It's a beautiful cold, crisp, bright morning here in the valley.  The sun is just breaking over the eastern fells and bathing the dew soaked pastures in a golden light.  One of my goats is in season and is providing a raucous soundtrack to this otherwise tranquil scene.  This will happen now every 3 weeks until April as the little tart runs round eagerly seeking billy goats.  Some hope! the nearest is in Chapel le Dale so she will have to wait until I decide whether or not to mate her this year.

I spotted a strange article in New Scientist yesterday about a small South American fish that has been discovered living in trees.  Apparently, when the tidal swamps in which this fish lives begin to dry it makes its way into insect burrows in the trees and survives there until the waters return.  A large number of these creatures have been found lying nose to tail in the burrows and no one is yet sure just how they manage to cope with such long periods out of water.  So next time fishing is slow on the river and there seem to be no fish in your favourite pool just check under the bark of the nearest tree.  Who knows!

I had an email this morning from Phil Holding at Spiders Plus announcing his latest special offer.  This is a series of three full length DVDs by Oliver Edwards.  These include Wet Fly Fishing on Rivers, Big Dry Flies For Fast Waters, and Czech Nymphing, Upstream Nymphing & North Country Spiders.

We are hoping to get Phil to speak at the 2008 AGM so watch out for more on this in due course.

I'm off this morning to try a bankside check at Turn Dub.  This will be the first survey at this site so it will be interesting to see what (if anything) turns up and how it differs from the other survey sites.  I'll report on this tomorrow.

Ian