In the shimmering rapids of the River Spey that cuts through the Scottish Highlands, Ian Gordon casts his line with a languid swish and waits for a salmon to take the fly.
In the early 1970s, when Gordon first fished the Spey as a “wee nipper”, it never took long to catch a bite. But things have changed.
“I would say there are now 20 percent, maximum, of what there were in the mid-80s,” Gordon told AFP on a stretch of the river near the town of Aberlour, where he runs a tourist fishing company. Before the numbers started to fall in the 1980s and 90s, hundreds of thousands of young Atlantic salmon or smolts would migrate to sea from Scotland’s rivers.—AFP
