Monday 30th March: Our annual visit from Napier University's  M Sc in Water Management students. Had hoped to take them to the Yarrow smolt trap, but no smolts yet, so gave a couple of talks on fisheries management instead and showed video clips of fish passing through a counter. We started the Yarrow smolt trap earlier this year to see if we could catch a three year old smolt - have had none  since smolt trapping started there two years ago. Evidence from scale reading of adults is that we may well have lost three year old smolts altogether over the last 10 years and we want to check this from other sources. The only place we used to find a real population of two year Parr (which become three year old smolts) was the top of the Ettrick and we'll electric-fish there again to check if this is still the case. If these slower growing Parr have gone altogther, it will be a strong sign of climate warming impacting the salmon population.

Tuesday 31st March: Out early to do the traps. No smolts yet. Back at the office, down to the Leader to put in a temperature datalogger, part of a catchment wide network we will be putting in to follow up the Pilot Study on the temperatures of the Ettrick and Yarrow that ended last year. The aim is to look at temperature variations between tributaries and how the water temperatures in the catchment generally change / vary over the years. We'll also get information on how fish use temperature as cues - the first male Grayling  turned up on the spawning site below Drygrange today.  In the afternoon a meeting with the RAFTS Biosecurity Planning officer.  Write a note on Spring Salmon and Gill Maggots for the News website afterwards.

Wednesday 1st April: Out early to do the traps. Still no action - 2 pairs of Toads in the Tinnis trap ( 5 singles and two pairs yesterday). Back to office and start preparing the 5 mins outline of work on the Sea-trout of the Tweed I'm to give at an Atlantic Salmon Trust workshop on Sea-trout in a couple of weeks time.  Later, start preparations for tomorrow's Lamprey survey at an instream works site in Hawick. This will be the first electric-fishing of the year, so the equipment needs extra checking. Kenny at an Invertebrates identification course over at Loch Lomond today. James (bearing the livid scars of a bloody encounter with his Judo instructor on Monday) is beginning to extract data from the scale reading database to produce a report.

Thursday 2nd April: Out with Barry to do a lamprey survey at some proposed river works in Hawick. A hot, sunny day, the water clear but still a bit high for this sort of work. Found plenty of lamprey larvae, but no adults or signs of spawning activity. There must be a quite astonishing total of lamprey larvae within the Tweed catchment, though estimating such a figure would be too difficult to even try. They are just about everywhere there is a patch of sediment - and sometimes, even, where there isn't any. As usual when sampling  larval lamprey habitat we found nymphs of Ephemera danica, the "true" Mayfly. Until we started sampling this sort of habitat, we very seldom came across these and thought them rare. Now, however, we expect to find these famous Mayflies wherever there is some sediment, and here they were again, right in the middle of Hawick.  What did surprise me, however,  was to electric-fish a Notonectid (a "Backswimmer") - these are larger versions, about an inch long, of Corixids ("Water Boatmen") and really belong in still waters and ponds. Years ago I surveyed the Island of Eriskay for these - you can identify them to species quite easily by the shapes of the hard parts of their genitalia - but I've long forgotten how to do this. James on leave fishing. Kenny on traps.

Friday 3rd April : Out early to the traps - a few small trout and 15 mating Toads in the Tinnis trap. Back to the office for the monthly joint RTC / TF staff meeting. Various bits of admin & some writing up of yesterday's survey. In the afternoon meet with Kenny and James to revise the trout section of the Management Plan for the next edition. Afterwards, phoning around the EA to get info on the Signal Crayfish / Zebra Mussel status of the areas from which various stocking applications want to bring fish into the catchment.