Life of a Chalkstream by Simon Cooper

Author:Simon Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

9

THE MAYFLY

WHICHEVER WAY YOU cut it, the mayfly, Ephemera danica, is the iconic chalkstream insect. It defines the most exciting moments in the fishing calendar. It is the proof that the chalkstreams are the most perfect rivers ever created. It is the moment when sometimes you have to step back, shut out the rest of the world and watch in awe to simply accept that nature is utterly and completely amazing.

The mayfly will live for just twenty-four hours at most, perfectly adapted by millions of years of evolution to execute the perpetuation of the species over that single day. There is no time to be wasted. The mayfly does not even have a stomach. It does not live long enough to need to eat. Hatching in their tens of thousands, from a distance the huge clouds of insects look like gunsmoke drifting beside the river. Get up close and an elaborate mating dance is taking place, at the same time both graceful and frenetic as two from the thousands pair up to consummate in a moment what has been two years in the making. But the full story of those two years is not all played out in the bright sunshine, along the verdant banks of the river, but rather in the dark, muddy recesses out of sight of every person and most other creatures, a far cry from those romantic last twenty-four hours.

There is a slight irony to the work we have done on North Stream and the vision of the perfect chalkstream we seek to attain, given that the bright gravel is favoured over silt or mud, when the latter is home to the mayfly for almost all of its life, and without the silt the chalkstream would be devoid of its trademark hatch. However, that said there will always be enough diversity in the different habitats of Gavelwood with the main river, stream, brook and carriers, to preserve the silty bottom the mayfly nymph craves. The only parts of a river that have a problem are the headwaters close to the source of the Evitt where the fast, shallow water strips away any silt build-up, or at worst it dries up in the summer. Unsurprisingly, the higher sections of any chalkstream will have a sparse mayfly hatch at best, the few nymphs that do exist preferring to drift downstream until they find a better and safer home.

Fishermen are often dangerously imprecise about the words they use to describe particular insects or hatch, but the word ‘mayfly’ has a precise meaning on the chalkstreams that exists nowhere else in the world. This causes great confusion with anglers from overseas, and considerable annoyance to entomologists who don’t like to see their taxonomy bastardized. But even though tradition trumps the science of classification on the rivers of southern England the taxonomy still insists that there are over two thousand different types of mayfly worldwide, with around fifty in the British Isles. They are all of the order Ephemeroptera, essentially small up-winged insects that only live for a few days after hatching.

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