News

WTT Conservation Officer, Rob Mungovan, just back from furlough, has got straight to work restoring a reach of a little river close to his heart.

Many of us already spend time battling against other non-native invaders like signal crayfish and various alien plants. So, with the Asian hornet in the news again as a threat to our honey bee, we thought a quick swat-up might be appropriate for interested WTT supporters.

We’re a month into WTT’s plan for dealing with the Covid crisis. Here’s an update…

Seven WTT members of staff remain on furlough: Denise Ashton, Paul Gaskell, Jonny Grey, Nick Lawrence, Rob Mungovan, Gareth Pedley and Theo Pike. Five of us remain on the bridge steering WTT, some on reduced hours and/or salary (in one case, sacrificing salary entirely). Just to remind you, we’re furloughing this extraordinary group of people in line with Government’s Stay at Home message, meaning we are unable to get out to do our advisory and practical work, much of it requiring travel and close 1:1 work, certainly where we’re working in the river with groups of volunteers. Furloughing people gives us the opportunity to return to our funded projects when movement restrictions ease, though obviously the people we work with have to be keen too to restart those projects when the time is right.

We are cost saving wherever we reasonably can. For example, we’ve deferred a full print run of our annual journal, Salmo Trutta. We’d planned our annual Get Together on the Usk for September 12 & 13, but that is in abeyance for now. We’re investigating the practicalities of a remote Get Together, where you could still hear from some of our guest speakers, such as Paul Procter, Jon Beer and Tony Bostock.

We have added a page about rainbow trout to the website under the ‘About Trout’ menu.

Rainbow trout are not native to the UK, but for many people they are the first (and perhaps only) trout that they catch. We hope you find it interesting.

There are also pages on brown trout, sea trout, ferox trout, grayling and arctic charr under the ‘About Trout’ menu. Plus 100 (or more) facts about trout.

WTT is a practical, hands-on organisation: we improve rivers and advise and help others to do so too. At present, however, Coronavirus restrictions on essential travel and social distancing means that some of our staff aren’t able to do their usual work. We have many practical projects lined up, with ringfenced funding in place, but we simply cannot get to the rivers to deliver them.

As a result, from 1 April 2020, WTT has taken the difficult decision to follow many charities and other organisations in temporarily furloughing some of our staff as part of the UK Government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

This means that, from 1 April 2020, some of our team will remain employed by WTT but not allowed to do any work for us, initially for one month. More details of those who are furloughed at www.wildtrout.org/contact-us

Jonny Grey has updated the paper on predation by fish eating birds, which is held on the ‘Predation and beavers' page in our website library. The paper reviews the available research and evidence regarding goosander and cormorant impact on fisheries and describes the measures available to control fish eating birds.

Jonny is a WTT Conservation Officer and Professor in Practice for aquatic ecology at the University of Lancaster.

Following a Consultation, the Environment Agency have decided not to extend the season for beach netting fishing for sea trout in Yorkshire and the North East.

Of the 562 online responses they received, 93% opposed an extension of the current netting season and 7% were in favour.

This is the first paragraph of our response:

The Wyre Rivers Trust have produced an excellent illustrated online ‘book’ to explain Natural Flood Management. It includes questions and activities aimed at primary school children but is also an extremely good summary for people of all ages of the issues and actions around Natural Flood Management.

There are teachers notes and lesson plans too.