Last autumn the Flyfishers’ Club (where I’m editor of the biannual Flyfishers’ Journal) took an important and very welcome step forward into the 21st century by voting in favour of welcoming women as members for the first time since the Club was formed in 1884, by a solid majority of 75%.

Naturally, I wanted to celebrate such an historic occasion with a suitable image on the front of the following issue of the Journal, and I set myself a very specific brief for this composition: dynamic, modern, celebratory, showing a man and a woman fishing together joyfully as equals, with a brightest possible future ahead.

In practice, as I’d rather expected, this wasn’t so easy to find: the one pic I really wanted had already (and quite deservedly) been snapped up by a film production company, so I had to start thinking laterally. But in the end, with lots of help from my photographer buddy Duncan Soar, and the Journal’s designer Stuart James, we produced a watercolour-style image which I think captures the moment quite perfectly.

Along with a blockbuster article from Peter Hayes on two millennia of flyfishing illustrations (often in the form of church wall paintings) across Britain and Europe, the other dominant theme of this issue of the Journal is concern over the fate of our Atlantic salmon.

Throughout 2024, worrying headlines just kept appearing: for example, scientists reporting the lowest number of juveniles in the Dorset Frome in more than 20 years of monitoring, against the background of a general population crash by over 80% in the last 40 years, and salmon having now been added to the IUCN Red List alongside elephants, pandas and polar bears.

Many Norwegian salmon rivers also suspended fishing last summer. So this issue of the Journal has a certain theme of wild salmon ecology and conservation, including our ‘good cause’ feature from the Atlantic Salmon Trust, and my own review of Henry Giles’s interesting new book, The Secret Life of Salmon.

Both remind us that we do live in times of change – but that we can all try to ‘be the change we want to see’, and that’s another stirring New Year’s resolution (early or late) for every one of us…

The Wild Trout Trust has enjoyed a close and beneficial relationship with fishing tackle retailers Farlows and Sportfish for years (if you’ve ever used their mail order services, you may have found a WTT flyer or membership form tucked in amongst your shiny new merchandise!)

Both of these leading brands have also been hugely supportive around my own past book launches in years gone by. So it’s been a particular pleasure to write another couple of guest blogs for them recently, building on the ones I wrote last year, and profiling even more of WTT’s work to make a better world for wild trout and all the other species that share river space with them.

• Farlows: Trout live in trees
• Sportfish: Helping rivers flow freely again

Please do click through to read (and watch!) when you have a moment…

(Image: Wild Trout Trust / Sportfish)

‘Shifting baseline syndrome’ is an idea which may never be more relevant than on the English, French and Danish chalk streams. These placid little rivers have undergone radical alterations, even in the past 100 years, yet our human memories are inevitably too short to register such changes clearly.

Enter Edwin Alfred Barton, a London doctor who arrived on the chalk streams of southern England in the years between the First and Second World Wars, just in time to witness their waning years as working agricultural landscapes.

Barton was an avid fly-fisherman who served as President of the Flyfishers’ Club in 1934, and Editor of the Flyfishers’ Journal from 1931 to 1937. He was a talented photographer too, who immortalised the chalk valleys with glass-plate images of extraordinary sensitivity and skill. Some of his photos appeared in his own books (and indeed in the Flyfishers’ Journal) but they’d never been collected in one place – until last year, when Andrew Herd and Jon Ward-Allen published them all together in E.A. Barton: The Lost World of the Chalk Streams.

This new volume is a worthy tribute to a photographer who has sometimes been called ‘the Ansel Adams of the chalk streams’: an understatedly beautiful book which contains valuable environmental insights and historical details mixed with the alchemy of early 20th century photography, and curated samples of Barton’s own writing.

So, E.A.B.’s self-portrait on the banks of the Test at Leckford is showcased on the front cover of the Flyfishers’ Journal for Summer 2024, and it sets the tone for the whole edition. There’s an introductory feature and photo essay from Andrew Herd himself, followed by in-depth discussions of our chalk streams’ past and future, including features from Mike Blackmore (‘The Great Chalk Dream’), Uffe Westerberg (replumbing our rivers and sewage systems for a more sustainable future), John Knott (examining a fascinating set of early 1800s fishing diaries) and more.

As always, it’s a pleasure to occupy this Editor’s chair… whilst also slightly daunting to remember that the polymath Dr. Barton once sat here before me!

(The Flyfishers’ Journal is a complimentary benefit for all Members of the Flyfishers’ Club, and it’s also available to non-members by subscription).

Apart from his reputation as an outspoken environmentalist and dedicated salmon fisher, King Charles III has also been Patron of the Flyfishers’ Club for many years…

… and the latest edition of the Flyfishers’ Journal records the gifts presented by the Club to commemorate his coronation in May 2023.

These included boxes of specially-tied salmon flies (one of which caught him a grilse on the Thurso the very next day!) as well as trout flies for his grandchildren, and three fully-dressed salmon fly brooches for Queen Camilla, one of which is shown on the front cover.

This issue of the Journal also celebrates the Flyfishers’ royal connections with the River Em in Sweden – dating back to 1926 when Prince Gustav Adolf invited the first party of English guests to sample the sea-trout fishing there, an era revisited in detail by my Swedish research colleague Martin Sandgren.

There are features, too, from Neil Patterson (fry-fishing in Neuquen), Patrick Mileham (ancestral voices from the Salisbury Avon) and Bob Bradley (continuing the Avon theme with musings on Ollie Kite) as well as an important piece about imitating the Olive Upright hatch from David Marriott and Andrew Farr, and Barry Ord Clarke’s step-by-step tying interpretation of the classic Avon fly, the Pheasant Tail Nymph.

Last but not least, this time round, our chosen ‘good cause’ is the Mayfly Project UK, which provides opportunities for children in foster homes to learn about fly-fishing, conservation and the outdoors with safe mentors – with an inspiring article from founder and executive director Susan Skrupa. Please support this worthy charity if you can!

(The Flyfishers’ Journal is a complimentary benefit for all Members of the Flyfishers’ Club, and it’s also available to non-members by subscription).

Earlier this year, the Flyfishers’ Club achieved an amazing coup by acquiring a cased set of six copies of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler – representing all the versions of the book which were published in IW’s own lifetime.

To celebrate this momentous addition to the Club’s Library, we somehow persuaded the talented fly-fishing photographer (and my own good fishing pal!) Duncan Soar to shoot the books on location – and his luminous photos now take pride of place in this edition of the Flyfishers’ Journal.

By tradition, the Summer issue of the Journal always includes the announcement of the annual Peter Lapsley Award for excellent writing during the previous year, and our judging panel all observed that this year’s strongest contenders had developed noticeably environmental themes.

In the end, Graham Thomas won the latest award for his article about the River Usk, with Greg Belcamino’s account of ecological crimes against the Hoosic River as a close runner-up. In this edition, Greg’s Letter from America returns to environmental subject matter with a deep dive into the challenges facing the remaining populations of Californian steelhead, and our ‘good cause’ article comes from James Wallace, profiling the UK’s exciting new charity River Action, whose board includes river campaigner extraordinaire (and Member of the Flyfishers’ Club) Feargal Sharkey.

And finally, on a personal note, I’m very grateful to Alan Hancock for his warm and heartfelt obituary for Allan Hardy: a quiet polymath, a conservationist, and a much-missed, convivial Flyfisher. Fittingly, Allan’s own final article, published in this issue, studies the legendary huchen, which have been threatened by environmental degradation for many years, but may now be making a tentative comeback in some European tributaries of the Danube system.

(The Flyfishers’ Journal is a complimentary benefit for all Members of the Flyfishers’ Club, and it’s also available to non-members by subscription).

One of the nearly-unavoidable hazards of traditional print production seems to be the way that important details can go out of date almost as soon as the book is published (and this situation has only deteriorated as we’ve started including more and more references to fundamentally ephemeral digital media!)

In the case of my own Pocket Guide to Balsam Bashing (later ebook edition here) the key piece of information was the call to action involving the PlantTracker app. Within just a couple of years, this fantastically useful citizen science tool started going buggy when it was defunded by the Environment Agency, and finally disappeared from view altogether.

Now, the good news is that the Natural Apptitude team behind PlantTracker have launched the new INNS Mapper app and website – complete with lots of the data that citizen scientists like me had loaded onto the previous platform.

Better still, INNS Mapper goes way beyond plants, enabling volunteers to report sightings and management of 62 different INNS, including invertebrates and mammals as well as aquatic and terrestrial plant species.

(Upon close inspection, the reporting options don’t yet map completely to all the species which I discussed with the GB Non-Native Species Secretariat before flagging up in Balsam Bashing – such as the Asian hornet, which recently seems to be establishing a worrying bridgehead in the south of England –  but it’s certainly a very good start).

Check out the INNS Mapper website here, and let’s all make the most of this new citizen science data hub to take the fight to invasive non-native species even more effectively from now on.