Watching the birds

Andrew Griffiths confesses that catching fish is only a small part of why he loves fly fishing Derbyshire’s rivers

As an angler, the good thing about developing a taste for the natural history of the river is that it gives you something to do when you are not catching fish. This can form a productive part of the fishing process itself – for instance, if you are waiting for a hatch it passes the time if you start to take an interest in which side of the trees the lichen is growing.

However, sometimes you find that you can get so engrossed in what is going on in that small, intricately linked environment, that the trout you are trying to catch, which let’s face it is the reason you are standing there in the middle of the river in the first place, just become a relatively small part of something much bigger.

I do find myself in that place a lot of the time these days, which is my excuse for not catching many fish. One of the things that first led me there was watching the birds.

There’s something exotic about river birds. Depending on the season, the predominant colors around rivers are greens, olives and browns. Not drab as such, but they aren’t colors that scream at you from paint charts either. But this reserve gets lost when it comes to the birds. I see all of these at least once on a fishing outing on my river: