Fly me to the river

The training is complete, the river levels low, the team assembled and the kit issued. The Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust riverfly monitoring project kicked off in earnest today.

I’ve paired with Graham and we have been allocated a fine spot by a fork in the river Frome to monitor once a month. The whole team met first for a final briefing, then we went to check out the site. It’s reasonably shallow, fast flowing and has different habitats of interest.

I stayed on the bank with the stopwatch and Graham collected the samples.

There were very large mayfly, blue winged olives, cased cadisfly and olives. What was surprising was the low number of gammarus.

Overall the score was 7, which was a little low compared to further upstream, but we’ll have to keep an eye on the consistency each month.

It also happens that there is no record of water vole on this stretch of river, so Graham and I will also start monitoring for signs and submit any sightings to the database.