Chris Avery | Wednesday, 12 February 2025
So then, mindful of the growing risks from urban sprawl and the upstream developments; and of Anglian Water’s shambolic potential for catastrophe. I am constantly noodling with cunning plans for making life a little less uncertain in the long term for our spotted friends in the Brook, my mind of late have been especially focused upstream, to the very tops of the very, very, top beat. Wandering upstream to this, there a few patches of gravel around but nothing obvious for any Trout in the few kilometres of mooching up those waters above the sewage works. Something which always eats at me as being decidedly wrong. (both the presence of a sewage works and the lack of gravel, one we need to keep an attentive eye on, the other’s well within our gift to improve, with a bit of grunt, goodwill and creativity).
50% of these wonderful Hum-beings that I share this planet with appear outwardly curvilinear, and despite a lifetime of struggling to fathom, remain a complete mystery to me. So any attempt in my ability to second-guess a Trout female is pretty futile. But the good books by those sciency; boffiny;research-types; all seem to state that the Brown Trout femme fatale, go upstream to breed!
Not that they will instinctively know, nor will have had a good chat over the Rununculus patch about the matter; that the gravel is bugger-all good upstream. So when the passion takes them, and they finally decide to leave the habitual bankside bolt hole and seek a bit of rough, they will ignore the default settings that compel them. But will choose instead to drop back a few kilometres, to where those Anglers dumped a load of gravel in a dozen years ago, and make do with slumming it this year. This outcome never strikes me as very likely. But then, I am not a scientifically trained boffiny type.
I imagine our ladies swimming up over various patches of silty, compacted beds, looking for some “cosy-condominium” to lay her eggs with a good neighbourhood nearby to bring up those sprogs. I can never really come to terms with them deciding, “Well now I’m here and all seems pretty much rubbish, and the blokes are here too. I’m gagging to get this over with. But maybe I’d better just hold on until it’s all just perfect!” Then turn around and head a few kilometres back downstream in blind hope, and keep on searching for Shangri-La, that in this stream, sadly doesn’t exist, at present!
Were that the case we would never see them on the Redds, but by mid-winter we see plenty of patches of cleared bed betraying where the girls had ‘made-do’ and sadly that’s the best we have available for them to play the increasingly crucial numbers game.
Our task is to help swing or swell the numbers, the percentages, of the say, 1,500 eggs she lays, that will make it to become healthy hatchlings, and then eventually get to breed.
And if we get things Tickety boo and 1400 come through and hatch, and then if we can provide them a good safe habitat to develop for a year. Even then, only 2.7% of those will survive that first year in the stream. Then with good fortune 50% will survive each following year. In our Brook with the quicker growth rates and maturity maybe 10 of those 1500 will make it to breeding size. That my friends, is what success looks like in a Trout stream, and I fear we are a long way from it!
And as our fish don’t appear to make year five… they are unlikely to get to breed twice.
Years back when we tried using a hatchery box with eggs seeded in layers of immaculately clean gravel, free from silt with Brook water percolating up after flowing through three sets of filters. These fliters were cleaned and inspected daily for many weeks until the tiny hatchlings appeared in the collecting box.
If we got over 50% through to hatch, it seemed at the time a disappointment. In retrospect it was a huge success, for the subsequent few years we would get several hundred very poor looking individuals from the 25,000 eggs. And when the box was packed up and cleaned out in spring, we found a mass of stinking decaying matter and silt and what looked like furry white Fungus as a return on our investment.
That was the numbers game when conditions go against you and you’re unable to keep fresh oxygenated water passing over those eggs. There were other faults with our system of recruitment too, and I doubt if any of those hatchlings survived much longer than a few days when put in the Brook.
Still it turned the mindset of a fishing club from stocking and killing and looking at the water as a potential for easy fishing. To, within a few years, nurturing and returning fish and the river being considered as a habitat and complex ecosystem.
Just how bad is it at the top of the beats?
Should the Willow brook Trout reject the meagre pickings en-route, they eventually end up in a deep round muddy mill pond. And, should they feel driven to persist beyond this point, there is then a jump up a small weir, if they can make it, (never witnessed it, but we have every right to believe they can). Through some very confused, rushing water for a few yards, but this then immediately leads into the Mill Leat. (dramatic chords of music illustrating dread and impending doom inserted here).
The ‘Leat’, is a body of water where the main stream is side channelled, via a sluice, and then held back to be released for passage through the narrow gap to drive the spinning blades of a large wooden water wheel.
In the days when that Wheel drove the spindles and cogs, it was central to the economy of a poor rural community. Now it’s preserved only as a folly for a grand old, luxurious: and very large, cottage. Of no benefit for; and way beyond the price range, of this present Rural economy. It’s a retired banker or lawyer’s chance to own the contents of a typical Constable painting and pretend to be linked to ancient tradition while living the “English” country lifestyle.
When working this mill would have been filthy, noisy, damp, and more than likely filled with choking air from all the dust that would have layered every surface. It would not have featured an immaculate French-polished old grandfather clock and a huge enamelled Aga cooker with matching coloured pans and polished floors strewn with precious hand-woven rugs from the middle east.
The Mill, like the Leat and the blockage in the stream it creates, is now useless, and offers as much benefit to the environment as a new Disney land. And, like that Bugger of a Bridge; the culvert downstream, it is a major man-made bottleneck, that taxes the chances of the Trout’s population which we have to be inventive and work around. The Leat is a grim few hundred yards of deep canalised water, with virtually no flow, whose sole-benefit offered for our Trout stream below, seemingly is its ability to act as a giant silt store, and to be beloved by the big Mayflies, while nowadays being a potential for more troublesome warming of the summer waters flushed downstream. It becomes more of a burden with each passing year,
Up above this Leat, the Brook goes all Brothers Grimm on us for its last 100 yards or so. Into a deep tangle of wild woodland. Through fallen trees, Brambles, and wader shredding Briar Roses, it delves and twists its last few meanders and pools. This is strategically unkept to be cover for Pheasants, I did use to try up there with a rod, it was challenging and there was little water to aim at before reaching the dam wall of Apethorpes ornamental lake and the end of our fishing map, it felt almost mischievous being in there.
But treading on the tail of a female Pheasant one day as she exploded out from under my boot, leaving her feathers behind and scaring the bejeezus out of me, I realised that, though part of our club waters.. it was firmly now home and sanctuary to Lord Brassy’s Pheasants and Deer, and the sound of early shooting season’s guns were not far away. It was not worth upsetting a game keeper who no doubt would prefer us not on that stretch, nor risk causing any friction with the landowner and patron of our fishing club. I could save my ingrained seditious streak for the chairman and club secretary and spare the hand that fed us.. And so I largely forgot about that stretch of water and filed it away as no longer relevant for consideration.
I have since become a more trusted and respected member of the club, with a proper title and all (invented just for me!). With access now to old records in the club archives, I have discovered that the National River Authority observed Trout breeding up there in Brothers Grimm wood. (Archives collated and held by the old Secretary who used to dismiss my observations of smaller possibly wild fish, as ridiculous. And my fanciful pipe dreams that maybe we had a breeding population of wild Trout hidden by the numbers of stocked fish, with the withering rebuttal.. “There has never been any evidence of Trout breeding in the Willow brook.” Full stop; end of conversation!!).
The NRA was the group that became the Environment agency, so this was between 1989 and 1996.(I’ve also seen ‘Minutes’ of AGM meetings in the 1970’s where its written that Trout were observed making Redds)
I don’t remember seeing any likely sites when I was there last, on Lord Brassey’s land. But I was seeking feeding trout and some way of casting a line in this jungle. It was before I understood and looked for our Trout’s needs and wants and before I became strangely (very bloody strangely) misty-eyed and almost maternal at the sight of a mound of clean gravel on a river bed.
Since reading that NRA sighting of Trout on Redds, I’ve been dying to get into those woods for a second look and see if, within that seemingly forbidden kingdom, there is a small area which is, or with a bit of work could become, an ideal destination to raise a Trout family for those wandering mothers to be.
Access for us humans has become harder as the thorns and tumbled boughs have become almost impossible to penetrate from our side without a chainsaw. So permission to get in and explore would be needed from Lord Brassy himself, the kindly club patron. I asked if I could be introduced, If I could join in on the Christmas gift run, but it kept getting put off for one reason or another. And another season passed me by, frustrated at the lack of progress. Until this January and the late Christmas present run of this year. (to be continued “I have a dream”).
All best to all in the Sexyloops Kingdom.