4 ideas
Through the 1970s Delibes kept dated entries for his trout-fishing days on León and Castilian rivers such as the Órbigo, Esla and Porma, noting the water, the weather, who came along and how many fish were taken. Read in sequence, these ordinary private notes become a field record of rivers losing their trout to dams, gravel extraction, sewage and farm runoff.
Delibes holds that the dams, industrial effluent, agrochemicals and roads that count as development in Castile are what empty and poison the countryside. The fish are the first measurable victims. The same forces break up the village knowledge and ways of life bound to the river, so the ecological loss and the cultural loss are a single process rather than two.
Someone who returns to the same stretches of river season after season learns fine baselines: where fish rise, how the water should look, which insects hatch and when. That makes him able to detect degradation long before it is visible to anyone passing through. Seen this way, a hunter or fisherman is not only an extractor of the resource but its most sensitive monitor, with a direct stake in keeping it alive.
Delibes separates the fisherman who treats the outing as a contest with a wary wild fish, governed by self-imposed limits, from the one who measures success by the weight of the bag. He attributes much of the harm to rising pressure from more urban anglers now able to drive to the rivers. In his view the ethic of restraint and respect for a worthy quarry is the only thing that makes taking wild animals defensible.