Our Projects

The tree nursery continues to grow, currently housing 22,000 live trees, and a further 22,500 tree seeds which have been sown in trays and placed outside, ready to start growing next Spring.

In 2020 the Kyle of Sutherland Rivers Trust along with Galloway and Argyll Fishery Trusts were awarded grants from Scottish National Heritage (SNH) Biodiversity Challenge Fund to plant trees in their catchments. In the Kyle we planted 5000 trees in the River Tirry area on land owned by Forestry and Land Scotland, who also assisted in the process. This will benefit fish species such as salmon and trout, but also freshwater pearl mussels which are present in the area. Pearl mussels are a filter feeder, and adults can filter up to 50 liters of water a day, keeping water clear for other species. We thank SNH for the funding and hope to facilitate more projects to help the community combat climate change in the future.

The full article has been published in the Kyle Chronicle, you can see this by clicking on the link below:

The Carron Radio Tracking project is designed to examine the habitat use of adult Atlantic salmon on the River Carron. Of particular importance are the conditions that allow them to pass certain barriers such as Glencalvie falls, but also the dam at Glen Beag. Estate workers have observed fish ascending above the dam in high water conditions, and electrofishing surveys have confirmed the presence of juvenile salmon and salmon-trout hybrids.

A dedicated webpage for the Carron Radio Tracking project can be found here: Carron Radio Tracking. This webpage provides a calendar for participating anglers and ghillies with dates when Kyle Fisheries Staff will and will not be able to undertake tagging.

In 2021, the Kyle of Sutherland Fisheries Rivers Trust was successful in securing funding for the Restoring Pearl Mussel Habitat on the River Shin project, provided by NatureScot through the Biodiversity Challenge Fund.

The in-river works took place in October 2022 and you can read more about the project by following this link.

This project is funded by the Scottish Government, SNH and SEPA. Ordinarily Fishery boards use electrofishing to answer targeted questions. For example, can fish get above this barrier? Has there been spawning in this area? Are fish present in this area? While good for answering these specific questions, the data gathered to date is not statistically robust enough for giving an impression of juvenile salmon populations at a catchment level.

This is because the electrofishing sites have not been randomly selected. The NEPS project uses a Generalized Random Tesselation Stratified (GRTS) design to select random sites which will give a more statistically robust impression of the salmon populations at a catchment level. The importance of this is that in areas of good habitat it will be difficult to detect a decline until it’s too late to do something about it, as salmon will preferentially occupy areas of good habitat than sub-optimal habitat

Conversely when the salmon population is in a good state, the areas of good habitat will be fully occupied and therefore fish will be pushed out into more marginal areas. Marine Scotland aims to produce a review in 2019. If successful, the project will continue on with the eventual goal of this data feeding alongside the rod catch tool for conservation assessments of rivers in future years.

A large project led by the Atlantic Salmon Trust and with multiple project partners, this project aims to examine the low return rates of smolts after they head out to sea. Around 5% of smolts return to their natal rivers as adult fish, and this project is using the “likely suspects” framework in order to examine why. Part of this framework involves examining the river and marine mortality of smolts. In 2019 it is hoped that smolts from the River Oykel and the River Shin will be fitted with acoustic tags. Listening devices will be placed both in river and in arrays in the Dornoch and Moray Firths. Based on where smolts “disappear” this will give an idea of where mortality of smolts is taking place. This will then direct future investigations and possible remedial action.

Results from the first year of the project are now available under “Project Reports”. More information can be found on the Atlantic Salmon Trust website, and a new video detailing year 2 of the project can be viewed on YouTube. Or watched below:

Due to the unique nature of Lairg Dam on Loch Shin, salmon smolts from tributaries feeding into Loch Shin have difficulty finding their way out through the dam on their way to sea. To help these fish get to sea (and hopefully come back as adults!) Kyle Fisheries and SSE run a “trap & truck” operation on these tributaries every year. Smolts are caught in either rotary screw traps or a box trap and transported down below the Shin diversion dam.

A portion of these fish are tagged with passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags. These tags do not rely on battery power so have a variety of uses. We use them for mark-recapture studies to assess trap efficiency, but also to assess how many fish are coming back to the Shin. A PIT tag decoder in the fish pass at the diversion dam allows us to detect individual tags and we can trace the tag numbers back in our records to each fish when it was tagged.

This allows us to determine the salmon’s place of origin, size when caught, the date it was tagged, where it was released and if any genetic or scale samples were taken. This information enables a variety of investigations to be completed, but of particular importance it allows us to calculate the return rate of the smolts going to sea.

Henry Morrice was the superintendent at the Kyle of Sutherland District Salmon Fishery Board from the 1960’s to 2001.  A very diligent man, he kept detailed records of the daily activities of the board. This contains information on correspondences with the government, bailiffing activities and the results from scientific investigations, some conducted in collaboration with the North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board (now SSE).

This valuable information is not published, or in any formal reports. To make use of this information, Matt Curran at UHI is archiving the documents as part of his PhD project as well as then examining why information such as this isn’t utilized in scientific journals and remains “grey literature”. This will allow Kyle Fisheries to examine historical data from within our catchment and compare with how things are today, as well as examining any pieces of work which have been “lost in time”.