A gloomy morning here has turned into a fine and sunny evening with little wind, good water on the river and some fly hatch.  The forecast is none too promising though so my plan is to try to get the monthly invertebrate check done tomorrow before everything goes pear shaped. 

God is clearly an Englishman and has obviously commanded decent weather in celebration of an historic victory at Lords this morning.  Let's see how our Antipodean cousins whinge their way out of a hundred run defeat.  As a life long Middlesex CCC supporter it's good to see the home ground packed to the rafters.

A member emailed me with a very good question about crayfish.  Why, he pondered, do American signal crayfish not cause the same degree of devastation in their home waters in the States as they do here.  The simple answer is that across the pond they have natural predators and diseases that keep the populations in check.  Here they have no such limiters so are able to recruit to the point where they overwhelm all other species.   We can't introduce predators (remember the old woman who swallowed a fly?), but the magic bullet may be found in a parasite that will only target signal crayfish.  The hunt is on.

Ian