WTT Blog

An update from Trout in the Town Programme Managers Theo Pike and Paul Gaskell :

After inviting urban river groups all over the country to apply for official accreditation with Trout in the Town  we’ve been receiving a steady flow of applications for this exciting new endorsement.

This article first appeared in the WTT Autumn 2018 newsletter, but as it is spawning time again we thought it was worth repeating!

A couple of new things for this year: An excellent podcast by Andrew Griffiths called 'The Trout and the Heron'. Just eight minutes of wonderful description, recorded beside a river at spawning time.

Paul Gaskell, WTT's Trout in the Town Programme Manager for the north, gives an update on a partnership project on the River Trent, including 're-wiggling' the river at Staffordshire University.

Some timely advice on how to avoid catching out of season trout from WTT Volunteer, Kris Kent.

Kris works for Fishing Breaks, is a professional guide, an Advocate for Keep Fish Wet, a life member and long term supporter of the Wild Trout Trust.

Updated April 2021 with the Panorama programme, update on the Philip Dunne bill, details of the evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee and a report by Salmon and Trout Conservation.

Updated January 2021 with the Defra task for announcement on sewage.

if you attended our Urban Conclave in Stalybridge last September, and saw the launch of WTT’s Trout in the Town Urban River Toolkit, you might remember that we also announced a new nationwide accreditation scheme for all our urban river groups.

Like so much else this year, this initiative has been held up by the Covid-19 pandemic, but we’ve now sent out accreditation forms to urban river projects all over the country.

Back in March, Jonny Grey wrote a blog about the low-cost baffle solutions to ease fish passage on Bradford Beck. These interventions over several weirs were a part of a wider scheme to improve the environment within and alongside the beck. He's been back to survey the fish populations now...

Traditional fishing day tickets risk spreading coronavirus through unnecessary contact with vendors. Digital solutions present a way to fish safely and protect the country.

It’s a little over a fortnight since the (re)opening of the 2020 trout season. One can assume our readership has dutifully obeyed the measures of social distancing passed down from Westminster. For ourselves, our neighbours and the good of the entire population we’ve shelved one third of our annual pursuit allowance. But now we may fish again…

Freshwater scientists have been studying the phenomenon of “hydropeaking”, the artificial variation in flow below hydropower plants, for around 25 years. One particular aspect has been the harmful effects of flows, fluctuating in some cases on an hourly basis, upon salmonid fish species. In response to the growing awareness of the need to reduce the impacts of hydropeaking, a team of freshwater ecologists and engineers recently published a timely review article. One of the authors, Daniel Hayes (a PhD candidate at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna) tells us a little more about the issue.

The ever growing population of the south east needs water, and so do our chalk streams which have been suffering from low flows and, particularly in the Chilterns, drying up, because of the demands placed on the chalk aquifers that supply both rivers and people.

In this blog, Charles Rangeley-Wilson describes a simple but revolutionary solution to the problem. Take the water from the lowest reaches of the river, not the top. Chalk-Streams First has the potential to completely re-naturalise the flows in all of the Chilterns chalk-streams with potentially only a small net loss to overall public water supply. 

While the amazing work around the world to remove huge dams and reconnect rivers tends to capture the media headlines (e.g. Dam Removal Europe), we know that small (known in the trade as low-head) structures can be equally as effective in fragmenting fish populations and interrupting sediment transport. And compared to large barriers, there are thousands and thousands of small ones, as the AMBER project has recently highlighted for much of Europe.

Through the latter part of 2019, Jonny Grey was involved in two projects to design low-cost fish passage solutions on two very different becks, and here he describes the installation in early 2020.