It's continued to be very cold here this week and the temperature dropped so low on Friday that the river at New Inn froze across most of its width.  Of course, this was helped by the low flows we have at present due to the lack of rain over the past few weeks, but it was still pretty cold.

The river was, however, high enough to enable me to do a good invertebrate check on Thursday at New Inn Bridge.  This gave a very satisfactory result.  Fewer heptagenia this time but, significantly more blue winged olives and gammerid (shrimp).  I also identified a satisfactory number of turkey browns.  This is likely to be much to do with my increasing confidence and skill in identifying these creatures but, I do think that there were more of them this time than previous months.  This particular creepy crawly  is a vital indicator of very clean water and is comparatively rare in our rivers and streams so its presence at Horton is testimony to health of our river.

I plan to do a similar check at Turn Dub tomorrow and will post up the results on the on-line spreadsheet so that our riverfly group can see them.  If anyone else would like to see the spreadsheet just send me your email address and I will give you access.

I had an email from the Head Keeper on the river Dove last week asking about the crayfish breeding programme.  It seems that someone gave his team a presentation about crayfish conservation recently and referred to the pioneering work that Neil is doing here at Horton.  He sent me a photo that was used in the presentation to identify which he thought was our river and I instantly saw that it was of the stretch below New Inn Bridge looking downstream to Rowe End.  Fame at last!

Otherwise it's pretty quiet here at present with everyone gearing up for Christmas and New Year festivities.

So have a Merry Christmas and I wish you all a prosperous and fulfilling new year.

Ian