Some call it ranching. It is, anyway, a calculated effort to keep the wild salmon, one of our greatest resources, economic and tourist, and a wonderful creature to be cherished as a symbol of the continuity of life, from slowly dying out or being killed off. There may be many such groups, but a few people who are active around Loughs Inagh and Derryclare in Galway, are earning some success.
The first process is as in any hatchery. Fish are stripped of eggs and melt and the fry and later fingerlings cared for in tanks. About a year after hatching they are transferred to a sort of firm container nets in the open lough, something like the devices used in fish farming. They are kept there for some weeks, still being fed as they were in the tanks, and becoming accustomed to the smell or tang of their native waters. A lasting imprint on their minds and bodies. So, as smolts they are released.
They are now about the length of a your hand, and off they go to the sea. Do they come back in numbers? One satisfied member of the fishery recently caught two grilse fish returned within one year from its marine foraging. And from being that tiny smolt, the first had become a healthy six and a half pounder. The other, very welcome, too, was not far short of four pounds.
It is a near miracle, for which anglers and other fish eaters are equally grateful, that the ocean is so bountiful as to cause a mite of a fish, in one twelve month, to multiply its weight maybe twenty fold. These people are putting something back, not just for themselves. How successful will it be? They have installed fish counters. Not all which pass through will be their fish, of course.
Without any disrespect to the employment capacity of fish farms, with its good low priced salmon in the supermarkets and its not so good aspects, such as the possibility of mutant strains when their captives escape, if that is a reality the so called ranching method seems to have clean hands, and to maintain a useful tradition. This, understand, is all about salmon. Sea trout is a different kettle of fish.
Where was a time when otters were also grateful for a good run of salmon, as we know from Wild Sports of the West. An angling book of half a century ago writes of otters from nearby Screehe fishery. Forty five were killed in one year. Mrs St George used to have one or two as pets. She could do anything with them and once took one to New York and back again. The Customs officials in both countries could not make out what it was, so passed it on as a "dubious" animal. So claims George Cornwallis West in Edwardians Go Fishing, Putnam 1932.