386 AN ANGLER'S RAMBLES 



and energy, can be expected from him as a means of securing 

 adequate protection for the salmon during the night watches? 

 The farce of browbeating the angling community in this way is 

 surely no preparation or stimulant for the performance of those 

 more urgent duties which devolve upon the river police. It pre- 

 sents, on the contrary, an easy substitute for the hazards con- 

 joined with the proper administration of salmon protection (an 

 encounter, for instance, with a body of nocturnal poachers), and 

 a pretext at the same time for declining or negligently fulfilling 

 duties involving such risks. 



These are some of the evils which the application to Tweed of 

 Section xn. of the General Salmon Fisheries Act is working out, 

 and I name them, not certainly with any expectation that my 

 doing so will have the slightest effect in causing to be restored 

 to anglers on Tweedside the privilege they have recently been 

 deprived of, but simply because they start up and pass before 

 me as shadows of greater disasters threatening the breeding- 

 grounds and parr-stock of a once noble salmon-river. 



THE FEATHERED ENEMIES OF THE PARR-STOCK. 



I HAVE not yet named as enemies to the salmon, the heron 

 (Ardea cinerea), and two species of sea-gull, Larus canus or 

 common gull, and Larus marinus or black-backed gull. In 

 the neighbourhood of Kelso, the herons which frequent Tweed 

 and Teviot are known, I may say, by head-mark. One or more 

 of them may be observed every day close to the town, usually not 

 far from the slap in the cauld-dyke, above the junction of the 

 two rivers, where a kind of island is formed, called the Ana. 

 Teviot, among its constant visitors, reckons several fine old spe- 

 cimens of this stately bird. The heron here is never molested, 

 and nobody wishes it harm. Its presence is an auspicious sign, 

 welcomed by every angler. The injury done by it in the way of 



