Monday 24th May:  All day in the office, trying to clear the backlog of e-mails, writings etc. as the next chapter in the  field season, netting and tagging, opens in June as smolt trapping (usually) comes to an end. The Yarrow smolt trap is probably finished now, as algal growth clogs it up when the water warms up and that is starting to happen, but there should be still a lot of downstream migrants to come at Tweedsmuir, if the low water levels do not stop them.

Tuesday 25th May: In the office all day again. The Yarrow is being walked today with the mobile reciever to find the smolts that have not yet turned up at Philiphaugh. There's a freshet due on Wednesday night, so we need to get the low water situation for the smolts worked out before we can see what effect, if any, a freshet has on them. I wasn't anticipating  being able to see the effect of these weekly freshets on smolts as they usually start later in the year, so this is a bonus. In the evening, out with Niall to check the movements of the smolts at Philiphaugh, to see if these were any different in the darkness.

Wednesday 26th May: Out early to do the traps, to cover for Kenny who was at TweedStart today. Back to the office to meet a researcher from Southampton University who had come to collect salmon scales for microchemical analysis. This uses a laser to burn off minute chemical samples from across a scale, which when analysed can indicate where the fish was in the sea when different parts of the scale were laid down. She showed me some of their initial results which indicate that the salmon from two English rivers went to very different parts of the north Atlantic - if this is right, then it radically changes what is known about the salmon at sea and also changes the context for understanding how stocks of different rivers vary in strength. If some parts of the sea have better feeding / fewer predators than others, then the fish that go there will do better than fish from other rivers that go elsewhere. They also found that Salmon and Grilse did not share the same areas at sea, even though they were from the same river (which could explain a lot of what we see in our historic catch records).  We were able to give her scales from 200 Tweed Salmon & Grilse to continue this research, from 20 fish  per year for the last 10 years. When we started collecting scales in 1992, microchemistry and the extraction of DNA from scales were very new and experimental but their future possibilities served as extra reasons for doing this. Now, 18 years on, when the future has arrived,  we have a "tissue bank" of scales from over 20,000 Tweed salmon and can begin to make use of these techniques as they become mainstream. Dried scales last very well - some Danish genetics work has used DNA extracted from salmon scales almost 100 years old - so this collection may well be of use in the future for other analytical techniques not even thought of yet.

Thursday 27th May: Out with Niall to fit an acoustic data recorder at the bottom of the Whiteadder. Although we'll be tagging adults upstream, at Paxton, we know from the previous radio-tracking that some Whiteadder fish will lie in the main channel all summer and only go in to the Whiteadder in Autumn. Down to Berwick and dropped off more preservative-filled vials for the taking of tissue samples for genetic analysis with a netsman - this is the third season he's been taking samples for us from fish of different sizes that he catches. Download the loggers on the way back up river and find half a dozen or so of the smolts have got right down the river in about a month, though all but one of them spent some time behind the Philiphaugh cauld. Just how big a proportion of their migration time different fish spend there is one of the things we'll be working out. The first reports of smolts being seen in the lower river were about a month ago, so these tagged ones will not be the first to reach the sea, even though they have come from the Yarrow in the headwaters. A late report of smolts in the trap on the Gala, so we'll be tagging there tomorrow, which also shows that that there are still smolts well upriver that have yet to get very far on their journey.

Friday 28th May: Weekly meeting in the morning then out to do the traps as Kenny at TweedStart again & see the acoustic tagging going on at the Gala.