WILD salmon making their way up the River Lune to spawn are being given a helping hand to ensure their offspring stand a better chance of survival, reports Ellis Butcher.

Cock and hen salmon are being trapped near Sedbergh, where a proportion of eggs and sperm are extracted and the fish then released to continue upstream to spawn naturally.

After being fertilised, the extracted eggs are transferred to the Middleton Hatchery near Kirkby Lonsdale.

Over the months, their development is monitored by ‘babysitters’ as the fish grow from fry into young fish called parr and pre-smolt.

Eventually, they are passed to a fish farmer at Garsdale until they are ready to be released back into the wild in their thousands during spring and early summer.

In recent weeks, scores of mature fish swimming in from Morecambe Bay have been heading up the Lune as they return from places like the Faroe Islands and Greenland.

The fish instinctively return to the stretch of river or tributary where they were born to become parents themselves.

The trapping was prompted by a drop in numbers as it was estimated that only around five per cent of all spawnings actually matured into young fish.

To boost numbers, brood stock salmon meet a sloping weir – spanning the width of the river - near Sedbergh, on their way up the Lune.

Only around 20 per cent can negotiate its angled slope so around 80 per cent find their way into a nearby “fish” corridor, that leads them into a vast water trap where they can be netted.

Since November 1, unpaid volunteers and members of the Middleton Hatchery Group, along with the Environment Agency, have stripped the brood stock and then released them back into the river.

The timely intervention has brought the success rate up to 98 per cent and has enabled the groups to release 10,000 young fish back into the river.

John Brown, vice-chairman of the Middleton Hatchery Group, said the trapping process was now complete and the cost of the project was around £17,000 - all raised by charity events.

He said: “Salmon in a river tells you it’s a healthy river, that is why we are so concerned about the population. Like most salmon rivers in England it has a number of problems, which means it is vastly under-populated with salmon and sea trout.

“This can be caused by anything such as acid rain, pollution, sheep dip getting in, anything. “We admire what the salmon can do and things like this ensure people can enjoy seeing them jump on their way up the river.

“The public perception when they look at all this is that it’s well-off toff’s fishing for salmon when really, that is not true.

“If fishermen were taken off a river it would die very quickly, because of the amount of work we do.” In fishing circles, to catch one wild salmon in a year is an achievement.

Fisheries officer John Cizdyn said: “The Environment Agency is delighted to be working with the Middleton Hatchery Group to improve salmon stocks on the River Lune. It is highly unlikely that this operation, in its present form, would actually exist without the group because they put in the financial input and the volunteers. This is just another of the tools to increase fish populations in the Lune catchment.”