SSE Renewables funded Upper Garry Salmon Restoration Project achieves major milestone

• One million salmon eggs have now been distributed in the River Garry

The Upper Garry Salmon Restoration Project, a project funded by SSE Renewables, has reached a significant milestone with one million salmon eggs now distributed or laid in the River Garry.

The ground-breaking initiative was developed to help kickstart the revival of wild salmon in what was once one of Scotland’s most productive early salmon fisheries.

Over many decades the salmon population, and consequently salmon catches, in the River Garry, at the south-west end of the Ness catchment where salmon migration is impacted by hydro dams, have fallen dramatically and it became ever more evident that numbers in the upper part of the river were critically low and close to the point of no return.

Due to the fragile nature of the Upper Garry salmon stocks the project adopted a novel approach to build up the number of salmon eggs available for stocking. Salmon smolts, young salmon which leave the spawning rivers in the spring to begin their journey to the sea, were trapped as they left the River Garry and then grown on in freshwater. Smolts are adapted to life in saltwater so growing them on in freshwater to maturity (when their eggs could be stripped) is challenging but with the expertise of Jon Gibb and his team at Drimsallie Hatchery, Glenfinnan, the first eggs for stocking out in the Upper Garry were produced in 2018. The number of eggs produced and stocked out each year has increased as husbandry techniques were refined.

Brian Shaw continued: “One of the most pleasing aspects of the project has been the close collaboration between the project partners. All are agreed that it is futile to dwell on the mistakes of the past. To tackle this decline in salmon numbers the Ness Board with its partners including SSE Renewables, University of Highlands and Islands, Mowi, SEPA and Garry Fishings have come together to ensure the delivery of a project to restore a wild salmon population to the Upper River Garry. Whilst, given the myriad of problems faced by wild salmon, restoring the Garry to its former glory is somewhat unlikely, this project is already bearing fruit in terms of kickstarting a viable self-sustainable population.”

In addition to the stocking of salmon eggs the project has also prompted a new approach to management of the salmon smolts as they pass downstream through Loch Garry Dam. Following extensive research and monitoring to demonstrate and justify changes to the operational set up, smolt screens were removed and the smolts allowed to exit Loch Garry via the hydro generation tunnel. Experience elsewhere in the SSE network had shown that allowing smolts to exit this way results in increased survival and significant increases in the number of adults returning.