Monday 15th March: All day at the Freshwater Fisheries Laboratory, Pitlochry, with the drafting group getting a final version of the Code of Good Practice for Freshwater Fisheries Management ready for the next meeting of the full group. This code is being drawn up as part of the Strategic Framework for Freshwater Fisheries as produced by the Freshwater Fisheries Forum.

Tuesday 16th March: Catching up with e-mails and bits and pieces in the morning, then down to Tillmouth with Niall to  look for suitable acoustic tracking sites. The middle of March and The Cheviot still covered in snow - the first Celandines out though.

Wednesday 17th March: In the office all day wrestling with the budget for the Living North Sea work - as its started later than planned, all the cash-flow projections have to be revised. The problem is that the budget headings required for reporting to  Europe are quite different from those needed for our own budgetting. In the evening at 21.00 set off with James for Galloway, to help our counterparts there to collect Sparling (Osmerus eperlanus) for work they are doing and to see one of the most curious fisheries phenomena to be seen in this country, their mass spawning. We make liaison visits to each other in alternate years, and it was our turn this year to go to Galloway. Sparling used to be fished commercially in the firths of the Forth and the Tay  and on several Galloway rivers but there is now only this one of the south-west's populations left and the Galloway Fisheries Trust have been contracted to see if they can be restored to the other rivers there. The spawning run upriver can be predicted from tides and water temperature and we got the call in the morning to say it would be on tonight - at just after midnight. And sure enough, right on time, they appeared in the river at their preferred site : small, grayish fish easily visible in torchlight. The astonishing thing about them is that so intent on spawning are they that they can be picked out of the water by hand - I got half a dozen this way. Although related to salmonids (they have adipose fins), their skins are quite dry, without any apparent covering of glaur and as they are not  very strong or energetic, they can be collected in this way. Even when still in the water they feel dry to the touch, which is very strange. Within a couple of hours, several hundred had been collected -some of the spawning groups were packed together like Sardines.  Also got some other liaison business done. The licences having been awarded for offshore wind farms in the Forth area this week, the scoping document for assessing the environmental impacts arrived today. This is something entirely new to us, but the Galloway Trust have experience of the Solway offshore wind farms, so got a run through on the issues from my counterpart - standing in the middle of a river in the middle of the night, beside a tub of Sparling. Left about 2.30 in the morning and back at 5 am.

Thursday 18th March:  Have three talks coming up in the next two weeks, so revised and completed the presentations today. Sent a very curious reference from Blaue's Atlas of 1654 to a loch near Peebles, where, when the wind was in the right direction in August it would blow masses of fish, especially eels, out of the water for people to catch in baskets. Certainly August is the right time for Eels to begin their migration out of the headwaters to the sea, but not sure about the wind bit.

Friday 19th March: Weekly staff meeting in the morning, then out checking Wark and Paxton for sites for listening stations. Will need to make decisions and start placing them out soon - smolt tagging should start in mid-April