Fankerton Fish Counter
Jo Girvan - River Forth Fisheries Trust
We are delighted to announce that our new fish counter at the fish pass
at Fankerton is now up and running. The technical difficulties we have
had since the counter was installed earlier this year have been solved
and we are starting to receive data on any movements through the fish
pass. This information will shortly become available to view through our
website and we will be providing regular updates throughout the
upstream spawning migration this Autumn.
The fish pass at Fankerton has been in place for one season, which means
that adult salmon could potentially have spawned upstream of the weir
last winter. We carried out electrofishing at three sites upstream of
the weir in August this year to see if we could find any evidence of
salmon spawning, but we did not find any salmon fry. It may take some
time for enough adult salmon to ascend the fish pass and produce
sufficient young so that we can pick them up through electrofishing
survey.
Because the area has been inaccessible for many years, there has been no
salmon spawning here and it may take time for adult salmon to ascend
the pass in any numbers and build a genetic homing instinct to
repopulate this part of the river. The counter will help us to monitor
this.
Fish counters are one of the primary mechanisms for fisheries
management, providing accurate figures on the number of adults returning
to a river. This type of information can help with many aspects of
management such as assessing the passability of existing fish passes and
accurate conservation limit setting. We hope this will be the first of
many fish counters that we will be able to install on the rivers of the
Forth District. Two more counters are already in the pipeline through
the RiverLife: Almond & Avon Project, with plans for others to
follow.
Thanks to Andy from ACE Ltd UK and Gareth from Vaki for helping resolve the technical issues.