News

The timing of the Auction is (to put it mildly), unfortunate, in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis and many potential bidders will be concerned about committing to buy fishing at this time. We can only be optimistic that fishing will be possible at some point this season. Many of our generous donors have indicated they are happy to be flexible and will defer to next season if necessary, and we will, of course, refund winning bidders where Covid-19 prevents them from taking their fishing day.

The Auction is an extremely important source of funding for us, and never more so than this year, when other sources of funding are looking threatened by the crisis around us. The Auction funds are vital for us to continue our work to improve rivers for wild trout.

Please support us if you can. 

If you win a lot and Covid-19 prevents you from taking your lot, please contact us and we will do our best to sort the situation; for example, donors might be willing to defer when the lot is taken. Hopefully, refunds won’t be needed, but please contact us for help.The monies we raise are incredibly important to us, even more so in these vexing times.

Annually, we receive a lovely donation from Butts Brewery near Hungerford, arising from the 5p they give us for each bottle of Barbus barbus beer that they sell. Each year, we turn that donation into something useful: bionic waders, chainsaws. This year, the £290 Butts donation will buy our Conservation Officers two (and a half) licences for an online mapping tool, to help them plan practical river improvement projects.

Thank you all at Butts. Check out all their organic beers, including their splendid Barbus, at http://www.buttsbrewery.com

The Atlantic Salmon Trust is looking to appoint a salmon and sea trout tracking co-ordinator to stimulate, develop, and where appropriate, manage fish telemetry projects and associated teams so that we may gain a better understanding of fish movements and their survival. In addition, the role will also involve informing technical and non-technical audiences about the work being undertaken by the Trust.

Based at the Trust’s main office at Battleby, near Perth, Scotland. Full time.Closing date 24 March 2020.

More details here.

Fisheries Management Scotland is seeking an Aquaculture Interactions Manager, “…to develop and maintain professional engagement with the aquaculture industry to support the production of environmental management plans (or successor arrangements) and monitoring strategies to understand and address any local impacts on wild salmonid fish”. Further details at http://fms.scot/vacancies/

Thanks to Chris Conroy of the Ness Fisheries Board, we now have a great collection of very high quality underwater videos of trout (and the occasional salmon) on our YouTube channel.

We will be embedding these videos on various 'About Trout' pages on this website in due course. One example is below, but you can view all of them here. 

Two good blogs about the current flooding from Mark Lloyd of the Rivers Trust and the Wye and Usk Foundation.

Mark Lloyd blog post: https://bit.ly/2uXz3XrWUF blog post: https://bit.ly/32isB9H

We are writing a blog post about the impact of floods on trout. Watch this space!

The Environment Agency have published their Fisheries Annual Report for 2018-19 which includes a breakdown of rod licence funding and how that money is spent. Also included are maps of the status of salmon and sea trout rivers for 2019 and the locations of Fisheries Improvement Fund projects.

The Wild Trout Trust is mentioned in the report as some of our work is funded by the rod licence. For a more complete summary of our work in 2018-19, see our annual report here.