Just in case you missed all the social media chatter a few weeks ago, I thought it’d be worth mentioning again that my review of Mark Everard’s important new book River Habitats for Coarse Fish has now been published on the Fallon’s Angler website.

As I said in my introduction…

In these days when all the funky river menders are talking about catchment-scale processes, natural flood management, and even rewilding with beavers, it’s feeling rather rare to find a book that’s just about fish. More to the point, it’s even rarer to find a book that’s just about coarse fish, and that’s exactly the point of this one.

Here in the UK, I think we can fairly say that river restoration for the benefit of salmonid species has made most of the running for the last 20-plus years.

There’s probably a whole tangle of reasons for this. Many coarse fish do use habitat in similar ways to trout and salmon, but they grow more slowly, so it can take a discouragingly long time to see results – and anyway, the Environment Agency has always been liberal with annual stockings of little chub, dace, roach and barbel from Calverton fish farm.

Maybe, too, it’s because lots of the problems affecting the barbel and bream zones of our rivers are actually much more systemic and culturally ingrained than problems in the troutier headwaters. As Mark writes in River Habitats for Coarse Fish:

Even classic art from the nineteenth century portraying idyllic river scenes often depicts destructive forces. One such well-known example is John Constable’s 1819 painting, The Hay Wain, in which the wagon that gives the painting its title is being driven along the bed of a river, cottages and roads are built right up to the bank top, wooden-shuttered banks displace the natural riparian habitat, the floodplain is converted for agriculture, and the banks are excessively trampled by stock. 

In fact, many classic English landscape paintings depict bucolic vistas in which rivers are disconnected from their floodplains (often with some bank reinforcement or trampling) and the river channel is plied by heavy boats, blocked by weirs, mills or locks, or is otherwise in a condition that may be culturally meaningful yet is very far from natural. Our modern perception of rivers, even in such classically idyllic depictions, differs substantially from the truly natural environments in which fish evolved.

Today, thanks to the modern catchment-based approach to river management (spawned by the European Water Framework Directive) everyone’s looking at our waterways in a much more holistic way, and scientists and anglers alike are starting to apply the knowledge that coarse fish often want to move around river systems just as much as better-known migratory game species.

For instance, I’ve just read this timely article by my colleague Chris Gardner at the South East Rivers Trust, in which he reveals his research on a school of bream that clearly wanted to migrate staggeringly long distances in very short spaces of time:

During my PhD in 2006, I tracked the movements of 80+ adult common bream (4-7lb) over four years in a long 40 km reach of the Lower River Witham, a very uniform fenland river in Lincolnshire. My bream were tightly shoaled and relatively immobile in a deep tributary off the main river at the upstream extent of the reach during the winter, moving short distances of, on average, about <5 km a month, up and downstream.

In the spring, they became highly mobile moving on average 30 km a month utilising the entire length of the river available to them, with one individual moving over 120 km in a single month! At this time they were visiting shallow tributaries off the main river, before using these for spawning in late May / early June. Once they had spawned, they spread out and spent the rest of the summer in the main river foraging, again moving on average 20-30 km a month up and downstream. In the autumn they moved back upstream to the deep tributary for the winter. This same yearly pattern was observed throughout the study.

As we spend more time studying more species, in river catchments which are increasingly friendly to the free flow of fish, I’ve no doubt that we’ll discover even more stuff like this to astonish us. And in the meantime…

Just like most of those the trout-focused manuals that came before it, River Habitats for Coarse Fish is designed to empower ordinary anglers with the knowledge and confidence to start making a real difference to their own river, and thus to their own fishing. If you have any interest in either of these, it’s my strong recommendation to get hold of your own copy today… and maybe buy a few for your fishing pals as well.

Several evenings in the past two months, I’ve followed the track of one of our previous volunteer balsam-pulling days, sniping late stragglers that pop their heads above the parapet of rusting brambles and bindweed. Absent overshading and other competition from its fellows, it’s amazing how the most inconspicuous seedling will snatch its chance to shoot skywards: these are the late-germinating plants that can scatter enough of their own seeds to cause problems next year, so it’s well worth taking an hour or two to make sure as few as possible get through. 

I’ve carried a rod on most of these trips, not so much planning to fish as being prepared for the places where good fish sometimes happen. One of those was a hefty dace (you won’t often hear those words in close conjunction), another was a three-pound chub that suddenly wandered down-river towards me, slurping negligently from the surface, ripe for interception with a favourite midge pattern…

Documenting some of my personal efforts to get on top of the scourge of invasive non-native species on the Wandle, the latest episode of The Urbantrout Diaries was recently published on Flyfishing.co.uk.

If you haven’t found it yet via other sources, please do click through and enjoy!

Somewhere in the depths of this apparently endless winter (cue another wild nor’easter kicking snow in the face of casting practice and trying to tune a recalcitrant switch rod to throw big intruders, never mind actual fishing) …

… Adrian and I grabbed a window in the weather and headed out for a day on a nearby river that wasn’t the Wandle.

The Hogsmill really is the Wandle’s pretty little chalkstream sister, rising from the same block of chalk to fill ornamental ponds in Ewell before flowing 11km via a sewage treatment works down to the Thames at Kingston.

But while the Wandle got completely engulfed by factories and mansions of industrial tycoons, the Hogsmill managed to retain a wide green corridor of ancient meadows for much of its length – not to mention a few Pre-Raphaelite artistic aspirations.

Even as the Wandle’s Arthur Lasenby Liberty was chuckling about sending all his dirty water down to William Morris at Merton Abbey Mills, and John Ruskin was agonising over cleanup work never given and lining Carshalton’s headwater pools with rocks from the Lake District…

… John Everett Millais was using the streamy upper Hogsmill to pose Lizzie Siddal as Ophelia in a setting that still presents an ideal of chalkstream biodiversity.

Meanwhile, William Holman Hunt let his Hireling Shepherd loiter on the same deep, alder-hung meanders, and set his Light of the World in a picturesquely-decaying doorway of the gunpowder mills a few miles downstream.

This chilly midwinter day, Adrian and I got off the train just above the sewage treatment works and took a long march up the Hogsmill to Ewell, spying out chubby holes, plumbing likely-looking runs for future reference, and spotting some of the 9 weirs where the Wandle Trust will be tackling total-catchment fish passage problems with CRF funding later this year.

Being urban fly-fishers through and through, we found no good excuse not to wade up and under the echoing culvert where traffic roared overhead on the A3…

… and took time to notice subtle installations of modern urban art including a decapitated doll’s head ironically trampled into the muddy path beside the stream.

And finally, somewhere near Ophelia’s Pool, we found a couple of pods of authentically rising dace, and landed three of them on our ultralight rigs.

We’d started the new year right.