Life of a Chalkstream. Simon Cooper

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СКАЧАТЬ is the closest thing we have to a full-time river keeper. A retired fireman who looks forty but is in fact fifty-five, he runs triathlons just for the hell of it. He can, and does, work all day felling trees, cutting weed and hammering in fence posts. He is in fact more of a coarse angler, and Gavelwood sort of inherited him when some local lakes closed down.

      Dan is young. We tease him for being young and he mocks us for being old. In his early twenties, Dan is on a sabbatical year from his university ecology course. I have a feeling he may have dropped out for good, but it is a suspicion I have kept to myself.

      The irregulars are a band of loyal fishermen and locals who simply like to help. They turn up as they wish, or Steve will put out a call when he needs some extra hands. It seems to work and every few months I put some cash behind the bar at the pub for an evening of merriment. Work on the river next day is sparsely attended.

      On that particular August morning Steve, Dan and I had gathered at Bailey Bridge, a steel latticework bridge of the same name that was invented by the British army. You used to see them all over the river valleys at one time, but most have rotted and rusted away. Built of light steel and wood, in sections small enough to be lifted into place by hand, they were ideal for bridging meadow streams. Designed to take the weight of a tank, they were much loved by farmers, not least because they were easy to ‘liberate’ from the nearby military camps on Salisbury Plain if you drank with a friendly sergeant major.

      Our bridge looked to me like it was getting towards the end of its life, but we estimated that by replacing a few of the wooden boards and repainting the metalwork we could eke a few more years out of it. I had my doubts about its inherent strength but Steve was prepared to test it out by the simple act of driving a tractor and laden trailer over it. Sometimes he worries me.

      The first decision we needed to make was whether to clear one or both banks along North Stream. Both sides were equally overgrown, and there are merits whichever way you choose to go. In sheer practical terms opting for a single-bank restoration halves not just the work required for the initial clearance but also regular maintenance in the years to come. With our tight timetable it was an attractive proposition, but ultimately we had to decide on what was best for the wildlife, the river and the fishing.

      Stepping off Bailey Bridge and towards the stream, our path was blocked by chest-high stinging nettles. Nettles are no great friends of ours – sure, they are much loved by caterpillars, who feed voraciously on them, but for the river keeper and angler they are a menace. They grow fast, crowd out more useful bankside plants and sting like crazy. Fortunately getting rid of them is not hard, at least if you have someone like Dan to do the work. Nettles are nitrogen addicts – in their effort to run wild they suck every last drop of nutrient out of the ground. But when they die back in the autumn the rotting stems and leaves put nitrogen back into the soil ready for next year. However, cut the nettles down and rake away the cuttings and you deprive the next generation of their nitrogen fix. Other species soon encroach on the ground left bare and new plants thrive in place of the nettles. For Dan a couple of weeks with a scythe and rake were on the cards.

      Beyond the nettles and bordering the stream was the scrubby woodland that ran the length of North Stream. On both banks it was 10–15 yards wide, because some years earlier it had been fenced off. The fence was pretty much all but gone, save for a few posts and rusting strands of barbed wire that would no doubt trip us up at some point. The main growth was really stunted hawthorn, which had done us something of a favour in the absence of the fence, by keeping the cattle away from the banks and out of the river. Pretty in its own way, and home to the hawthorn fly, we mulled over how many of these bushes-cum-trees should stay, be trimmed or cut down. I am a huge fan of hawthorn. It is the constituent element of every hedge in the chalk valleys and in April its vivid lime-green leaves and white or red flowers are the first tangible proof of spring’s arrival. Admittedly the flowering bushes do emit the most awful stench, which makes you think there is a rotting corpse under every hedgerow, but once you know what it is it does not seem that bad.

      What’s more, the hawthorn fly or St Mark’s fly (Bibio marci, so called because it hatches around St Mark’s Day on 25 April) causes much excitement among fly-fishermen in the first few weeks of the season, not least because trout go on quite the feeding frenzy when these clumsy fliers drop onto the river surface. The fly has no real connection with the river, so why trout go mad for these freakish-looking creatures is a mystery about which one can only hazard a guess. At first glance the hawthorn fly looks like an athletic housefly, but at second you’ll see its long spindly legs dangling below it, like the undercarriage of an aircraft, with big knuckles for knees and so hairy you might even stroke them. The flies don’t live for long, maybe a week at most, having emerged from larvae in the soil beneath the hawthorn bushes. Once hatched they hug the hedgerows for protection from the wind, but from time to time an unexpected gust will whisk them across the meadows. From this point on things get tricky. They are, without shelter, the most hopeless fliers and you will see them buffeted by the breeze. Occasionally when the wind drops they regain control, but it will be short-lived and once over water they will plop onto the surface. Unable to break free of the surface tension they are easy pickings for the trout.

      Along the length of North Stream and among the hawthorn are a few spindly ash, plus some alders, clumps of hazel, brambles and wild roses. The trees we wanted to keep we marked green, those we would thin, blue, and the rest – marked red – were to be cleared. It soon grew abundantly obvious that on this bank there was not much to preserve, whilst on the opposite side pretty well everything, bar a few branches that were falling into the river, could remain undisturbed as a sanctuary for the creatures that live along the riverbank.

      Part of the restoration process is about letting light back into the river and onto the riverbed itself so that the weed there can grow. The term weed does these river plants like crowfoot, starwort and water celery something of a disservice. Weed implies that they are invasive and bad, but the reverse is true. The right river weed, in the right river, is home to nymphs, snails and all manner of tiny aquatic creatures. It provides cover for fish, shade from the sun and refuge from predators. And as a filter for the water, a healthy river needs healthy weed, and that will only grow with sunlight. It is hard to say anything bad about weed, and a chalkstream without it is on a downward spiral.

      Removing a fair amount of the thicket growth along the south-facing bank was going to suit us very well. In this respect clearing the north bank alone would not have helped, because as the sun tracks east to west across the sky during the day it would have left the stream perpetually in shade. If you ever doubt how bad perpetual darkness is for the ecosystem of a river, glance under a bridge one day; it will be as bleak as the surface of the moon. That said, our work was far from about eliminating all shade; trout and all the creatures thrive best where there is a mix of light and dappled shade, so before we took the saw to any bush or tree we cocked our heads to each in turn to decide stay, trim or go.

      All the way up North Stream the stream itself was no great issue for us. Sure there were plenty of branches and stumps to pull out, but the dark shade had pretty well prevented anything growing. Once the obstructions were removed the sheer volume of water over the winter would flush away the mud and slime. That was of course always assuming we were able to open up the Portland hatches.

      Removing the decades of compacted silt could be done by hand but it would be long and laborious, so we elected to bring in a digger to do the job. Machines are great, but sometimes you have to go easy with them or risk doing damage to the very things you wish to preserve. The Portland hatches were a case in point. They had stood the test of around 500 years because they had been carefully constructed with strong foundations. Smash those with the digger bucket and our problems would multiply.

      Steve produced a steel rod with a T-bar handle. Jumping down onto the silt he pushed the rod into the ground until at around 5 foot down we heard a muffled clunk. He tapped the rod up and down twice to confirm that he had hit something solid. Over the next hour, working like an avalanche rescue СКАЧАТЬ