Climate change is present in the district.
Nature changes noticeably.
At the Attel, which was once rich in fish, a tenant is fighting to keep the river alive.
Emmering -
Max Wagenpfeil is standing in the ankle-deep, October-cold Attelwasser in rubber boots, an olive-green parka and a gray felt hat.
The river meanders between dense embankment bushes around a few rocks and a willow that stands in the water.
Wagenpfeil stirs in the gravel with one foot.
“If it were like this everywhere, then everything would be fine,” he says and watches as the thrown-up mud veils downstream.
"If I want to help the trout, I have to do it over gravel."
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The Attel near Emmering is Max Wagenpfeil's area.
He has leased the fishing rights from the community and is committed to maintaining the fish population.
The brown trout, for example, needs gravel beds to spawn.
© Stefan Rossmann
Wagenpfeil, 57, has been fishing the Attel for half a century.
His territory is the section of the river in the municipality of Emmering, which forms the border with the Rosenheim district.
His father took him here when he was a little boy, he learned to swim on a threshold in the Attel.
He is now the fishing tenant himself and is fighting with six fellow fishermen to maintain the fish stock.
“It takes a lot of idealism,” he says.
They do not take more than ten fish per capita per year from the river.
They imposed that on themselves.
Most of them don't even reach this limit.
Trout needs gravel, coolness and oxygen
Wagenpfeil knows that the trout needs three factors to spawn: gravel, coolness and oxygen.
And the river suffers from all three.
The fisherman looks searchingly into the current.
He doesn't see any fish.
"All of the Upper Bavarian fishing waters have the problem," he says, citing a report by the State Office for Agriculture, according to which almost 90 percent of the fishing grounds are "disturbed".
A number of factors are to blame for this: When the Attel was straightened in the 1930s in order to make more land arable, many spawning niches for the fish disappeared.
“Back then, people had different priorities,” he says.
Nevertheless, the fish stocks held up well until the mid-1980s.
Then agriculture, trade and leisure use increased more and more.
The past few years have seen too little rainfall
And now there are still no winters, and the past few years have proven to be low in precipitation.
"There is less water due to climate change," summarizes Wagenpfeil.
“And it is warmer and therefore lower in oxygen.” From 18 degrees the brown trout has heat stress and stops eating and reproducing.
Their stock in the Attel has decreased massively.
The fisherman observed that the herons now prefer to stand in the field and catch mice.
“Now they are only called gray herons,” says the 57-year-old.
He can only half laugh about it.
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The fisherman can tell how his river is doing by small details: insects on the underside of stones indicate healthy water.
© Stefan Rossmann
He bends down and lifts a stone the size of a child's head out of the water.
He eyes the underside critically.
Then his face brightens: “It's from a caddis fly,” he says, pointing to an inconspicuous gray structure.
Like dragonfly and stonefly larvae, a sign that the water is alive.
“This shows how the river is really doing,” says Wagenpfeil.
The nitrate load in water samples fluctuates depending on when the sample was taken.
A saprobic analysis is more meaningful;
Roughly Germanized: to see what is creeping up and floating in the Attel.
Hurdles and curves built into the current
Here, where it is right now, the water management office has already done something - built a few hurdles and curves in the current to create better conditions for the fish.
Elsewhere, where the Attel is still dead straight, the fish find it difficult to reproduce.
And the existing thresholds and gravel grounds also have to be maintained by hand.
Since the river was deprived of its natural bed and no longer washed through by regular floods, mud has been building up.
In contrast to gravel, there is a lack of oxygen there.
"The mud is the death of the fry," says Wagenpfeil.
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Foam carpets indicate nitrogen pollution, for example from liquid manure or sewage.
© Stefan Rossmann
He gets into the car and drives a little further down the river.
Past a tree trunk that has fallen into the water, on which a white-brownish foam carpet has accumulated.
A sign that there is nitrogen in the water.
“It's worse in summer,” says Wagenpfeil.
He drives past the Kronauer Bridge, where the traditional Sautrogrennen starts.
“The fish can withstand such a year-round plowing,” says the fisherman.
He is more bothered by the beer bottles and the garbage, which often end up in the water.
Or when riders lead their horses into the water and the gravel beds in the critical phase from November to January, when the trout spawns.
“Many don't know that,” says Wagenpfeil.
"But that breaks the brood."
On other stretches of the river, the farmers make do by using farmed trout again and again.
Wagenpfeil sees this critically - the non-local fish reproduced only with difficulty.
The Emmeringer has a different plan: create conditions under which the local fish species can multiply despite climate change.
For this he has teamed up with the community, which is the landlord.
Together and with the water management office, more renaturation is to take place so that Aitel, grayling and trout feel more at home in the Attel again.
The dream of an open, gravelly mouth area
Max Wagenpfeil climbs out of the car a good half a kilometer downstream from the Kronauer Bridge and trudges along a stream.
The last few meters to the Attel it squeezes through a pipe that was probably built once so that machines could drive over the brook.
In the meantime, the water management office has bought the area, there is now rampant growth.
Wagenpfeil dreams of dredging an open, gravelly estuary instead of the boring concrete pipe - another place that is supposed to invite spawning.
“The trick is to create a self-cleaning biotope,” he says of his plan for the Attel.
It is more likely, however, that their care and preservation as a living space will become an ongoing task for generations.
Because the river is so dead straight in many places due to the regulation of human hands that nature is not actually used to.
A task that the Emmeringers around Max Wagenpfeil now want to face.
