"DO you ever see lights along the riverbank during winter, especially in November December? That's when they come with their pitch forks to haul out the spawning salmon." The words of one of the unsung heroes who maintain part of our heritage. He is a senior man in the network of regional fisheries boards, and he would probably wish to remain nameless. Anyway, the men with lights don't reckon with the possibility that in the dark, not too far from them, are standing, soundless, moving only to try to keep circulation going, the watchers, the guardians of the priceless gift we have in our salmon, returning to the river and often small stream where they were hatched, to spawn and ensure for us and them, continuity.
And to leave us in awe that a fish which has left its native waters will return, unerringly, to the same. Poaching of this kind is often, says our friend, a matter of a joke, hatched in a pub after a couple of drinks. When caught and brought up in court, and the effects of their disturbing of salmon redds, are revealed to them, they are often contrite. Why should they despoil the district they live in?
There may be, says our fisheries friend, six to eight thousand eggs laid by the female. Many, many of the young emerging fish will fall to predators in the water, but the miracle is that so many survive, to go down to sea two years after hatching, say, as lovely silvery things of some six inches, to cross the Atlantic and feed until they grow massively and then, in full adulthood return to the place from which they came. Up the big estuary, into one of the main watercourses that branches off, then into the smaller river which means home. And possibly to a spot not a hundred yards from where the eggs from which they hatched were originally laid.
Our rivers contain great wealth and even great mysteries which not all the factual data given us by devoted researchers quite satisfy. But there they are. About the third week in November each year in one townland. The rhythm does not change, for the young silver smolts have just left their native stretch, mid May, on their way to the sea and the ocean.