Dr Bennett, one of the founder members of the Riverfly Partnership that teaches anglers to use riverflies to monitor river pollution, produces high quality picture keys of such flies but was missing pictures of March Browns. Dr Bennett, unable to find this fly near his home in England, had heard that there were still good hatches on Tweed and contacted the TTGI for assistance on where best to sample. On Thursday, 2nd April he travelled over 350 miles north and arrived at the Tweedswood fishing beat, near Melrose, where he met the TTGI Biologist and Tweedswood Boatman, Kevin Patterson (who had kindly given permission to sample March Browns on his beat).
The iconic Leaderfoot Viaduct on Tweedswood fishery near Melrose
On the day the River Tweed did not disappoint. After a couple of hours of collecting nymphs in the river by kick sampling a good “hatch” of March Browns started at around 12 o’clock. The hatch lasted around ½ to ¾ of an hour and allowed the collection of sufficient numbers of adults in only a short period of time.
A March Brown mayfly
Dr Bennett is now in the process of producing high quality photo keys showing the nymphs and adult stages of the March Brown mayfly. These will be incorporated into the keys used by the Riverfly Partnership, amongst other uses, and will help improve the data collected on this important and under-studied species of mayfly.