Posted on March 16, 2020
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.
Posted on March 15, 2020
The auction starts on Friday this week! If you would like a printed catalogue so that you can peruse the lots with a glass of wine or beer and pen in hand, please contact Christina on office@wildtrout.org. Catalogues and all the lots are also available on our website. With over 300 to choose from, we’ll be helping you narrow the field by featuring groups of lots under the ‘Season of Adventures’ banner over the next couple of weeks until the auction closes on Sunday evening, 29 March. Keep well and keep your spirits up by planning your ‘Season of Adventures’.
Posted on March 15, 2020
We at WTT are planning to carry on as best we can, in the face of the Covid-19 crisis. We believe that our advisory visits and our practical work, with appropriate hygiene measures and risk assessment in place, can still continue, at least for now, so please don’t hesitate to contact your local Conservation Officer for our help; details here.It may well be that the river bank is a good place to be while this crisis rages!
Posted on March 13, 2020
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
Posted on March 04, 2020
The Arundell Arms hotel in Devon is one of the UK’s premier fishing hotels, with 20 miles of private fishing on the River Tamar and its tributaries. They are running a friendly and social weekend of fly fishing for wild trout with dinner and accommodation, aimed at Wild Trout Trust members and supporters. Your host is David Pilkington, the hotel’s senior fly fishing instructor. Join David for dinner and take advantage of his 50+ years’ fly fishing experience. Stay for two nights, Saturday 2 and Sunday 3 May 2020, for £295 per person. The price includes two days fishing and dinner each evening, plus room and breakfast.
The hotel will donate £20 per person to the Wild Trout Trust.
For more information and to book your place, contact Reservations@arundellarms.co.uk or ring 01566 784666
Posted on March 04, 2020
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.
Posted on February 28, 2020
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/
Posted on February 26, 2020
WTT members will have seen an article in the Autumn newsletter describing how to tell the difference between a brown trout and a sea trout. They are the same species, but with different life strategies and telling them apart is not as easy as you might think.
You can read the article here.
Paul Kenyon of Snowbee and Fly Fishing Devon has taken the question further in this interesting web page .Another interesting article on the remarkable flexibility of trout and their migration habitats will appear in our journal, Salmo Trutta, which will be sent to members in early May.(You can join as a member here.)
Posted on February 25, 2020
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.
Posted on February 23, 2020
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!
Posted on February 14, 2020
Beavers have been breeding on the River Otter in Devon since at least 2015 and have been the subject of intensive study to understand their impacts. The River Otter Beaver Trial Science and Evidence Report has now been published and is available to download here.
Mike Blackmore, formerly WTT Conservation Officer and now working for the Wessex Rivers Trust, sat on the Fisheries Forum for the beaver trial and wrote this article for our journal, Salmo Trutta, in 2019.
More information, including the WTT position paper on beaver-trout interactions, is available on the ‘Predators and Beavers’ library page on our website. The summary paper includes a matrix of postive and negative effects of beaver activity on trout.The Wild Trout Trust position on beavers can be summarised as:
Posted on February 13, 2020
The judging team agreed that the Living Heritage of the Don project reflected the innovative nature of contemporary urban river restoration, with its blend of technical excellence, partnership working, community engagement, long-term monitoring, and above all fish passage improvement - so that salmon are now reappearing in the post-industrial heart of Sheffield after an absence of 200 years.
The project has received a £2500 donation from the Fario Club supported by Peter Ahluwalia Bellinvest Global Equity Fund together with a sculpture of a kingfisher, the river watcher, cast by reknowed bird sculptor Paul Harvey.
Click here for the full Press Release with details of all the finalists.
Posted on February 11, 2020
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.
Posted on February 09, 2020
The EA are running a consultation on whether to extend the season for the Yorkshire and NE coast net sea trout fishery. We would encourage everyone to respond to preserve our sea trout stocks. The consultation closes 21 February 2020.EA consultation details are here.
There are supporting documents which you can download, and the survey can be submitted online or using this document. It is very short – essentially one question.
Our full response is here. This is the first paragraph of our response:
Posted on February 06, 2020
Come and visit our stand at the BFFI this weekend. We will be selling some flies tied by the late, great Malcolm Greenhalgh and donated to us by his widow Yvonne. Malcolm was Vice President of the Wild Trout Trust and loved wild trout.
Suggested minimum donation £10 per pack of flies.
https://www.bffi.co.uk/
