Trout in the Town:

You may have seen the first three phases of works on the middle reaches of the Lyme Brook (shown in previous blogs Here and Here) from project works that began in 2015...

Well although the first surveys after that work found some nice coarse fish populations - there was no cold hard evidence that any trout had found the newly-improved habitat...Until now!
I received a phone call today from Matt Lawrence who is the EA's Catchment Host for the Trent Valley Catchment Partnership (with key partners Groundwork West Midlands and the Wild Trout Trust who conceived and delivered the habitat works). Matt told me that he'd had some exciting preliminary reports from a EA Midlands fisheries surveys team. Their survey on 7th September had caught several wild trout as part of their sample on the habitat works site.
These are the first modern records of trout in the brook and is also the exciting news that we have been waiting for on these first phases of work to create spawning, juvenile an…

Take a bow Groundwork West Midlands (particularly Richard, Francesca & Chris) - myself and Tim Jacklin from team Wild Trout Trust really enjoyed working with you and the great volunteers from the National Citizens Service.

Together we turned what was one of possibly the straightest of any straightened sections of brook into a section with quite a lot more variety. This is what the section looked like in winter:

Though, in high summer, almost none of the water was actually visible when the 360 digger arrived on site ahead of the volunteers (I wanted a day to sculpt the basic shape of the brook before Tim, Francesca, Chris and the volunteers came on site for days 2 and 3).
So, once we found the wet bit of the river, operator David and me could start to collaborate in remodelling the stream. I'm always in awe of how much control these folks have with a machine and bucket - and we soon got into a great working and communication routine. It is fantastic to see the physical changes …

You probably know the basic story now (e.g. This Yorkshire Post article), but whether you do or you don't, it is worth reflecting that this whole project was given the go-ahead because it tackled a number of critical problems.

A big one was the flood risk posed by blockages in the original culvert - but Sheffield CC went beyond that and created an "amphitheatre" shaped park that actually created even more flood-water storage than an open channel would. They didn't stop there though, and with the help of multiple partners (including us at the Wild Trout Trust, the Environment Agency and also community volunteers from SPRITE as well as local offices such as the prestigious Jaywing advertising agency), a valuable urban green-space was created. This video explains all that (and also has a lush clip of a rising trout that made my day when I filmed it):

Here's the really exciting thing for me though, as well as the aesthetic amenity value of the formal planting in the …

I was recently able to use the Trout in the Town project to provide two days of training in habitat work for the Friends of Bilbrook (find them on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/Bilbrookfriends/ ).


We used some very simple techniques of woody material introduction and stabilisation to help create submerged "cover" habitat for fish (and hopefully the native crayfish that have been recorded in the brook). Some simple tweaks to those techniques also helped to promote more diverse depth over the cross-section of the brook at selected points.

At the same time as creating localised bedscour - the installed material also encourage patches of sediment deposition. The combination of those actions produce a pattern of separation between areas of fine silt and coarser bed material in a patchwork fashion. In this way, a greater variety of micro-habitats are created and this creates many more opportunities for aquatic species. At the same time, it also creates the variety needed…

You've done a big, ambitious partnership project to deculvert a section of urban stream, but now the civil engineering contractors have gone to their next job. The site is left to mature...what next? Very seldom does this kind of project have any budget for ongoing ecological monitoring (which is a frequent and justified criticism of habitat improvement works - the lack of ecological effect data).

The same can be said for general "husbandry" of the site - whether it be litter or invasive plant control; or even fairly substantial running repairs...

Step in SPRITE (Sheffield Partnership for Rivers in Town Environments) whose site you can check out on http://www.sheffieldsprite.com, the Sheffield Trout in the Town group and a supporting donation of pre-established planted coir products from Salix River and Wetland Ltd. (with their site here: https://www.salixrw.com)

You can see SPRITE talking about their aquatic invertebrate monitoring and see their repair and site care wo…

Although this is the start of what is planned to be a wider project that tackles multiple issues throughout the full length of this heavily-modified river, the first set of works are shaping up really pleasingly. Alec and the rest of the YWT team have made impressive progress to organise and deliver the program of works that we designed on just around 1 km of the River Went, on a project supported by the Environment Agency.
It was particularly impressive due to a last minute loss of the previous project manager due to a career move. In the video you can see how Alec worked with the WTT to power through the first, steep part of the learning-curve on in-river structural improvements to a heavily-modified river.
The main challenges stemmed from the historic realignment of the channel (and general lack of in-stream structure/debris necessary to create vital habitat for different lifecycle stages of fish and other aquatic life). Coupled with the relatively low gradient and fine particulate m…