Week 68

Week 68

A fine week of weather, no rain and the temperature in the high teens. The first handful of Swallows have turned up along with a solitary cuckoo. Fly has been hatching from mid morning to mid afternoon with fish up and looking, rejecting a few and taking the odd one. A few dead Grayling have turned up this week, post spawning fish that have finally reached their sell by date. Each fish was between a pound and a half and two pound. The Roach and Rudd in the flight pond that have managed to evade the Cormorant were massing under the shade of the large weeping willow, the Carp have yet to start thrashing around in the roots.

The river had a brown tint to it for much of the week, weed cutting was carried out on a few of the beats above which can result in silt being exposed to the current, or it may be the start of a bloom of brown algae that lifts off the bottom and breaks up as it goes through faster water. I had one day cutting weed, the Ranunculus at the top off this stretch out of the water and on the brink of flowering. Cutting weed this early is often an indicator of a reasonable season to come, although this was not the case last year. I have also finished the bank repairs that I started before our sojourn to Spain; fifteen tons of chalk on the areas of bank that come under the most pressure. On the first three days of the week I managed to get my pick stuck on each day, requiring a pull out by an amiable neighbour or digging the truck out with a spade, on the fourth day I left the pick up at home and got the Tractor stuck instead. If nothing else it shows that the water table is reasonably high in the river valley. The roof has gone onto the new shelter half way up the river and the Fishing hut spring cleaned, we are now set for the start of the new season next week.

A story this week in a National broadsheet highlighted the case of a Swan in the South West who regularly chased some Canada Geese from a corner of a small lake, it was suggested that the Swan might have killed one of the Goslings. The story was accompanied by a quarter page picture and featured in the first ten pages of the normally sensible paper. Has metro sexual man behind his journalistic computer screen in the city become so detached from life in the country that he would consider this news, or has the disneyfication of the countryside blinded those who have recently settled there to the harsh realities of nature.

If this is news, then call up CNN, Sky and the BBC for the daily goings on around here: Day to day gang rape of female Mallards. The incestuous life of rabbits. Cannibalistic Pike who would eat their own mother and bullocks in the field that have been without a woman too long and have to make do! …. And in public at that!

Swan chases goose is a ridiculous piece of news that highlights a worrying trend in the press who are increasingly isolated in an urban environment and seem to believe everything that Rolf Harris and his kind tell them.