End of year fly

It’s a long stretched time between Christmas and New Year, so I was happy to meet with Graham in the morning for a spot of riverfly monitoring. We couldn’t do this site earlier in the month due to river levels. It’s been reasonably dry for a while, so while still high, it’s safely manageable.

Graham took the kick sample and was able to reach the middle spot where there is a nice grass habitat on the river bed.

We caught a few fish as well, so there was quite a bit of sorting out of the sample tray to do before we could start counting.

We quickly spotted enormous cased caddisfly, which is consistent with what I saw with Tony upstream last week. It must definitely be the season for them to pupate. We also found quite a few empty cases, which I expect were vacated quite recently.

There were numerous gammarus – quite possibly the biggest count we’ve seen here. We also found single samples of a fine caseless caddis and mayfly. Quite a few Olives as well, so a very healthy score of 8 overall for the site.