Botham on the Fly - The River Spey

" The River Spey is one of the largest rivers in Scotland and indeed in the UK, and is world-renowned as one of the great salmon rivers. Unlike other rivers, perhaps this is very much a spate river which depends on rain fall for its flows and also snowfall onto the Cairngorm Mountains where its headwaters are. It has probably, we think, about 60,000 salmons coming into it every year, but amongst those fish, there're all sorts of different, what we call, stocks of fish which come from different parts of the catchment. Some fish come in the spring time and they're generally quite large, having spent 2 or maybe even 3 years in the North Atlantic before coming back to the river to spawn, and other fish which come in during the summer are called grilse, which have only been at sea for maybe 1 year, and then we also have autumn fish which are a mixture of both 2 sea winter fish and 1 sea winter fish, so there's a great deal of variety within the river of salmon themselves, and we also have a fairly large population of sea trout which of course a brown trout which goes to the sea, and we think there's maybe 20,000 to 30,000 of those that come into the river every year. This is a fairly typical example of the numbers of fish and the types of fish that we find in a small feeder burn on the river. These are salmon fry which are fish, which would've been born this year so they emerge from the gravel probably in March-April time and this fish will grow on in that burn to be about the size of one of these bigger fish, which was probably born last year, and looking at its size, that fish will probably go to sea as a smolt next spring and then might come back to this area of this river, probably even to this burn and spawn right here."