John Bailey – The Kingfisher Diaries
January 1st 2010
Lessons Written in Snow
The holiday period, for me at least, was a bit of a bummer. Not in personal terms of course but certainly in piscatorial ones. The stillwaters were pretty much frozen and the river was a soup of snow-melt. Not even a chub could be induced to feed over the heart of the Christmas period.
Still, I did my best and was, at least, out and about looking and, it turns out, learning as well.
I walked round a lake not that far away that has lavished money on an otter-proof fence. We've obviously discussed this development around the main Kingfisher Lake but have remained unconvinced. And I'm glad. This is why.
The more I walked around this otter-protected lake, I realised that the endless tracks on the ice and around the margins were not made by dogs but, in fact, by otters themselves! The obvious lesson here is that otters find normal fencing no obstacle to them. If we are really to keep otters out, we're looking at structures resembling Wormwood Scrubs!
This was compounded by a chat with my friend Neil who had watched a wildlife programme on otters. In it, he'd seen them scaling the sheer walls of a mill pool some ten to fifteen feet high! How on earth we expect, therefore, a relatively small fence to keep out these ingenious predators I just don't know!
Next up was a really interesting conversation with one of our most fascinating carp anglers at Kingfishers. Seems he'd been watching a mink fishing around the margins of an island for quite some time the previous week. The animal repeatedly dived and came up with a small roach in its mouth. It built up a pile of them, obviously stocking up for Christmas!
Read the press and you'd think all the damage done to our fisheries is by otters and by cormorants. Whilst these two species do us no good, we tend, these days, to overlook the continuing role of the mink. It's tempting to think the mink tide is a thing of the past but there are still plenty around, still doing plenty of damage.
I'm thinking about the Wensum again. Say you've got a shoal of fifty or so eight ounce fish, our hope for the future. And let's say the otters, the cormorants and the pike don't get them. They've then got the mink to contend with.
It's a difficult life in this new decade of the new century. If we look back to 1970, say, there were very few otters. Cormorants had not come inland in the numbers that we see today. And, of course, nearly all the mink releases were still in the future. Whilst Wensum roach in 1970 faced many problems, the damage done by predation was obviously considerably reduced.