Summer begins…
July 11, 2011
For me the summer really starts when the electro fishing survey season begins. This year it will be a little different as I have handed over these duties to our new Fisheries Scientist, Gareth, that said I don’t plan to stop doing it all together! Once the summer starts time moves unbelievably quickly, looking back to see when my last blog post was (13th of June), and what has occurred since then is actually quite scary!
We are moving all projects forward at quite a pace, with our Brun Calder fish passes now poised to begin, consent for fish passage projects on Boyces brook and Barrow brook now received we hope to make a start on these in the coming weeks. Our Habitat schemes on Easington and Red syke brooks are all but complete, just the tree planting to go (once November comes round)! This project has been completed almost entirely by volunteers, both angling and non-angling and shows how much people are for their environment. Despite one days rain all the other days went down a storm, and the sandwiches my other half made for the Red syke fencing went down so well that she’s really set a bench mark for all our volunteer days now!
Our work on Chipping brook needs a little fine tuning with the Environment Agency to determine that we are up to scratch prior to consents being issued. The work at the top of the Ribble is also moving on, with much of the modelling complete and grip surveys and securing the final OK from the Landowners and the EA “all” that remains before we make a start.
We had a trial days electrofishing on the 14th of June to see where our fry were up to, and a quick decision to give them another 2 weeks was made as the size of fry was such that identification was nigh on impossible at this point. The electrofishing began in ernest on the 27th and we completed a weeks worth of surveys on the Calder catchment. The surveys were quite interesting with less fry being found than we were expecting, but at this point no conclusions can be drawn. We are now undertaking otter spraint surveys at the same time as doing our electrofishing surveys, and have identified a couple of locations on Pendle water, and one on a tributary of Colne water where we found spraints. The tributary of Colne water was quite surprising as no where else on Colne water did we find one, but also that there were no fish (not even in the most likely spots) on this stream. However looking around I then noticed that the Leeds Liverpool canal was but 25 metres away. So my guess is the otters are using the canal.
We have now agreed to support a project with Sheffield University, (this project has not secured funding yet, but I hope that it will) the project aims to under take a series of water chemistry samples simultaneously, catchment wide over 3 years. We hope that we can encourage at least 100 volunteers to take part to get as many samples as possible. This work will help us to focus our interests in things like addressing septic tanks or sewage works, as well as agriculture and industry. It’s an exciting project, very few simultaneous surveys like this have ever happened before.
Our new beats on the Angling passport scheme are now fully open, which include new stretches on Stock beck, Bottoms Beck and main river Ribble at Mitton. The booklets and tokens are available online or at the Aspinall Arms near Whalley. These will feature in next months issue of trout and salmon which I would hope will spark more interest in the schemes, and income that will be invested directly back into the our rivers and streams.
Since the last blog post I managed to sneak in a weeks holiday which as re-energised me, but it’s never enough! While I was away Stephen and Catherine hosted a visit from DEFRA to visit the various projects that they have funded over the last two years. This went really well and they were both pleased and excited by the work we’d done.
I also have some other exciting news, but we just can’t broad cast it yet, it’s absolutely fantastic… but I just can’t say anything for a little longer. Hopefully in a fortnights time I will be able to!
Environment Agency news- 25,000 more homes to be better protected from flooding
- Completion of Olympics environmental works secures green legacy
- Environment Agency moves to stop rivers running dry
- Woman rescued as car is swept away by floods
- Environment Agency tracks alien invaders
- Unwanted Christmas trees provide festive flood defences
- Queens green energy scheme nears completion
- Case for change: Drought to be commonplace by 2050s
- New taskforce will tackle illegal waste sites that blight communities
- Environment Agency moves to manage scarce water supplies across Eastern England