Trout in the Town:

Saw this great news on Twitter - which makes a superb punchline to the work in the video below: #BrownTrout redd on enhanced #RiverRestoration site Candover #Itchen pic.twitter.com/N5CjdDNDqR — Tim Sykes (@TimSykesEA) December 14, 2013

Had a great visit to and discussion around Shipley weir recently. Stephen Bottoms (who organised it all) has done a great blog post here. Also, do go and check out the rest of the "multi-story-shipley" website. It is great and a perfect example of a central theme to the Trout in the Town project - local communities' relationships with their urban waterways: http://multi-story-shipley.co.uk/?p=718 You'll find explanatory text on the site about Stephen's great short film (below) on Bradford Beck...a stream we've featured a few times on the Trout in the Town Blog and you can use the search function to find those too :)

You can always have too much or too little of a good thing. When it comes to revetments (re-inforcements) of river-banks; there are a whole host of pitfalls. On the one hand, many sections of river suffer from excessive grazing of the land surrounding them that leads to a dramatic reduction in the variety of bugs, plants as well as fish populations that can be supported. In addition, many rivers that run through towns and cities often pass through quite intensively used land upstream of urban reaches. The excessive inputs of fine silt and sand where bank-erosion is rampant and extensive often end up being accumulated in the engineered sections of channels in towns and cities. As well as causing maintenance problems,this can smother what may, otherwise, be perfectly good spawning gravel. Conversely, where efforts to "lock" a river channel in one place are over-zealous; the result will be the strangulation of supply of spawning gravels and a variety of cobbles and other r...

The WTT borrowed the fabulous Emriver kit from Severn Rivers Trust during the 2013 CLA gamefair. It allowed us to set up a whole range of common river-channel scenarios in an accurate scaled-down simulation. Dredging was one of the things we modelled: Dredging river-bed material is something that is of particular relevance to the urban/heavily-modified channel environment. As is so often the case with rivers, what seems like the obvious and correct thing to do can actually blow up in your face (or someone else's face several miles up or downstream!). Just as intriguing are the potential knock-on impacts of ad-hoc dredging in rural environments in an effort to increase the capacity to drain land... Nature abhors a vacuum and removing accumulated material from a river channel can have far-reaching and unintended consequences. The first principle effect is to increase the demand for eroded river-bed and river-bank material from upstream. This can dramatically increase the rate o...

The Wild Trout Trust very gratefully benefited from the generous loan of Severn Rivers Trust's "Emriver" at this year's CLA gamefair. As well as proving to be a great way to engage game fair attendees of all ages, it provided a fantastic opportunity to accurately simulate many scenarios that we routinely encounter in our river habitat works. This first video introduces some of the basics - and shows the effect of two common habitat installation techniques: marginal brash and log flow-deflectors. There will be a series of short videos that follow this first introductory piece. Each subsequent film will look at specific scenarios and model their outcomes - which are often highly unexpected unless you have quite a lot of existing experience with geomorphology...

Met with Phil Williams last week to chat through the questions he had for me about the Trout in the Town project. Phil has now put his interview up on his website; and it is available to listen to below: http://www.fishingfilmsandfacts.co.uk/podcasts/F3/AudioAngling130.mp3

Shaun Leonard gave a huge amount of masterclass training over both days of the Urban Conclave - enabling attendees to benefit from just a small part of his extensive experience in decoding the secrets of the lives (and sometimes deaths) of fish just using visual examination of small samples under a microscope. Combining the Trout in the Town friendly competition monitoring methods with training in scale sampling (which does not harm the fish)provides anyone who cares about an urban (or rural!) river with a wonderful tool for understanding the fish populations in their river. For instance, the picture at the top of this blog entry gives a clue to why one of the most commonly-heard myths about taking large fish for the table is completely wrong... Just by way of explanation, the picture shows a trout scale under a microscope. The scale was taken from the fish (caught and released by the WTT's Gareth Pedley from the river Tweed) in the photograph below: Although they are ...