Scooping up fly
An early start this morning to see if we can monitor riverfly for the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. I met with Tony at 8am at Ebley Mill and we made our way round to the regular spot. The water was a lot lower this month than in December .. almost back to normal.
We were accompanied by a sixth form student who wanted to see the process and help with the count. It provides a good educational opportunity to engage the next generation in wildlife monitoring.
We were able to get into the centre of the river safely, but not the whole way across. So we decided to record the results for our purposes, but not submit them to the national database as the samples were not captured in line with the full methodology.
There were a remarkable number of mayflies, and much bigger than we observed in December.
We also had a healthy number of cased cadis flies in addition to numerous gammerus.
So, overall the score remained the same as last month at 5. This is showing some consistency, but we would expect to see more species once it’s safe to collect in the faster flowing central part of the river.
In the afternoon, I held another session of the python Dursley Code Club in the library. It was very satisfying to see 4 boys decide to work together on a project. They used what they had learned in previous exercises and each of them had a different role in creating a new game.
They managed to get a basic structure and a few lines of code with no input from me. They are sufficiently motivated that they are meeting next week during half term in the library to try and make progress.
I can’t wait to see what they come up with in a fortnight’s time.
