Activist Anglers founder Jim Murray and Wessex Rivers Trust director of operations Mike Blackmore discuss the radical changes they believe are needed to protect the future of chalkstreams
SALMON ARE IN CRISIS, AND AS AN angler and nature lover, writes Jim Murray, I feel it’s vital to get a clear and facts-based message out far and wide. I also believe anglers need to be open to change, both their attitude and approach to fly-fishing on certain rivers, if we are to have a chance of mitigating the current issues.
David Attenborough recently described chalkstreams as “one of the rarest habitats on earth”. Running into just a few of them is a gravely dwindling number of our rarest, oldest (possible the UK’s original) salmon population. The chalkstream salmon, considered by some scientists to be a subspecies, Salmo salar calcariensis, is on an even more critical knife-edge than its Scottish cousins. We’re witnessing the extinction of an irreplaceable icon.
I met up with my friend Mike Blackmore of Wessex Rivers Trust to ask: what’s going on?
MIKE Chalkstreams are certainly in crisis. 2024 marks 20 years since the government published The State of England’s Chalkstreams report, which declared that all chalkstreams should be “protected or restored” to a quality that would sustain their “wildlife”, “water supplies”, “recreation”, and “cultural history”. Ten years later in 2014, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) independently published a second State of England’s Chalkstreams review, which concluded that our chalkstreams were still “in a shocking state of health” and noting that “all six nationally important salmon chalkstreams [are] categorised as ‘at risk’ or ‘probably at risk’”. The 2014 report practically begged the Government to deliver a step-change in agriculture and water industry regulation and deliver the Environment Agency’s (seemingly forgotten and now laughable) goal of “zero pollution incidents by 2020”. It also called for water metering of all chalk catchments households by the same deadline and identified “physical modification for historic land drainage and industry” as a key driver for failure, calling for the removal of “weirs, sluices, hatches and other barriers to fish passage”. Well, now another decade has past, and yet here we still are, staring down the barrel of the same gun, only now the trigger is being well and truly squeezed.
JIM We often use salmon as a keystone species directly representing the health of their rivers. In that context, what do you think might have caused its acute demise in our chalkstreams?
MIKE Well, in the case of chalkstream salmon, we know that something terrible must be happening at sea. Whether coastal gillnetting, deep sea mega-trawlers, changes to prey availability off the coast of Greenland or all of the above, the problem wil
