Cormorants devastate top loch

Fishing just for birds on top loch in Scotland


SCOTLAND'S top angling loch will no longer be stocked or used for international competitions after protected cormorants devastated stocks of brown trout.

Jamie Montgomery, the owner of Kinross Estate has announced that he will no longer stock Loch Leven, and has cut the number of fishing boats by 80 per cent.

Last year, about 100,000 fish were introduced, but a recent survey found that cormorants were eating between 42,000 and 123,000 trout every year. Up to 700 cormorants have been counted on the loch in winter, feeding mainly on trout.

Now, just six boats will be allowed on the Perthshire loch after Loch Leven Fisheries, announced losses of ?500,000 over the last five years.

Next season, Loch Leven, which hosts the Scottish National Fly-fishing Championship finals, the world's oldest national fly-fishing event, will revert to being a naturally-stocked water.

The move has caused dismay among the 30,000-strong Scottish Anglers' National Association.

Ronnie Picken, the president of the association, said: "Loch Leven has been the home of stillwater fly-fishing in Scotland and the venue for competitions and national and international championships for well over 100 years. Obviously, it can no longer be considered as a venue."

Ian, that is a mind blowing report, what are your own thoughts in this instance?
Are we to blame for the cormorants lack of natural food in the first place?.
It would break my heart if cormorants cleaned out the beautiful local venues that I fish on. This must also break the heart of a man trying to run a buissness and make a living.

Cormorants are basically saltwater and estuarine species.

Bloody Blair (and that's the person I blame all ills on in Britain) was told 9 years ago that commercial fishing around the British Isles must cease for at least 20 years to allow the cod and other species to repopulate the seas. But no, the ****head did nothing!

There are still commercial fishing craft going out and decimating the oceans of it's valuable fish. Not only that, foreign fishing boats are allowed in our waters.

Let's give the seas a rest for goodness sake. Let's let the oceans of the world recuperate and give them at least 20 years before we take another fish commercially from them. In the meantime, if you want to eat a fish from the sea, you can catch it on rod and line.

Then in 20 years time you will be able to eat some real cod, not the thin filmly excuses covered in mountains of batter that you get from the chippy today.

And the cormorants will not need to invade freshwaters ever again.

Deanos, my thoughts are, cormorants are given far too much protection. Untill someone "wakes up & smells the coffee" they will devastate many more inland waters.

Not only do they eat fish, they fatally wound those which are too big for them to swallow. Thereby decimating many fisheries.

It would be interesting to see how the cormorant numbers have fluctuated perhaps over the past twenty years, or more to the point grown.

Ron, when did cormorants first hit the headlines of the angling press.
Was the inland sea bird?invasion? very gradual, or did things happen quickly?.
Maybe the birds are now so conditioned to feeding inland that they would not return to the sea to feed even if stocks sea fish stocks did grow back to food source levels in the future?

the reason cormorants are protected is because ,someone forgot to put the word PYGMY in front, that is the bird thats protected,as for fishing boats more foreign boats fish our water than our own, due to stupid ministers

Trust Ron to see this as just ANOTHERexcuse to have a go at Blair

Can't understand why you like the b*****d Ed. He's evil, along with the Blairwitch!!

And wait whilst that B*****d Brown gets in power. He will take all our money.

The only dude who has any money on here is YOU Ron!...but after what you said about the tax man on another thread, I would bury it all in a biscuit tin under the apple tree if I were you!

That's why I have a secret numbered Swiss account mate.

My Dad cashed in a small number of shares the other day and the tax man took several hundred pounds. Hey this is daylight robbery.

And you people still vote for Blair and the b******ds!!

I think the only answer, while these birds are protected by law, is to manage the stocking to defeat them.

Stockies would have to be 2 1/2 lb plus. OK the Cormorants would stab and fatally injure a lot, before they realise that they can't eat them and move on elsewhere.

The angler will then have to accept reduced limits, and possibly increased ticket prices.

In the area in Yorkshire that I fish I have never seen a cormorant Rick (hope I never do!)!?not because there aren?t any fish I hasten to add!?but, I do mainly fish small lakes and rivers.

Maybe its not a big enough food source to interest them?.
Do the ?commercials? get visits from cormorants or, as anglers are present most of the time does this keep them off ?

Ron's absolutely spot on; we can blame cormorants or come to the realisation that they're inland because there's nothing to eat in the sea

Industrial fishing is still busy mopping up the capelin, sprats and sandeels for fishmeal and other less sensible uses, and sod all happens to stop it.

It's capelin, sprats and sandeels on which the predatory species depend. So do puffins, and numbers of them, and guillemots, auks and other seabirds are plummeting through chick starvation.

Blair commissioned a report to tell him what's going wrong, stifled it for a year when it came, then published it last week with the news that he will be doing nothing but talking about it.

Commercial sea fishing has got to be sorted out. My plan would be to ban all foreign trawlers, regardless of where they're registered, within ten miles of shore, and allow nothing but 35-footers to fish within five miles.

Iceland had the right idea during the Cod War - unilaterally take action, and sod the EU. Did you know that the whole of the Med is 'policed' by just 120 fisheries inspectors? Guess what? They don't bother to do anything to enforce the existing EU regulations. I saw swordfish barely two feet long at market in Sicily last year. It's a disgrace, and to the shame of Europe

You got that one spot on Mark. We are the only damn silly control freak obsessed country in the EU to actually enforce these innumerable EU regulations. All of the other countries quietly get on with things in their own sweet way regardless.

Like when regulations required that all cheese be made with pasteurised milk. Did French cheese makers pay a blind bit of notice ? Nope, just carried on as before. The only difference being that you couldn't buy certain French cheeses in this country for a while (in particular Vacherin, my favourite, hence my interest !). After four or five years of the regulation being ignored they quietly deleted it.

I well remember Keith Flloyd in one of his programmes wandering around French and Spanish mediterranean fish markets pointing out piles and piles of boxes of patently undersized fish with nary an Inspector within 100 miles. And even if there was an Inspector to hand a quick bung would see to him... That programme must be a good five or six years ago (sad lack of Flloyd on the box for too long, programme makers take note please !).

Having my cake and eating it perhaps I am on the other hand in complete agreement with the strict enforcement of all regulations and even more and stricter regulations within British waters. What's the problem with the Royal Navy getting a bit more active in helping the fishery officials police these enormous foreign factory trawlers and enforcing net size regs etc ? Or with declaring a few sea areas of Sites of Special Scientific Interest for breeding populations of endangered species ? or a few other such "creative" implementation ideas on the present regs....

I subscribe to a government news service which sends an email about once every two months about trawlermen getting prosecuted for the usual range of offences - wrong fish, too much fish, too small a net mesh, boat full of holes.

Even allowing for the fact that minor offences might not be newsworthy, but it doesn't seem to me we have a wall of fisheries vessels poised ready to pounce.

But it's no good having uneforceble rules that inflict evenm more damage on sea ecology. Did you know that to get a kilo of sole, a beam trawler destroys 14kg of other creatures? With some species of fish, the rules mean they have to be bunged back, so while we trawl up tons of sprats for the protein, we chuck thousands of tons of unlandable fish back. It's crazy.

Then of course there is the traffic in fish which get landed unseen by fisheries officers. In the sea just off West Africa, there's an entire 'graveyard' of leaky boats.

Next post

The boats are from China, and though they remain anchored, with no working engines, they carry generators so they can store tons of fish, being trafficked to Europe and elsewhere. Some of the staff on them have little to eat, haven't been paid, and some have been marooned like this for two years.

Fishing used to be honourable toil, but now it's just open piracy of everyone's stocks.

We seem to have forgotten the Grand Banks, once the biggest cod fishery in the world, producing 100lb-ers, and enticing Irish sailing trawlers across the Atlantic. In less than 100 years, it was trawled into extinction, and the cod fishery has not returned after a 10-year fishing ban.

We should get shirty! I know Ron would approve...

I am very sad to hear this news. Loch Leven brown trout were sent throught the colonies and the Loch is regarded as the home of loch style fly fishing.
Lets hope that the Scottish Executive and SANA learn the lesson as 700 hungry cormorants will surely move on to the next well stocked loch.
I'd like to know what the bird watching fraternity contributes in the way of funding and / or stocking to sustain such a large population of immigrant birds..