The wild life
Make home improvements to attract this iconic fish.
Somewhere in deepest Dorset during the mid1990s, a car carrying two men known to regular readers of The Field, Charles Rangeley-wilson and Richard Slocock, was the scene for the creation of an esoteric-sounding organisation: the Wild Trout Trust (WTT). These two chaps saw a need for a practical, hands-on body, akin to Trout Unlimited in the US, the purpose of which would be to advise and help landowners and fishing clubs to better manage their rivers (and lakes) for wild trout and the many plants and other animals that rely on naturally functioning waters. Thus, it came to be, with the Wild Trout Society forming in 1997, morphing into a charitable trust two years later. Since then, many landowners, fishing clubs and other community groups have worked with the Trust on sensitive and practical management of their river: everything from advice through to full-blown river restoration projects. WTT’S philosophy is based on the three critical elements needed for brown trout to thrive: good water quality, water quantity and habitat. Where trout thrive, we know that the environment for them and myriad plants and animals is at least reasonable or better; where they don’t, something is wrong and WTT’S idea is to try to tackle habitat deficiencies, involving people to try to make things better. Furthermore, our brown trout is a perfect indicator not only of the state of our aquatic environment but also the land that drains into it. Ultimately, healthy rivers are good not only for trout but for people and much wildlife.
The WTT is extremely protective of the focus that’s remained on its main task: to advise and provide practical help to people to enable them to create and maintain habitat that is good for trout. What started as a group of hyper-keen volunteers now employs nine frontline conservation officers, based around England but working across the UK and Ireland, who go out advising people, demonstrating habitat improvement techniques in the river and carrying out river-enhancement projects. This team of vastly experienced river professionals spends around a thousand days each year on the bank and gathering views from many contacts, so offers a unique perspective on the state of our rivers. At a catchment scale, problems such as pollution from increasing urbanisation and intensification of agriculture are widespread; all too commonly, WTT officers see the damage to our rivers from weirs, dredging and straightening.
At a local level, rivers and their wildlife suffer from well-intentioned ‘tidying’ aimed at improving drainage or access for angling and boating. Over-laying all these issues is the unholy, head-on conflict of climate change (making our rivers warmer and rainfall patterns ‘spikier’) and human population growth, with people in need of water. Life will be much more tricky in the years to come for all those plants and animals (like trout and salmon) that need cool and plentiful water, especially in southern Britain. So, the kind of work that WTT proposes, trying to improve rivers and make them more resilient physically for what’s already coming, seems all the more essential.
WHAT CAN WTT DO FOR LANDOWNERS AND FISHING CLUBS?
Much of WTT’S bread-and-butter work is through advisory visits, riverbank walkand-talks to point out good and bad bits in and by the river and what might practically be done to make the bad better. Annually, its conservation officers carry out more than 200 advisory visits across the UK and Ireland; in many cases, a visit yields a follow-on report for the recipient, highlighting observations and what might practically be done to improve the river habitat. In England, the Trust’s advisory visit programme is supported by an excellent partnership with the Environment Agency (EA), using fishing rod licence money, so the visits and follow-on reports come to recipients largely for free, save for a contribution (often a few tens of pounds) to WTT travel costs. Advisory visits usually produce work on the ground: this might involve doing something like felling selected trees into the river margins to create habitat or removing a weir to ease fish migration along the river, though equally the advice might be to do nothing, such as not trimming marginal vegetation, allowing
In many cases a visit yields a report highlighting what might be done to improve habitat
it to grow and provide shade and great cover for insects, fish, birds and mammals. The process starts with a chat with your local WTT conservation officer; all the officers’ contact details and more than 700 examples of past advisory visit reports are on the website: wildtrout.org. WTT is not equipped to visit domestic properties with a few metres of river frontage but even for these landowners, there’s plenty of relevant information on WTT’S website.
Often the advisory visit report is followed up by a project proposal that addresses specific habitat issues, such as narrowing an over-widened section of river or creating spawning areas. Each year, WTT staff, working with landowners, fishing clubs, partners in the regulatory agencies and sister NGOS (such as river and wildlife trusts), take around 80 projects from the advisory visit and inception stage to design and development (including the sometimes arduous process of getting the necessary permissions), right through to delivery in the river.
ADVICE INTO ACTION
What, then, does it look like when WTT advice leads to practical work in the river? In each of the examples outlined across these pages a critical feature of the work is the strength of the partnership with the EA, landowners and fishing clubs, all of whom provide funding, expertise and quite possibly muscle to get the work done.
If you’re a river owner or belong to an angling club and would like to know more about WTT or seek its help, please do get in touch. You could help the Trust’s work, too, by joining as a supporter or donating to its cause. WTT runs an extraordinary annual auction, offering some unusual lots of fishing, shooting and angling art and tackle, all raising invaluable funds for WTT’S work. For more information, visit: wildtrout.org.
Shaun Leonard is the director of the Wild Trout Trust
The visits and follow-on reports are mostly free, save for travel expenses