Riverfly success

I met Tony early at Ebley Mill and we went to check if we could access our site this month. The good news was that water levels were below 0.5m and it was safe to go into half the river and perform kick sampling.

This is the first time really that we’ve been able to get a decent sample and count. Given our experience with winter weather, we’ve decided to sample only a specific portion of the river that we know we can reasonably get to in the winter months. There’s little point in sampling the far side when we may only be able to get readings in June.

We identified four species. The mayfly are particularly fine, but we also had cased cadisfly, olives and flat bodied stone clinger. We’ll enter this on the national database as our first proper sample for the site.

In the afternoon I held the regular Dursley Code Club. The internet connectivity problems of the last couple of weeks persisted, which resulted in a patchy experience for the children’s coding. I keep reporting the issues in the hope that someone in library IT takes a look at the problems.