// BLOG
Ribble Life
October 17, 2011
Well firstly I’d like to apologise for the complete lack of posts over the last 6 weeks, it’s hard to believe it’s been that long, but when
I look at what we’ve been up to recently it’s not that surprising. The trust is in a real transition at the moment, we’ve made another appointment since my last post – Jackie Dibley – who is our community engagement officer for the URES project, and we are soon to make another three appointments. These are two invasive species officers and a Ribble Life engagement officer.
You may ask what is Ribble Life? It’s the project title for the Ribble Pilot that we are co-hosting with the EA. It was launched on Friday of last week, and we had a fantastic turnout, both in Diversity and in numbers! The pilot is looking at new ways of working
to deliver river improvements. Particularly working in collaboration with others. This is something we have been doing for 13
years, but now we hope to ramp up the scale and deliver real benefits for all, the river, business and communities. The Launch was opened by Nigel Evans the MP for Ribble Valley and the deputy house of commons. It was held at the Wildlife Trust’s Brockhole visitor centre, which is an amazing venue that I would recommend to anyone. Many connections were made and hopefully a few seeds for collaborative projects sown. We will continue our engagement and work to identify possible partners over the next 12 – 18 months trying to set up projects to deliver.
The engagement for URES has now started and Jackie has had a couple of weeks to get herself set and is now undertaken many meetings and hopes to arrange some events to encourage involvement in this project. The Fish passes in Burnley are now almost
complete and all should be done by Friday. We have been so unlucky with the weather is it unreal, but my many thanks go to Baileys Developments who have done an incredible job.
Brun and Calder Fish Passes
We’ve now completed all the design work for the other fish passes required in Burnley and hope to soon have them submitted to the national fish pass panel for approval. We hope to bebuilding a 3 flight larinier style fish pass, and a 4 step pre barage pass. These couldn’t be much more different, but ultimately the most appropriate for their locations!
Stock Beck has had all the gravel added and we are now awaiting a chance to get the fencing up, but the weather is delaying us as,
understandably, the farmers don’t want machinery churning up their fields.
Our electro fishing is almost complete, our annual catchment wide surveys are done, as are our surveys linked to the Settle Hydro and the Signal Crayfish in Bookil Gill Beck (which threw up a huge surprise – a juvenile grayling). However we are still undertaking some of the Surveys linked to impacts of Abstraction on the Dunsop and Langen. This should be done in the next fortnight. All results will soon be inputted and analysis complete ahead of our AGM in November. Thanks to all the volunteers who helped to deliver this monitoring, it is key to the overall reporting of trust activities and state of our rivers health.
We’ll be looking to host another invertebrate volunteer evening in November, but we need to get our other projects out of the way
before starting on the data analysis. We’ll also be reporting on the Otter spraint monitoring and trying to drum up support for some more volunteers to help with this and the invasives.
Otter Spraint from the upper Ribble
We’ve also moved from our old building at Hanson Cement, to our new space near main reception which gives us all the desk space we need, plus a meeting/conference room, archive and plenty of storage. Not to mention a room we plan to set up for our Invert lab!
Cam and Gayle Beck works are progressing as best can be expected given the weather, and last week we took our external grant funders from the Nineveh Trust around for a project site visit. Despite the poor weather a good time was had and we were able to show some of the real issues we are tackling in this project.
We’ve also visited a fish trap on Warrington to see salmon trapping and tagging in action ahead of our planned work next year. However no salmon were caught on our visit! This project is progressing nicely and the realisation that it is no small task has really come home. We are yet to secure our equipment, but are currently following a few avenues to get our hands on some kit that will mean we can deliver this project for fantastic value. In the mean time we have recieved consent and begun trapping some of our fish pass as part of assessing their efficiency.
Our Large woody debris project at Newton and Knowlmere is no almost complete, we are just looking at one last piece of work, but the main body of work is done, and some fantastic habitat for fish, inverts and otters has been completed! Thanks to all the
volunteers who helped with this!
I think this is about all other than to say this time of year always gets me excited as trout and salmon begin their last big migratory push, trout will be starting to spawn in some parts of the catchment, whilst the first frost will signal the temperature change that is likely to bring spawning on in ernest. So if you see some long haired bearded chap leaning over bridges is probably me looking for my favourate fish.
It’s raining it’s pooring….
September 9, 2011
An eventful few weeks , aren’t they always? we’ve had some real success and a few sorry stories. But the main issue has been, as the blog title suggests, the rain! This level of sustained rain I haven’t experienced at this time of year in my time at the trust! It has interrupted two projects, our fish passes in Burnley and the gravel addition at Stock beck.
But lets start with the successes. Although Stock beck has been interrupted progress was excellent. With 4 out of the 9 locations successfully installed and over 100 tonnes of gravel added to the previously dredged beck.
Gravel spawning riffles
As soon as the weather breaks and the ground firms up we’ll crack on and get finished. Our surveys of the site confirmed that very little successful spawning has occurred. We’ll be spending quite some time watching these artificial riffles looking for spawning fish and redds. And now some bad news – pollution, unfortunately we found some sewage pollution in Stock beck, and as a result we found unbelievable amounts of sewage fungus and one dead juvenile salmon. Thankfully there were quite a few live juveniles in the area, and one positive outcome was the surprising number of Eels of various age classes, from 75-80cm to 15cm!
Sewage Fungus
Our surveys have taken a bit of a hit, in that we are a little behind schedule, but we put out two teams over the last two weeks to try and catch up. We’ve covered the Ribble up to Long Preston and hope by the end of September to have succeeded and completing all the Ribble sites. At the same time our other team have been working on the Hodder and completed surveys up to the Dunsop area. Including two detailed studies on Abstraction and our spawning channels. The results will be analysed and reports available in November if not before! Generally trout seem to have had a good spawning season, but salmon not so good, but that is not unsurprising given the timing of last years cold winter coinciding with salmon spawning. Some of our most exciting outcomes so far this year have been the number and extent of White clawed crayfish, and otters.
Surveying the Brenand
And now some sad news, last week some contacts let me know of a dead otter. The otter was found on the Whalley road in Clitheroe near the old Stalwort lodge. We collected the otter and passed it onto the Environment Agency for analysis. However the death was clearly the result of a Road traffic incident. The otter came to the weir on Standen Beck and obviously couldn’t continue upstream in the river, so decided to go around, involving crossing the road. I have to admit being devastated more than I’ve been in some time. This location is near where I walk my dog every day, and I keep an eye on the beck being my local stream. One that we have worked on in an attempt to provide passage for all wildlife, so that in theory fish and otters can easily gain access to the top of Pendle Hill! I hope in the future we can find away to ease passage for fish AND otters so this never happens again!
Speaking of fish passes, our first fish pass in Burnley is complete, and we were half way through the second when this tail end of Irene hot our shores, and has ceased work for the time being, but we are on schedule to complete on time. We hope that this will coincide with the Launch of the URES project including the appointment of the new Community Engagement officer.
Our work site in Burnley
This should also coincide with the move into our new office building, although at the same site and address, Hanson Cement have agreed to provide us with a fantastic building that will allow us to house our new staff, and provide facilites for training of volunteers (on invertebrate monitoring, scale analysis and much more!) and meeting rooms for our local action groups.
What are the local action groups? Well this is what we hope to form as part of our Pilot project with the EA, or as it’s now known “Restoration Ribble!”. The official launch is coming up in October and will mark the real start of the project. Although we’ve already made a start in talking to organisations and groups, and this will continue over the coming few weeks (if your part of a group, or an individual interested in this please get in touch!). What we hope to do is to give people the resources, skills and advice needed to allow them to restore and enhance their own streams.
Although there is much more to talk about such as our Large Woody Debris projects on the Hodder, completion of our fish pass on Boyces Brook and the progress of our Cam and Gayle project, I think that I’ve written enough for one blog post, and what will be left to put in our annual newsletter! However below is a comment that I posted on a national newspaper website, in response to an article that was inspirational, but particularly because some of the other comments were things that we have come across in the last few weeks:
The article was: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/05/yorkshire-river-aire-people-power?commentpage=last#end-of-comments
My comment was:
I work for a rivers trust, which is a community based river charity. We look after our own
specific river, and now there are rivers trusts covering almost every river in the country. The
River Aire has its own, and I’m sure that the man (who shall remain nameless) that is behind the rivers trust there, was also involved with the eye on the aire.
It is so interesting to read the comments as each has addressed a point that I deal with on a day to day basis. The one that stands out is the damage to Asian Rivers. There is a something called a “kuznet curve” which is based on a hypothesis that says that as a country gets wealthier, they value their environment more and so protect it, but still want cheap goods, and thus export environmental damage to less wealthy countries. This is why buying locally sourced, responsibly produced products is key to any country/economy. Such actions are about people power – community based!
On the point of legislation, I agree to a point, our government has given more power to the
regulators, the EA. However as legislation has increased, resource to enforce has decreased! It has continued to be the case that the regulator has relied on people to report and monitor
polluters, and pile pressure on to ensure action is taken – community based!
Improvement of sewage treatment is now undertaken by Utility companies. Often at great expense, but paid for by the rates payer, and you know what… it will probably only mean pence on our rates for benefits worth a great deal more. Utility companies are private firms, and what makes them tick…customers. So pressure from customers will invoke action (although it may take time) if they think we don’t care it will continue – community based.
Increased value of riverside property is an interesting issue. As a rivere cologist/conservationist, development on river banks I hate, but increase land value doesn’t have to be money based. How many people who walk across bridges can’t help but look over the bridge? How many people who go for a walk prefer to walk near the sound, or site of water? Encouraging people to walk or be near water improves health and quality of life, but only if the water is clean. But really things come back to money, and so I ask how much do pubs, restaurants, b&b’s, tea rooms.. I could go on… benefit from being near clean water, and not all of these people are wealthy investors of board room types – community benefits.
So this essay comes to end, with one statement. Our cities are often threatened by
river flooding – Why? Not simply because we build on flood plains, but we build on flood plains because we as humans, for both physical and emotional needs want to be near water.
Full stream ahead!
August 22, 2011
Things are as busy as ever, with projects completed, on the go and coming up! Not to mention our move to new offices on the horizon, we’ll still be based at Hanson Cement in Clitheroe, but in a new larger and more suitable space. This has kept every spare minute (not that there are many) packed with cleaning, tidying and organising. We’re looking forward to getting in as things are a little cramped here in our two rooms since we became a team of 6!
Over the last couple of weeks the Brun Calder fish passes have progressed, but been interrupted by the significant rainfall we had a week or so ago. However by the end of this week we hope that the first fish pass will be in place and completed!
Boyces brook fish easement is well and truly underway, and we hope that this will be finished by Friday, if the weather holds. This is a great little scheme, and will be completed by the addition of Eel mats, that we hope will see Sea trout and Eels making there way back up onto Kemple Fell.
Stock beck gravel addition is due to start in a week, again weather dependant, but also if the farmer has managed to get his silage off! I’m looking forward to this project as we have selected a more natural stone than that which we use last year, which I hope we will see fish utilising this coming winter.
Our consent for the first Chipping fish easement is through, however we suffered a set back to find that Tweedy’s culvert was not a suitable project due to implication of flood risk. We hope subject to land owner consent to start this project in a few weeks, and will now start to look at the Talbot bridge weir, and see what can be done there to improve fish migration.
The URES project Community Engagement Officer post is now being advertised, and the closing date is the 30th of August, so if you’re interested get your CV and covering letter to us ASAP!
The Ribble Pilot is also moving forward, our strategy for engagement, including overall techniques and outcomes are now set, and so it will be a case of talking to interested groups. That said if you are an interested person or group please please please get in touch! The aim is to find enthusiastic people who can help us (or more importantly - we can help!), to deliver improvements to rivers and streams throughout the Ribble Catchment. We hope that we will be able to offer more than just advise and guidance, but training, equipment and if we’re lucky maybe even funding!
I think the most eye opening work I’ve done over the last few weeks has been going out with Richard Atton doing grip surveys on Blea Moor near Ribble head. Grips are interesting “things” as in some cases they aren’t typical land drains that get water to the river fastest, and they can be so varied in shape and size. Grip surveys are essential so that we can prioritise which we think need blocking, but also estimate cost of putting things right. You may be asking, why should we block them? Well beyond the aesthetics, they really are a blight on the landscape (maybe a touch subjective), but they cause pH fluctuations in water, increase the amount of sediment in streams, add a real “tea colour” to the Ribble, and destroy blanket bog, which is one of the most important natural eco-system services for sequestering Carbon from the atmosphere.
Here’s just a few examples:
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- Almost wide enough to drive 4×4 through. This type of grip is quite interesting as the vegetation within should help to slow down water speeds
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- These grips drained to one central point before dropping into a small stream, you can imagine who big the hole where they joined was
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- Richard marking down the size, length, and exact location
We also helped the Environment Agency to try and identify if signal crayfish were present in a tiny tributary of the Hodder. The extra water made things more difficult and we had to go to plan B, and do it using electro fishing. We used this as an opportunity to gain valuable data (as well as look for crayfish) and cam accross one of the most fantastic examples of a salmon trout hybrid. This fish had the head of a juvenile salmon, the tail of a trout, and a body somewhere in between, one of the volunteers took a picture and as soon as I have a copy I will put it up for people to see. No crayfish were found, however traps have now been set and the trust working in partnership with the EA will monitor these for a couple of weeks to try and discover if signals are present or not. On the subject, our colleagues who we worked with previously to look at innovative ways of eradicating signals were busy all last week. Unfortunately we weren’t able to work on this project this year as time just did not allow, but Neil Handy from the Environment Agency and Stephanie Peyar gave them a great deal of support. Fingers crossed for some positive outcomes.
On Thursday evening we are holding an evening to talk to local farmers about who we are at the trust, what we are trying to do, but most importantly, how we can do this and help (NOT hinder) farmers – from grants to advice. If you are a local farmer and interested in coming along please drop us a line (01200444452) for more details.
Now it’s marrigolds and a dirty office for me….
It’s URES!!!
August 5, 2011
Well Once again I can’t believe it’s been three weeks! But some much has happened it’s been unreal! This biggest and best news is that we have secured our Heritage Lottery Fund grant for phase 1 of the URES project – the Urban River Enhancement Scheme. This is a project focused on the Urban Rivers Brun and Calder in Burnley, the aim is to find groups in Burnley who want to take an active role in improving their rivers, and we hope to provide training equipment and opportunities to undertake work, as well as input into some of the bigger capital work we are planning to undertake. The project will involve the appointment of a community engagement officer, which we will be advertising for in the not to distant future. This person will co-ordinate all of the community and action group work. Once in place anyone who wants to get involved should contact the trust.
On the URES project, ground was broken on the key fish pass project in Burnley that will open up the Calder from Sea to source and get the Brun opened up to Thompson park where we will have two more weir to deal with, unfortunately we are struggling to get pictures up on the website at the moment, but if you’re in Burnley Town centre look for the big crane near homebase!
Our weir removal on Barrow brook has been undertaken and now fish can get several kilometres further up Barrow Brook. We also expect to start work on improving riparian habitat in the near future. We have come across another issue there which is some intermittent pollution. The brook every few weeks (without rainfall) suddenly becomes discoloured, it goes very opaque grey in colour. If you have seen this or have any info please let the Environment Agency know (0800 80 70 60) or drop us an email.
Our fencing schemes at Burholme Bridge and on Easington are now complete, and we are waiting until October/November to plant trees – which we will need help with so if you would like to volunteer for any tree planting please let me know. And thanks to all those volunteers who helped to deliver this.
We are now waiting for consent from the environment agency for the gravel addition and habitat improvements to Stock Beck, which we have been lucky enough to have funded from Lancashire Environment Fund, the Environment Agency, the Woodland Trust and support from Hanson Cement – are real multi organisation project! As well as this we hope to soon have consent for two fish easements on Chipping brook, and a large woody debris project on the Hodder near Newton (thanks to funding and support from the Bowland AONB).
Monday will see a fish easement project on Boyces brook commence which we hope (sorry salmon anglers) to see good weather continue for another 3 weeks!
If all the above isn’t enough we’ve also been preparing our projects on Cam and Gayle beck which we hope we will start to see real progress on in the next week. AND we have eben undertaking our electro fishing surveys. These are a little different this year, we have a very focused project on the spawning channels on Dunsop and Langden which Gareth will report on in October. As well as targeted surveys looking at the effects of abstraction on Brennand and Whitendale. This project is a partnership between the Trust the EA and United Utilities which is brilliant, and working with EA staff in the field has helped to strengthen our partnership (as well as make it all possible!) and will have wide ranging outcomes for any abstracted water. Needless to say with this amount of work we’ve all been doing 14 and 15 hour days for the last 4 weeks. Our many thanks to Adam Walmsey and Sam Ambler to their very hard work, we would have struggled without them!
As many people will be aware the Ribble has been listed as a “pilot” under a new way of delivering the Water Framework Directive. The EA and ourselves are just finalising details on a partnership that will see us jointly working on this pilot. In much the same way as our URES project, the aim is to find stakeholders who can help to deliver the objectives of the WFD (as well as others). This will be some of the usual suspects but we hope will provide the opportunity for anyone and everyone to involved in improving THEIR water environment. We hope to have more detail and how to get involved available in the coming weeks.
A date for the diary – 10th of September 2011 is the next Riverfly Partnership Training course, if you would like to be involved please email Catherine to sign up admin@ribbletrust.com
Finally if you have the chance to look at Trout and Salmon, our passport scheme is featured inside! Some tell me the picture I’m in is the best they’ve ever seen of me… it’s the back of my head!
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- 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
- Survey reveals people would save pets over gadgets in a flood
- Communities to see the future of their changing coast