(Picture – anglers from Cromford fly fishing club sampling and monitoring invertabrate life in the river)
When you look at a river what do you see? Water obviously, plants and trees on the bank, dippers, kingfishers, wagtails taking a newly hatched fly from the air, voles busy swimming, a deer venturing in to drink from the woods – the list goes on and on. What most people fail to comprehend (for obvious reasons!) is there is a whole other world underneath the surface. Unfortunately, the underwater world, when it comes to conservation, gets forgotten, yet it is this world that is vital to the world you see above.
As the weather cools, the trout will start to pair up and spawn. It’s vital that spawning beds (or redds as we call them) are protected, did you know it’s actually a criminal offence to interfere with a spawning trout! Without a fresh crop of trout fry emerging from their eggs, there will be no streak of blue from a kingfisher as it dashes around the margins hunting for trout fry. Riverkeepers, bailiffs and club conservation officers, as well as interested anglers, will be ensuring as best as they can that fish spawning beds remain undisturbed through the spawning season.
Buried in the mud at the bottom of the river, mayfly nymphs will be slowly developing ready to ascend through the water and hatch at around the beginning of June. Anglers undertake a huge amount of sampling and recording invertebrate life – this work has uncovered a nationwide decline of many aquatic invertebrates and experts are using this information to try and understand why. Without these aquatic flies hatching through Spring and Summer, you would not see the precise athleticism of the wagtail as it catches beak fulls of mayflies mid-air before fluttering back down to the rocks at the side of the stream.
Many of the fishing clubs and estates that run the fishing on the river are also riparian owners, this means they own the river banks and also the river bed. This allows the development of protected areas alongside the river for other wildlife to flourish, for deer to shelter whilst waiting for a quiet time for a drink or the habitat of the rare water vole to be protected. It’s anglers “boots on the ground” that are removing the parasite spreading signal crayfish from the rivers or the invasive balsam from the bankside.
It’s often anglers, through the representations of their legal bodies such as Fish Legal that successfully monitor river and fish stock in order to prosecute polluters who spew nature killing effluent into the river.
The point is, that the focus for most conservation is fluffy animals, or pretty meadows, things that can be easily seen and understood. Who cares about a slimy eel, or a small silvery roach? It’s important to remember that without a strong and healthy underwater habitat, much of the nature you see on and around the river bank will simply disappear.
Anglers and clubs put a huge effort into preserving and protecting the underwater world because it’s not only in their interests to do so but because they care about the river and it’s future.