A busy time for various river interests

April 6, 2009

Well it’s certainly a busy time for the various river interests at the moment. With consultations on WFD, Sheep Dip, Fish passes and papers on Hydro Schemes. This means that slightly more time than I would have liked was spent in the office this last week. That said a trip to Stock Beck Habitat Work on Monday showed the Beck to be in cracking order, apart from the huge amount of litter on that banks, but with a resolution for our litter trap upstream we hope to have this sorted. I spent the rest of the day and Tuesday on the WFD River Basin Management Plan consultation. The less said about that the better. There was some excitement as I tried to help the friends of Greenfield LNR to get a dead sheep moved from Colne Water in their reserve. Stephen managed to spot a salmon Kelt amongst the habitat work on Stock Beck. This was a fantastic site, and shows how well the work is doing.

Tuesday night I managed to get myself to the Ribble Fisheries Consultative Association meeting. There was a lot on the agenda, and I came away with a list of things to do. So Wednesday I spent a large part of the day sorting that lot! We managed a site visit to Sawley to look at an old Mill leet, which in the past when cleaned out had been full of Eels. We dropped in to look at Swanside Below the A59 and found some rather nasty poaching and Hay right on the Waters edge. This was reported to the EA and the farmer has sorted it. We also noticed a discolouration to the substrate. I investigated this and found that there is a huge cliff (40ft) being eroded away upstream and the colour of sediment being eroded was very dark grey, almost black. This was being trapped by the Algae on the Substrate giving and almost black appearance to the river bed.

Thursday morning I headed up to Stock Beck, and did a walk over survey from the Habitat Work up. Unfortunately I found two pollution incidents, one slurry and one sewage. This was reported to Fred Higham and the EA. I also found two weirs, one possibly passable, the other definitely not.

Friday we scouted for potential release sites for trout in the Classroom. We did some kick sampling and unfortunately decided that our Longridge preferred release site was not up to scratch. We did find that Savick Brook that flows from Long Ridge and drops into the Ribble at Preston was really quite good in the upper part of the Catchment, which shows how success full the EA pollution team has been in cleaning up the brook, they are still working at the lower reaches in the Urban area, but it shows the potential.

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