The Calm before the storm

June 9, 2010

Unfortunately the title of this weeks blog is not literal enough!  The river really needs a good flush, although a sudden spate without the water table being slowly filled could be just as damaging as none at all.  A sudden deluge would flush everything from roads, hard surfaces and the recently cut silage fields into the river for it then to drop to bare bones again with all the muck in it, this would cause serious oxygen and pollution issues, where as a few steady days rain to build up the water table and then a good spate would stop this from happening (I hope!).

The electro fishing survey season starts in just two weeks time, and amazingly I am nearly fully prepared, due to a couple of quiet weeks.  And because of the quiet I decided to get a nice long weekend in fishing before I have a electro fishing back pack permanently strapped to my back!  So last week was only three days, and this week would have been four but we are running our invert course on Saturday.

Most of last week was spent on preparing for the stock beck habitat project, which is to add suitable substrate.  We carried out two days of flow and channel surveys, and then used this data to produce a flow model so that our added gravel would have the desired affect, without causing any flooding of the adjacent land.  This took up almost all of the week, but we did manage to work on producing a database and data entry form to keep all of our records in.  This should stream line our data entry and make looking up data later much easier.  We’ve been very lucky to have some help on this, otherwise it wouldn’t have got off the ground.

And really that’s about it for last week, other than to say that we were amazed by the fly life we say in stock beck, including: Damsel flies, Dragon Flies, Sedges, True Mayfly, and plenty of olives!  And not only that on the Thursday we watched several trout feeding behind one of the head lands (flow constrictors) that Stephen has been putting in for the last few years (with the help of George from Bailey’s our contractors).

Did I mention that this section of Stock beck is in the Passport Scheme….?

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