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Appendices to Fourth Annual Report 



effectually prevented from entering onr streams, that the taking of a salmon 

 or of a large trout is an event so rare as to he a seven days wonder. I think 

 the Secretary of State should have power to alter Estuary Lines on good 

 cause shewn, and to combine or divide Fishery Districts as in the English 

 Salmon Fishery Act of 1873. There cannot be a doubt that, as now permitted, 

 stake-nets and bag-nets are highly injurious to the salmon fishings, though, 

 under some restrictions, they are required for the supply of the market. 

 There cannot be a doubt that the establishment of a Hatchery here would 

 be most advantageous from the various contingencies to which the salmonidse 

 are exposed. (1) From the smallness of most of our streams, especially at 

 the source where the spawning beds lie, the young fish are more exposed 

 to their natural enemies than in larger streams. (2) Our streams as a 

 rule rise in high ground, consequently have a rapid fall, and run with a 

 degree of violence that must prove fatal to much of the spawn. (3) When 

 in flood, they spread so far beyond their usual bed that numbers of fish 

 deposit their spawn where it is left high and dry until the next flood, which 

 often, if not always, does not reach it until it has lost its vitality. (4) Then 

 almost all the streams have small aflSiuents which run only in time of flood, and 

 when fish enter they and the spawn alike are left to perish. The ' Wild Birds' 

 Protection Act ' should, in the interests of salmon fishing, be so far amended as 

 to do away with the protection to the black-backed gull, which is a most 

 destructive enemy to the young salmon. I have constant occasion to pass a 

 lake into which several spawning feeders run, and in which, for some time prior 

 to migration, the smolts seem to rest. For half-a-century I have noticed that, 

 in the early part of May, when the migration of the smolts is about to begin, a 

 large number of black-backed gulls lie at the part of the lake where the smolts 

 leave for the sea, living entirely on smolts and the flock is regularly to be seen 

 at the mouth of the river catching the smolts as they leave for the sea. At this 

 place, the smolts have to wait for a flood to enable them to migrate, and when, 

 as often happens, they are detained for two or three weeks waiting for a spate, 

 a very small proportion of the original number can be left to migrate. It is 

 quite clear that the smolts lie near the mouth of the river, or rather where it 

 leaves the lake, as the gulls, during the whole time, lie at that point of the lake. 

 What I see here, I see in other localities where there are salmonidae. 



I entirely agree with what is stated above regarding the evil done to 

 the salmoQ fishings in Scotland by that piece of sentimental legislation 

 termed the ' Wild Birds' Protection Act.' But so far as the black- 

 backed gull is concerned, he is expressly excepted from the shelter 

 afforded by the provisions of that Act. Other fish-eating birds are, how- 

 ever, protected, especially the gannet or solan-goose; and, as has been 

 proved where those birds have been kept in captivity, each gannet will 

 eat at least 7 herrings in a day, and no doubt, if smolts came in their way, 

 the gannets would be equally destructive to them. The late Captain 

 Macdonald of the 'Vigilant' fishery cruiser, who was probably better 

 acquainted with Scotch fisheries than any man of his time, gave very 

 strong evidence at Wick in 1877 before Mr Buckland, Mr W^alpole, and 

 myself, when we were engaged on a Government Inquiry into the Herring 

 Fisheries of Scotland. He then said : — 



The gannet will eat 12 herrings a day, and the gannets eat more herrings 

 than all the fishermen in Scotland take. The gannets breed in the Bass 

 Rock, Ailsa Craig, Stack Eock (off Cape Wrath), St Kilda, and Suliskere, 40 

 miles north-east of the Butt of Lews. The auk, the guillemot, the pufiin, — 

 all under the aegis of the ' Wild Birds' Protection Act,' — and gulls of every 

 species, consume each 20 to 30 young herrings in the day. 



Mr Hugh Maclachlan, one of the chief fish-curers and fish-merchants 

 in Glasgow, said that he — 



Would repeal the ' Sea Birds' Preservation Act,' as there are thousands of 

 solan-geese about Ailsa Craig which consume as many herrings as the boats 

 annually catch. 



