Monday 27th April : Spend the morning trying both to cut down my existing presentation on Beavers and the problems they cause to migratory salmonids and to incorporate some very interesting new material that has emerged during the last couple of months. There's now a paper that shows how the number of Salmon redds upstream of a Beaver dam increases if a notch is put in the dam to help the fish over (though the Beavers quickly repair this) Another of the new sources is a paper on how public attitudes towards Beaver have changed in Massachussettes as their population has increased and more and more people have problems with them. This so changes people's views that some end up thinking that it is a problem even to have a wetland near their homes as this encourages Beavers to settle  nearby. The difficulty  for this next meeting  is that it all has to be cut down to 15mins and there is such wealth of information on these problems now, this is very difficult. In the afternoon, get the electric-fishing gear out of store and test it ready for the first expedition of the season tomorrow.

Tuesday 28th April: Out all day with Barry to start the monitoring of the population of Bullhead that has unfortunately established itself somehow in a small tributary of the Ale Water. These little fish belong to the South of England but like so many fish  species  from there have been moving northwards over the years, largely through stockings of fish from areas where it is present into areas where it is not. As a very small fish, it can easily hitch a lift with larger fish unnoticed. As a specialist species of small streams it would be a major devaluation of the biodiversity of the Tweed if it spread through the catchment - up till now, invasive fish species have been those of larger channels. There's no easy solution at present, so we are monitoring the population and removing as many as we can, though the wet summers of the last two years have restricted work. Today's work however, finds it no further upstream than last year but spread is, of course, much easier downstream. In the evening, work on the Beaver presentation for tomorrow.

Wednesday 29th April: Working on Spring Salmon data analyses to see if I can find any freshwater phase reasons for this year's poor run. Looking at the stock structure generally as well - now that the scale reading database is up and running (more or less) can now see the ages of fish that make up the Spring run over the years and there are some odd features to this that are baffling me at the moment.

Thursday 30th April: Presentation on Beavers to the Scottish Estates Business Group in Edinburgh

Friday 1st May: Fisheries Management Code of Good Practice meeting at Faskally

Saturday & Sunday : The Tweed Angling Fair & traps duty.