Friday 2 December 2011

Do Not Mess With Fish 152,

and you thought fish were fun!

well there were a few hundred salmon in River Teme at Ludlow who did not think it was funny, they were trapped whilst trying to get upstream to spawn, the first of the Atlantic Salmon to make their way up The Teme are four or five years old - some have come all the way from Greenland to make their final journey, first up the River Severn and then to the spawning grounds some thirty miles further up the Teme from Ludlow, the problem, is that this year the water level is to low, meaning the salmon can not make it up stream,


but the good news is that teams from The Environment Agency are using diggers to make trenches and lining them with sandbags to make it easier for the salmon to get up the weirs, called salmon/fish ladders some are permanently in place with viewing windows in the side of them so you can watch the salmons progress, I remember many years ago whilst staying in Scotland with long time fried Peter Thompson and family we visited the salmon ladder at the Pitlochry hydroelectric dam, and its famous fish ladder which spans the River Tummel in Scotland, about 5,000 fish a year make it up the ladder, they are counted electronically, but back to the River Teme, hopefully the efforts of the team will be rewarded with a bumper crop of salmon over the next few years.

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