Monday 5th November : In the office all day, mainly working on my talk for this week's meeting of the ART (Association of Rivers Trusts of England and Wales) in Devon. I am giving my classic "What is Fisheries Management" talk . James is ploughing through October's data from the fish counters,which is a massive job as because of the irregularities we found last year, the video clips taken for "rejects" have been saved for manual inspection (and have thus greatly inflated the headline total of "Up" events). Kenny is analysing some of the Creel Survey and logbook data, working out some things that we have never seen before such as the number of anglers with permits per mile of river bank for the different clubs. Steven is working on producing a summary of the data available from rain and river flow gauging stations within the catchment for the SEERAD Management contract.

Tuesday 6th November : Tweed Foundation Trustees meeting.

Wednesday 7th November :  At a meeting of the Area Advisory Group (AAG) which is part of the Water Framework Directive process  (WFD)(Nick usually goes to these, but was on a First Aid course today). This was followed by a meeting between James and myself and the SEPA officers who are "characterising" the Tweed  in terms of pressures on waterbodies for the WFD assessments. We had just not understood how some of these assessments had been arrived at for some parts of the catchment, but managed to sort things out.

Thursday 8th November : Up early to fly down to Exeter for the six monthly ART (Association of Rivers Trusts of England and Wales) meeting tomorrow. On the way called in at Exeter University to discuss how our genetics work is getting on. Then a long drive down to Newquay for the annual ART dinner and awards evening.

Friday 9th November : To the Eden Project for the ART meeting. My talk on Fisheries Management is in the morning with others considering the concept of "natural" in river management. In the afternoon, the talks are on Beaver introductions to Bavaria & the Netherlands and an interesting one on their history in Britain. It is very clear that Beavers would mean major physical and hydrological changes to any smaller waters that they settled on and that they would not be confined to a few glens in the hills. All experience is that they breed prolifically and create their own habitat wherever they want - in farmland or in towns or wherever. From the pictures, I cannot see that their dams could be anything other than barriers to spawning fish migration. A stream with no obstacles can be passed by fish on a spate of a few inches but the bigger the obstacles on a stream, the bigger the spate needed - and bigger spates are less frequent than smaller (we haven't had any on the burns with traps this Autumn so far, for example). Beaver dams can be very big obstacles indeed, though some are just a few cms in height. One of our RAFTS Beavers group has recently been to Norway and seen dams there and reckoned that even abandoned ones were barriers to fish migration - and found that any Beaver that tried to dam a smaller spawning tributary were shot as a matter of course. One of the supposed advantages of Beaver is that their dams settle the silt out of streams - but at this time of year, it is important that spates in small streams are silty as this gives protection to the fish running upstream. Herons know to take station where obstacles to fish movement hold them up and in clear water the larger fish that come into the burns at this time of year are far more vulnerable than in silty water.