FISH ON!
The Spawning Salmon Scene
Teign and Tavy, Torridge and Taw, if you walk and watch their headwaters high above sea level in winter, the secrets of salmon spawning will be revealed.
The key is to move slowly, to remain seeing but unseen, as you observe the shallow water-scoured gravel tails of the pools. Be circumspect. Hold back from the bank. Sooner or later there will be a surface bulging swirl as a cock fish chases off a rival trying to attend to his chosen hen fish.
Move closer; crawl the final yards; peer over the edge of the bank. There, in a trough six inches deep and as wide and long as a 24" Gye net, is the redd she has flapped with her tail. In this inhospitable cradle she deposits her eggs, about 700 for each of her liveweight pounds. She may not extrude them all in one redd, but may dig two or three to spread the risk.
Now watch very closely.
She twists and convulses on her flank to force out a stream of pearly eggs. The cock may be with her or waiting below the trough, and then he moves alongside to shed from the vent a puff of milt. They curve and convulse many times at the climax of their lives.
The eggs, being heavier than water, sink into the gravel and are covered by little stones. In spring, in about three months, sooner or later, depending on the water temperature, the ova hatch. From the split membrane an alevin emerges. Too small to feed, and too weak to face the river's flow, he is equipped at birth with a sac of yolk suspended beneath his chin. In a month the packed lunch is absorbed, he is called a fry and starts to feed whilst others feed on him: trout, eels, goosanders, mink and herons take their toll as he grows to the size and status of a fingerling parr.
The river years pass: perhaps one year if the feeding is rich, generally two, sometimes three before, changing his coat to a silver sheen, and known as a smolt, the magnet of the ocean draws him downstream to the sea.
Five inches and five ounces of vulnerable silver fishlet is now exposed to cormorants, seals, Atlantic gales and the lurking dangers of the deep. For a minimum of fifteen months, called a grisle, or a likely maximum of two or three sea-winters, he follows the ancestral ocean trails to the Faeroes, Greenland, and other feeding grounds. Our fish grows fat and strong. Then, in gleaming sea-liced muscular maturity, returns to the river of his birth, to the spawning gravels high in the hills, to repeat the cycle of life.
Charles Bingham