Following yesterday evening's Panorama programme about biodiversity loss, in this morning's BBC Breakfast Tim Muffet joins RSPB's Ralph Underhill, Mark Lloyd of the Angling Trust and Stephen Marsh Smith of the Wye and Usk Foundation to look at one very good and one very bad tributary of the River Lugg near Leominster The day was rainy and muddy but the cows provided plenty of entertainment. One river has been fenced off from cattle and is full of trout while the other is dredged and full of sediment. Does that tell us something? I think it does. Our rivers is a coalition of RSPB, WWF, Angling Trust and Salmon and Trout Association.
I saw a kingfisher at Stanwick Lakes yesterday, but it just flashed past so I couldn't see the colour of its lower mandible. This photograph is a female (orange lower mandible) as males have black upper and lower mandibles.
They are gorgeous birds and remind me of the River Chew in Somerset where I used to look for birds and watch water voles as a kid. My last visit was a bit depressing - no water voles and the river felt lacking in life. Is that my imagination? I doubt it.
Do you have a favourite or a least favourite river? Please let us know.
Mark. You have disappointed me now, I do like to see cows with their feet in the water; images of Grey's Elegy spring to mind of lowing herds etc.
Jeremy Biggs at The Garden Pond Blog has written an excellent summary of this story and attaches a link to the relevant British Wildlife article http://wp.me/pjz4j-1a7
This may surprise you (or not!) … I have in the past spent many a summer’s day ostensibly hunting the otter in East Anglia – in the days when otters were very few and coypu tended to be the quarry. Even then the huntsman – exaggerating somewhat -would remark how hounds “used to” come out of the rivers “each and everyone with a fish in its mouth”. Even then folk were grumbling about ‘no fish’!
But my choice of river is The River Lyn, with its small tributaries which take their birth from Exmoor.
For many years we visited Exmoor two or three times a year staying at The Staghunter’s Inn in Brendon Village - fishing, riding (including rounding up the ‘wild’ ponies), walking and – as I recall – drinking (and singing “ . . . . from Bratton to Porlock Bay … ”.
In his book – “Exmoor Streams” (published 1903) the author Claud F Wade writes:-
“ …..We will take our next piece of fishing between Watersmeet and Brendon. In this stretch the right bank is the better one to follow.
“ ….Around Watersmeet and just above it the river flows in stickles and shallow pools till we come to Limekiln Pool, where many a salmon has been caught, Stag Pool and Island Pool, both very deep ones, the latter excellent for bathing just out of sight of the path. After this the stream comes along fairly shallow through the woods and there is excellent fly water especially at S, or Crook Pool, which you cannot mistake from its shape, and from this we go on another three quarters of a mile through a beautiful piece of fishing scenery and open water called Willsham Plains till we get to trees and rocks again and to the foot of the far-famed Long Pool.
“ ….Here I have seen more salmon caught fairly than perhaps in any other pool on the river, both in the long stretch of deep still water at the lower part and also under the fall at the top. Once this fall formed a barrier to the salmon which few could surmount; but some years ago the rock was blown up and the passage made comparatively easy, which has not been considered an unmixed blessing as far as the trout fishing up above it is concerned, and as the Lyn can never rank as a proper salmon river, and the salmon above this point are generally very black, I think on the whole I agree with the grumblers.
“ …Above Long Pool there is good salmon and trout fishing up to Rockford, the chief pools being Upper Black Pool, where I caught my first salmon, weighing 13 lb, in the year 1868, and Ash Pool, the former, I think, being the deepest pool on the whole river, and a dark forbidding looking pit.”
Anything we can do to bring our rivers back to how it used to be in Mr Wade’s time will be a massive benefit to all of our lives.
GilbertJessop,
Thanks for posting the link to that excellent British Wildlife article. I'm completely in agreement with the view that just fencing off riverbanks is not the way to go for biodiversity, since it leads to very dense overgrown vegetation alongside the river. Much better to have moderate levels of grazing to create a mixture of vegetation types along the bank.
In Ireland, their equivalent of the farm stewardship scheme (REPS) requires watercourses to be fenced off from cattle - I'd be concerned if there was to be a similar compulsory requirement here i.e. to require farmers to fence off rivers without regard to the conditions on each site.
Mark's original comment doesn't distinguish between the effects of fencing and dredging, so the comparison between the two rivers isn't necessarily all that helpful.
Interesting Mark. I read an article in British Wildlife last month suggesting that some access by cattle to the river edge was a good thing for biodiversity - maybe this is not as clear cut as suggested?
Favourite River - the Teme (together with The Talbot Public Inn and Teme Valley Brewery!)
The easy mnemonic for remembering which Kingfisher is which is that the women wear the lipstick!
Favourite has to be the Lathkill as can always find Dippers and Kingfishers.