Life of a Chalkstream

Life of a Chalkstream
Simon Cooper

Chalkstreams are one of the very few habitats that are nearly exclusive to England. They range far and wide from the famous River Test in Hampshire across eight other counties from Dorset in the west to Yorkshire in the north. Every river is very special in its own right.Brought up in Hampshire, Simon Cooper was lucky enough to have great fly fishing on his doorstep, but as he grew up, got a job and moved away he soon realised what a closed world chalkstreams were unless you were in the know. So with little more than a germ of an idea, a telephone and the book of his fishing contacts, he set out to change that. His passion for all things fly fishing, but in particular the chalkstreams of southern England, shines through in this lyrical and most extraordinary of journeys.We are treated to a year in the life of a chalkstream. From the remarkable spectacle of salmon, sea trout and brown trout spawning in winter, to the stunning sight of emerging water voles in spring and the budding explosion of mayflies in the early days of summer, the author describes the true wonders of life in a chalkstream in his inimitable and evocative voice. He introduces us to the fascinating diversity of life that inhabits its waters and environs – the fish, the angling community, the plant life and the wildlife. We learn how neglect threatens these inhabitants and why the fight to save and restore the chalkstreams is so vital, not only for fishermen, but for anybody who values the beauty of rural England.

COPYRIGHT (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1, London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014.

Text © Simon Cooper 2014

Illustrations © Chris Wormell 2014

Map © Liam Roberts 2014

The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover photographs © Ken Takata. Designed by Kate Gaughran.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007547869

eBook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007547876

Version: 2015-04-22

To Mary and Nigel. For endless encouragement and always being there.

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

The Brook by Alfred Lord Tennyson

CONTENTS

Cover (#u3da7d79d-c2f0-5230-a285-6217172fbfa5)

Title Page (#u1dd98c5c-2428-5c97-a880-5151fc1cabf1)

Copyright

Dedication (#u851a5ab5-aa6d-5a39-ab87-ce95a7d812c7)

Epigraph (#u6c6bceb3-9822-5f10-aeef-f9d918609a40)

1 Discovery

2 Decline

3 Work begins

4 Spawning and the cycle of life

5 Scar Boy

6 March

7 How I held a trout for warmth

8 Mayday

9 The mayfly

10 Crayfish invasion

11 Midsummer’s Night

12 High summer

13 The English savanna

14 Cams Point

Epilogue

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

1 (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)

DISCOVERY (#uf4839420-6584-57e9-acde-ba57b9abc0f0)

FROM A DISTANCE water meadows look unkempt and uninviting, but once you get into them they have a beauty all of their own, with a myriad grasses, flowers and stunted shrubbery growing in an apparently irregular pattern. The pattern is dictated by the cattle that graze the wet pasture of the river valley.

Cattle, sheep and other livestock are the cloven-hoofed landscape gardeners that create the meadows. Without their relentless chewing, battering down the growth, fertilizing the ground and churning up the turf, the fields would soon become a dense, overgrown bramble thicket. Where they graze tight to the sod the sun and light let the buttercups thrive; cowslips spring from the nitrogen-rich manure patches and where their hoofs punch holes in the soil, the rhizomes of the yellow flag iris are split and separated to create fresh growth for the following season.

And sure enough, as I picked my way across the meadows I spied a diverse collection of cattle grazing in the distance, only their upper bodies visible above the pasture. Livestock are also great path-makers. Their sense of direction may be slightly off-kilter, and they may fail to realize that the shortest route between two points is a straight line, but they are canny and I know that if you deviate from the path they’ve trodden you will soon become stuck in boggy ground. So I followed their zigzag path across the field.