Saturday 28th August: Down to the nets at Paxton, for tagging, but met with the news that they'd had a quieter day on Friday and that the tides were small and not much good. The first two shots were blank, the first double nothing we've had this season. Got two small and rather lean Grilse in the next shot and then the netsmen started "fording" -watching for the fish coming upriver before running the net out - they'd seen fish passing before we started. However, the wind then got up and ruffled the surface making this impossible. At the point of the tide, we got a good shot of 10 salmon, including one of 16-18lbs which is the biggest we've tagged so far this season. Processing this number of fish takes time, so that brought the session to an end.

Monday 30th August: Out electric-fishing on the Borthwick Water with Shaun, good numbers of salmon fry at the sites. At one farm Shaun was able to turn a stiff key in a cottage door that was defeating the farmer's wife, so he was of  extra use today.

Tuesday 31st August: Electric-fishing the uppermost Teviot with Kenny today, some of the burns coming right off the watershed. Found masses of trout fry, many less than 45mm in length though others half as big again, so obviously the big die-off of surplus fry still in progress at these higher altitudes where temperatures are colder and growth slower. Also found signficant numbers of salmon fry in burns that I would have assumed were too small (about 1m wide) for salmon spawning, but the fry were present in such numbers (though trout were dominant) and so far from the larger channels that they must have been spawned there rather than have migrated more recently. No Salmon parr at these sites, just fry, which is the reverse of the usual situation which is that Parr are found further upstream than fry, having migrated to find vacant territories. There must have been very high water levels in this area last Autumn that brought salmon in to streams that they would not normally use - we actually saw the same thing on some of the little burns of the Till as well.

Wednesday 1st September: The team have been getting on so well with the electric-fishing that I was not needed today and was able to catch up in the office in the morning. In the afternoon went down the river collecting up  filled scale packets.

Thursday 2nd September: Everyone out to the College Burn, where we've been sampling the very interesting population of Whitling regularly since 1997.  There's several features that create this interest: their spawning location upstream of the Hethpool linns which Salmon cannot pass (we once got an adult Salmon above the linns, but have never found any juveniles, yet there's plenty just below the linns); their very limited size range (e.g. of the 46 fish sampled today, 40 were between 400 and 500mm. Of the five below 400mm, none were under 385mm and the one fish larger than 500mm was 510mm); their behaviour ( it is only in the burns of the Cheviots that we find adult Sea-trout well upstream in Summer, but only in the College are they in any numbers, even as early as June, depending on flows) and their limited number of spawnings (those fish in the low 400-450 range are generally first time spawners and those in the 450-500 are back for a second time). This time we took genetics samples from all the fish we caught as part of our Living North Seas programme work, the idea being that College fish will be able to be identified genetically wherever they are caught in the sea and so show where their marine migrations take them. There's obviously been a good run this year, but we've found over the years that the flow pattern really determines the numbers of fish up by sampling time and that we can't therefore monitor numbers in this way. After lunch, off with Niall to download the acoustic recorder at Ladykirk - the pattern we seem to be seeing is that only a couple of the fish tagged at each session at Paxton continue on upriver, most just hang around at the bottom though we've only recorded one going as far back as the estuary as yet. After that, on to the bottom of the Teviot to get  samples from  Salmon fry for the FASMOP programme which is mapping the salmon populations of Scotland. This was the last of the range of juvenile samples we had agreed to take as part of the first stage of this programme, and which we've been doing since 2008.  However, the programme is an iterative one - as results are analysed it will become apparent how many populations there are and where in the catchment they live and further samples from different locations may be needed to define boundaries or amplify existing results. As we electric-fish a third of the catchment each year, we've been able to take most of these samples as part of our existing work and any further sampling should be possible to do in the same way.

Today's  work on the College takes us past the 1,000 mark for tagged Sea-trout. The first Sea-trout tagged by The Tweed Foundation was on the 17th of February, 1994 - in those days, I used to go down to the nets that worked early in the season and tag the Sea-trout kelts they were catching & releasing.  

Friday 3rd September: Monthly joint staff meeting with the RTC, then admin & organising for the annual Ettrick and Yarrow electric-fishing survey.