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River Axe Salmon
Years of painstaking work by the Environment Agency and fisheries groups to boost salmon stocks on a Devon river is starting to pay off.
The River Axe in East Devon once boasted a healthy population of salmon, but stocks crashed in the 1980´s and early 1990´s as a result of agricultural pollution and excessive erosion that caused salmon spawning beds to become smothered with silt.
The Agency tried to reverse the decline by re-stocking the main tributaries of the Axe with salmon fry, but survival rates were low and the slump in salmon numbers continued.
More recently the Agency has concentrated, instead, on raising and releasing smolts into local tributaries. Smolts are larger than fry and have a better rate of survival. These young fish have a small fin on their back (adipose fin) that is clipped before release so that they can be easily identified on recapture.
Encouragingly, these fin-clipped salmon are now returning for the first time to the Axe in good numbers. After just a year at sea, the smolts grow from a few inches in length to adult fish weighing 3 - 6 lbs. Young salmon returning to their home river for the first time to spawn are known as "grilse".
The Agency has a fish trap on the Axe to monitor salmon numbers. It is also used to capture a small number of wild salmon for use as "brood stock". Eggs are stripped from hen fish and taken to a hatchery. After hatching the young salmon fry are later moved to a rearing pond in East Devon where they turn into smolts and are kept prior to being released into the Axe.
"We were becoming concerned as over the past three years the number of migrating salmon caught on the Axe has been low. Last year no female fish were caught which meant no brood fish were obtained. This year, in contrast, we´ve recorded our second best return of salmon since we started the project," said Dave Brogden for the Environment Agency.
"The return of the first of these fin-clipped salmon is very exciting. It is a real milestone and shows that after years of preparatory work the Agency´s rearing and re-stocking policy is starting to pay off. It is great news'.
A number of additional measures have been introduced over the years to help revive salmon stocks on the Axe. These include improvements to and maintenance of gravel beds to encourage spawning and the removal of obstructions such as weirs within the river system to help migratory fish move upstream.
The Agency has been helped in its work by the Axe Vale Rivers Association (AVRA), an umbrella body for riparian owners, that has provided support and contributed to the re-stocking programme. It has also been assisted by the Axe Flyfisher's.
The revival in salmon numbers is among the spin-off benefits of the Axe Catchment Project, an EU-funded initiative that has brought together a range of organisation's and interest groups to improve the quality and potential of the Axe and its tributaries.