Midweek Group – August/September 2012
The start of September saw our midweek group working with the Cromarty Firth Fisheries Trust on their River Peffery Restoration project. For this project we were working on a section of the river below Strathpeffer which has over the years been affected by the surrounding agricultural practice. Continual dredging, drainage and flood banks have altered the natural flow of the river.
The task itself was to create natural meanders in this section of river to help restore and imitate a natural flow, creating pools, shallow areas of gravel, variety of flow speed. All of this combines to help restore the habitat for Sea Trout.
The meanders were created using logs and stones sourced from the locality. A variety of structures were created – v shaped log dams, parallel log dams and stone pile damns. This meant our volunteers were involved in 2 weeks of log dragging, log pinning, stone sourcing removal & placement, pool creating and gravel loosening.
This project went down extremely well with our volunteers who loved the hands on practical nature of the task. It was also something different for us to be working on and great to work on something where the results could be seen instantly – by the end of the 2 weeks the improvement to the river flow was visible.
I think our photos speak for themselves – lots of hard work and lots of fun!
