I HAVE been a wild salmon watcher for more than 40 years and l am certain there are fewer than there used to be.

I know they are a national asset owned by the nation and that the first fish returning to spawn in the spring are unique to the UK.

North America never had "springers" and those through whose territories the Rhine passes have been destroyed by a lack of agreement between neighbouring states. Our Government dealt this priceless asset body blows through constructing hydro schemes with migration barriers around the Highlands in the 1950s. Then, we didn't understand the importance of migration. We do now, but ministers fail to revisit these barriers as Fisheries Committee experts (paid from the public purse) advised should be done after due time.

The Government "manages" special conservation areas. One of these is in the Dornoch Firth. Every species that preys on the defenceless tiny smolts or few returning salmon is afforded legal protection, encouraging maximum breeding and eating. That's not management of a food chain. Only five fish per 100 smolts going to sea return to spawn, a figure that used to be much higher. Ghillies, bailiffs, fishery boards and all who make life easier for visitors are in danger of not being needed; area tourist income will drop.

Our Government has encouraged coastal netsmen toward EU money. They buy new gear and reopen old, dormant netting stations. Visiting anglers return 90 per cent of their catch and watch netsmen sweep up hundreds of remaining breeding stock, to be sold at Billingsgate.

This infuriates our neighbours in Greenland, the Faroes and Iceland. The North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organisation (Nasco), which is headquartered in Edin­burgh, and the redoubtable Orri Vigfusson in Iceland, had persuaded them into suspending coastal netting in the feeding grounds of UK and North American salmon to allow dangerously low stocks a chance to re-generate.

As the Scottish Government refuses matching restraint, these people now feel free to restart netting to join a free-for-all before Salar the Salmon becomes a nostalgic museum piece. We are seen as fishy jihadists with zero care for nature. How can matters be turned around?

Jonny Shaw,

Amat,

Ardgay.

YOUR report on the apparent decrease in the numbers of kestrels suggests that the main cause lies with changes in farming practice and resultant decrease in food sources ("Farmers blamed for alarming decline in number of kestrels", the Herald, September 13). The weakness of this argument is if, like me, you acknowledge that instead of kestrels in our woods, fields and motorway verges you now see an abundance of buzzards. In the supposed absence of suitable food due to the farming changes, how is this growing population sustained? Having killed and eaten most of the kestrels, I suggest that the buzzards have more than enough food to expand their own numbers from our supposedly-debased countryside,

Iain M Walker,

118 Chatelherault Crescent, Hamilton.