Trout in the Town:

We trout in the town types occasionally come in for some snide comments regarding playing round the edges of things at a local scale when we do volunteer balsam bashes and contract knotweed stem injection work. Well, as our own experiences with recovery of native seedbank plant species following the removal of Himalayan balsam concur, there is also now peer reviewed published science that indicates Global plant diversity can hinge on local battles against invasive species. It also explains why some of the previous literature can, sometimes, give conflicting conclusions depending upon the scale at which studies measured diversity. RT @ bes_invasive : Global plant diversity hinges on local battles against #invasivespecies ow.ly/h7myP and ow.ly/h7ngR — BES (@BritishEcolSoc) January 25, 2013

A number of projects that I am involved with in the UK have ambitions towards "daylighting" sections of urban rivers. I eagerly look forward to the full production of the film whose trailer appears below. There will always be sections of river that cannot be brought back up out of the underground tunnels. However, I hope that we will be able to witness more and more sections of river as they get their first glimpse of daylight in over a century... Lost Rivers - OFFICIAL TRAILER from Catbird Productions on Vimeo . More good stuff here: http://www.facebook.com/DaylightingUrbanRivers/posts/467978206593127 and here: http://www.facebook.com/DaylightingUrbanRivers?ref=stream and here: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150317869878639.335457.359636693638&type=1 and here: http://daylighting.org.uk/Daylighting/siteDetails.php?siteId=32

I saw that Theo Pike had posted this in his urban trout blog ( http://www.urbantrout.net/film-night-fly-fishing-the-urban-potomac/ )and just think that the film and Theo's synopsis nails it. This is the underlying passion that Trout in the Town needs to kindle and ignite in communities that live around some of the best, most valuable and most un-loved wild trout and grayling populations in the UK.

So, at this time of year, trout streams across the UK will play host to some genuine - and almost entirely hidden - miracles. Much of this will be played out in the microcosmos found in the tiny breathing spaces between irregularly-shaped gravel chips. It doesn't matter whether the trout stream is in the middle of a busy city or in pristine countryside - new life is currently finding a way. In fact, I can think of a bus stop only a few hundred meters from where I currently sit that the queues of passengers will be standing almost within touching distance of a new generation of tiny trout. Each occupying parallel but completely separate universes. Our (largely) warm and wet winter of 2012 will mean that lots of streams would have seen spawning efforts starting perhaps in November. The males chasing rivals away from prime spawning sites and the females fluttering their bodies sideways to thrash and scrape small depressions in the gravel bed. The eggs shed and fertilised by the ...