But I didn’t feel inclined to wait for years, so intervention, in the form of gravel-blasting, was the remedy. Gravel-blasting is not the nuclear solution it might at first sound. You take a high-pressure water pump with a steel probe on the end, stand yourself in the river, press the probe down into the gravel to a depth of about 6 inches and then wait while the water from the pump does the work, washing away the decades of silt that was binding together the gravel stones. When the water starts to run clear, you pull the probe out and push it back into the gravel a foot or so away. For the first ten minutes this is a fun job, but after a while the novelty palls. It is effective, however, and when you stand on the bank to admire your handiwork there is always a certain amount of satisfaction – the riverbed looks like a freshly plumped pillow and the gravel will positively glisten.
While the trout are starting to weigh up the options of North Stream, our salmon pick up the pace as the scent of the home river gets stronger. Past Land’s End they start to hug the coastline, the beaches of Cornwall then Devon almost in sight. Gradually the pack thins out as one by one they peel off for rivers like the Dart, Exe and Camel. For the remainder the chalk cliffs of the Jurassic Coast are the marker that these salmon are heading for the chalkstream rivers of Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. Yet the salmon might be less eager to make the transition from salt water to fresh if they knew that the change signals the end for most of them: nineteen out of every twenty salmon are certain to be dead within a few months. The odds are much worse for the males than females, but they know nothing of this, so the urge to procreate impels them forward.
Why do they die? From the very moment our salmon enters the fresh water he or she stops feeding. And this cessation is absolute. Not a single calorie of nutrition will be consumed until the salmon returns to the sea or more probably dies. During the time of its life when food is most needed there is none. Day after day the fish swims upstream against the current, navigating weirs, dams and obstacles whilst the body adapts to the change from salt to fresh water, losing weight and condition. In the confines of the river a new raft of predators awaits; otters, pike, herons, cormorants and even fishermen line up for a piece of the action. These are not good odds, and at the head of the river the body-sapping ritual of mating will deliver the death blow to nearly all who make it that far. At Gavelwood we are about 35 miles up from the coast, more or less two-thirds of the way up the river system. For a salmon, a chalkstream like our Evitt is an easy run: no massive waterfalls to leap over or fierce currents to swim against. The greatest point of difficulty is Middle Mill, 5 miles up from the sea. At one time this was the biggest flour-grinding mill in the county, capturing the entire river flow to drive two enormous waterwheels. Below the mill races is the mill pool, a huge expanse of swirling water, which is the first place the salmon rest up on their run inland.
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Simon Cooper
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Хобби, увлечения
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 28.04.2024
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О книге: Chalkstreams are one of the very few habitats that are nearly exclusive to England. They range far and wide from the famous River Test in Hampshire across eight other counties from Dorset in the west to Yorkshire in the north. Every river is very special in its own right.Brought up in Hampshire, Simon Cooper was lucky enough to have great fly fishing on his doorstep, but as he grew up, got a job and moved away he soon realised what a closed world chalkstreams were unless you were in the know. So with little more than a germ of an idea, a telephone and the book of his fishing contacts, he set out to change that. His passion for all things fly fishing, but in particular the chalkstreams of southern England, shines through in this lyrical and most extraordinary of journeys.We are treated to a year in the life of a chalkstream. From the remarkable spectacle of salmon, sea trout and brown trout spawning in winter, to the stunning sight of emerging water voles in spring and the budding explosion of mayflies in the early days of summer, the author describes the true wonders of life in a chalkstream in his inimitable and evocative voice. He introduces us to the fascinating diversity of life that inhabits its waters and environs – the fish, the angling community, the plant life and the wildlife. We learn how neglect threatens these inhabitants and why the fight to save and restore the chalkstreams is so vital, not only for fishermen, but for anybody who values the beauty of rural England.