Trout in the Town:

Some very nice positive coverage here in the local newspaper for the Wigan Trout in the Town activities: CLICK IMAGE TO VIEW FULL SIZE

An important video from Trout Headwaters.com - The amount of damage caused by the floodwaters on the Otter Creek associated with Hurricane Irene was worse where there was access to healthy wetlands and floodplains was reduced. http://troutheadwaters.com/clubecoblu/?p=3393

Last year key people from SUBSTANCE social research co-operative: http://www.substance.coop/ and the Get Hooked On Fishing project: http://www.ghof.org.uk/ and myself put a LOT of work into an extensive funding bid to the Big Lottery Fund. The idea behind it was to generate interest, interaction and greater care of urban river corridors in the communities living close to them. This expands upon the excellent achievements of GHOF that uses coarse fishing activities to train up "peer mentors" who then coach people their own age in angling skills and achieve accreditation that helps them into careers in angling. They have been able to report significant successes in reduction of antisocial behaviour and many benefits to the life-choices made by participants in the scheme. Some of the most comprehensive evidence for these successes was gathered through the involvement of SUBSTANCE as part of their huge research project covering " The Social and Community Benefits of Angl...

Following my initial Advisory Visit on 8th December 2010 we were finally allowed to get our wellies on and make some habitat improvements to a stream in the Wigan area (close to where I partially mis-spent my youth!). So in March 2013 an intrepid band of local volunteers were led by Paul Kenyon, whose house backs onto the river, to participate in a WTT Trout in the Town habitat Practical Visit. We were also joined by local landowner Ian Parker who got firmly stuck into the labour – and is interested in additional works on his section of river just upstream. The presence of a few wild trout in the reach shows the potential of this river – although it is currently periodically struck by serious pollution incidents that have emanated from a Victorian-era dye works upstream as well as Combined Sewer Outfall discharges. The provision of improved habitat in this reach is hoped to provide opportunities for generations of fish to thrive and reproduce in-between pollution incidents on the ma...

Although the weather shows no signs of warming up just yet, do check out the writings of Kathryn Maroun - previously a very active angler and now battling with stage 3 Lyme disease that is transferred via tick bites and, improperly treated, kills you by attacking the body's organs (including the brain). Kathryn Maroun is one of a handful of Canadian women to be certified as an FFF casting instructor. She is the award winning executive producer of What A Catch Productions. The 52 show series highlights Kathryn's fishing adventures from around the world. Kathryn exposes never talked about hazards of the sport, conservation, culture, as well as showcasing exotic game fish in her series. Her show first aired in the US before being internationally distributed. Kathryn is featured in the collection of two prominent museums for her significant contribution to the sport of fly fishing. Kathryn Maroun is the president and founder of Casting for Recovery Canada, past director of Trou...

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