Monday 22nd May: Van in for service early, then catching up with last week's e-mails. At lunchtime go down to Sprouston to pick up a c 2lb Brown-trout found dead yesterday. Pretty obvious signs of Furunculosis but an unusually bloody vent. According to the book, the internal organs can liquefy with this disease, which gives an explanation for this and the internal organs are, indeed, in a poor state despite the fish itself still being in good condition. James scores a success, identifying the sex (female) from external features despite it not being the spawning season - he's working on this as part of our attempt to look at the sex ratios of Brown-trout and Sea-trout. The big news while I was on leave was the approval of the Living North Seas programme for funding under the EU InterReg IVB heading: this means re-writing the work programme for the next three years. There will be a lot of bureaucracy to cope with, but huge opportunities to fill in major gaps in our knowledge. It's been a long haul since I heard of the Celtic Sea-trout Programme when I was in Ireland three years ago and thought it would be good idea to have something similar for the North Sea, but it seems to have come right in the end - though the real work starts now.

Tuesday 23rd May: In the office all day, finishing off the first draft of the report on the Lamprey survey made on the lower Gala for the railway works. Also looked up some literature on the acoustic tagging of smolts on their downriver migration as this is a key work topic for the Living North Seas Sea-trout work we want to do here. It's one of the great missing pieces of the Tweed jigsaw - how do our Salmon and Sea-trout smolts survive on their journey downriver to the sea - and what is the estuary like for them ? We've got funding for two years worth of work on this and it would be great to be able to compare smolt survival in wet seasons, when they get swept off to sea in spates and in dry seasons when they have to actively swim to get downriver.

Wednesday 24th May: Out with Barry to do more Bullhead electric-fishing. It's a small stream, only a couple of metres wide with occasional deeper bits, but even after all the years I've done electric-fishing, it still astonishes me just how many Salmon fry and parr can be held by such insignificant little burns. Almost every sweep of  the anode turns over handfuls of fry and where there's bigger stones, parr as well. Competition  must be merciless in such situations - only the very best (= most aggressive ?) must survive to reach smolting size. Bigger cover  turns up bigger, two year old trout as well. We actually get one of takeable size (8") as the catch of the day. Also see an Ephemera danica, a true "Mayfly" hatching. These are surprisingly widely distributed within the Tweed catchment, though it is really only when we survey for lamprey larvae, which also burrow into sediments, that we  find the nymphs regularly. Afterwards, go to the Philiphaugh cauld to see the repair work in progress. Kenny is at TweedStart today, working with schoolkids and James is out electric-fishing at a windfarm site.