Contemplative Inquiry

“The hazels are rocking the cups with their nuts

As the harvesters shout when their last leaf is cut;

‘I swim with the salmon says the Green Man,

‘I swim with the salmon’, says he.” (1)

‘I swim with the salmon’ is a bold, clear statement. It evokes powerful images that leap out of their place in the flow of William Anderson’s poem. Green Man as a whole takes us on a wheel-of-the-year journey beginning on 22 December, successively featuring thirteen trees for four weeks each. The hazel is the ninth tree, whose time runs from 3-30 August. As the poem indicates, this is a harvest period, and the last month that fully belongs to the summer. It is also a time when you may find Atlantic salmon swimming home to spawn, though spawning doesn’t begin until October.

In this post I celebrate salmon naturalistically, through an account of their extraordinary life cycle. I am especially aware of the River Tay in Scotland, mostly thanks to a 90 minute documentary The River: a Year in the Life of the Tay (2). My personal experience of the Tay is limited to visits to Dunkeld, Perth and Dundee, where I nonetheless fell in love with the river and its powerful energy.

Salmon begin their lives in mountain streams, as far upstream as their parents have been able to reach in their autumn/early winter spawning period. The new generation undergoes a remarkable series of transformations (3), hatching as alevin or sac fry when the water warms in spring, and growing into parr with camouflaging vertical stripes. They remain in the same environment for two or more years, by which time, as smolts, they have developed a bright silvery colour with scales that easily rub off. Driven by growth hormones, the 10% of smolts who survive to this stage experience the mutations necessary to become salt water fish and make their journey to the ocean.

They spend another two or more years in the North Sea, travelling north into Norwegian waters, becoming sexually mature, with a darkening of the silvery scales, before embarking on their homewards 120 mile journey up the river to its headwaters. They are much larger than they were when on their way out. The largest salmon ever caught in the Tay, in the 1920’s, was over five feet long.

To return to their own birth-place (remembering exactly where they come from) they have to navigate waters that include rapids and waterfalls, evade osprey and human anglers, and achieve the feats of leaping for which they are famous. “The salmon is able to jump upstream not by fighting against the current, but by utilizing its knowledge of the reverse current which flows beneath the surface current” (4). They are returning to their native headwaters in order to spawn and begin the cycle again. 98% of Atlantic salmon spawn only once and die soon afterwards: their adult bodies, equipped for a salt water life, never fully re-adapt to fresh water and this makes them vulnerable.

Swimming with the salmon is not for the faint-hearted. At the present time the population of Tay salmon is in severe decline (70% in the 30 years to 2019) although the river is relatively clean and is now managed to prevent over-fishing. The effects of the climate crisis in the Atlantic are the most likely cause for the decline of Tay salmon, as for Atlantic salmon in general. Yet even in decline they remain magnificent. Long before the Celtic Iron Age, during it, and for long afterwards, they were abundant in the rivers of Britain, Ireland, and other Atlantic maritime countries. With their complex shape-shifting capacity, their far-journeying years at sea, their uncanny homecoming knowledge and their extraordinary leaps, they seem marked out for another life, in human song and story. I would like to think that the salmon’s mythic reputation can help to save it in this interconnected world.

”’I swim with the salmon says the Green Man,

‘I swim with the salmon’, says he.”

(1) From:  William Anderson Green Man: Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth Harper Collins: London & San Francisco, 1990 See also: https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2017/05/11/poem-green-man/

(2) The River: A Year in the Life of the Tay 90 minute documentary made for BBC4 in 2019. Presented by writer and naturalist Helen MacDonald. See: https://youtu.be/ZEmAXQIrDeg?si=wlaI0bNtM6YWevAf The film is well worth watching, covering the journeys of the salmon and much more.

(3) Salmon Wikipedia

(4) Philp and Stephanie Carr-Gomm The Druid Animal Oracle: Walking with the Sacred Animals of the Druid Traditions Fireside: London, 1994 Illustrated by Will Worthington. The face of their salmon card is pictured at the top of this blog.