A short but packed week
April 12, 2010
Well altough I had only just recovered from a touch of man flu and had been off most of the previous week a shortened week seemed just what I needed. But the work load didn’t seem to care whether I was in four or five days!
Tuesday I did a walk over survey of barriers to migration on Colne Water from just below Colne to Laneshaw bridge. The result was that our records of artificial (complete) barriers to migration now tops a 100. Colne water has some fantastic habitat for all species from trout to dipper and the certainly Kingfisher that seemed to be keeping an eye on us all day. However barriers to migration cause more than just problems to fish, but reduce “eco system function” – which is a wider concept, gravel is held behind weirs that should be down stream being spawned on by fish, used by inverts for cover and dippers to hunt on. Barriers also increase the kinetic energy of water, the increased energy results in increased levels of erosion, not just bankside but river bed reducing habitat and increasing diffuse pollution, and they also cause changes in temperature! That is just a few of the problems barriers create.
Wednesday I plotted out the barriers, started work on some more reports and had a short meeting with Philip, a true office based day. I also had to prepare some bits for Thursday as we were hosting a monitoring workshop for Rivers trusts across the UK.
The turn out for the workshop was a little less than we had hoped but we had some key figures there and plenty of correspondence from those who were not. We discussed everything from techniques of monitoring we employ and would recommend to new trusts, to new innovative techniques we could employ to boost our knowledge of the river. It was a useful day and many things that were discussed will pave the way forward for more than just those who attended.
Friday I took Catherine our new admin officer around 3 project sites so that she had an idea of what we were doing and where. Thank fully the weather was kind and it made for a nice morning out. We then got back into the office to sort out some more funding paper work and also to look for some more! I then got a call from a prospective volunteer to say he was concerned about the lack of fish he had seen in the hyndburn, some will say this is nothing to be concerned about, but they would be wrong! Last year we found salmon fry, trout fry, eels, bullhead and stoneloach in the Hyndburn – all be it in number lower than we would like – but they were there! I decided to call into Padiham weir and then pop over to the Hyndburn. Padiham is progressing, slower than I would like but then I’m pretty darn impatient! I noticed some discolouration in a near by beck, and after a little look I called it in to the EA hot line (0800 807060) and reported the incident, there were no dead fish and inverts seemed fine, but it should not have been how it was and even if the source can’t be found it is key to report this so people can investigate. The trip to the Hyndburn was both positive and negative as we managed to spot a feeding fish, but also I was shown a tributary that was as dead as they come. I mean really dead, no worms, leeches midges nothing. The EA are looking at the problems as best they can but it’s going to be a lengthy process to fix, as the tributary drains a large urban area, it will be up to people to make sure they aren’t polluting to sort this completely, and that includes washing your car on the street so the soap ends up in the surface water, to pouring oil down drains. At some point we need to take responsibility on the small and large level to stop polluting rather than rely on the EA to stop offenders.
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