Connor Goddard, Head of Freshwater from Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, will be talking to us about restoring rivers on Thursday October 9th at 7.30pm in the Victoria Hall, Tisbury.

About 7 years ago, part of the River Nadder near Salisbury was restored by Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. This link will take you to a brief video explaining what they were doing then.

Improvement Works On The River Nadder In Salisbury
Come along and find out what has been happening since! The bar opens at 7pm.

No need to book. As usual, free for members and £2 for visitors.

​How is The Nadder doing? This is a question I ask frequently, as I am sure you do too. Often, after heavy rain the river is full to overflowing, its water is brown and muddy. For months during this summer, it has been clear but with reduced flow. Are local sewage works discharging polluted water into it?

The Environmental Agency (EA) reduced their testing some time ago, so it's difficult to get a clear idea. The quality of river waters are measured in different ways, taking account of biological factors (such as invertebrates and fish), chemical (harmful to humans) and hydromorphological elements (such as flow and depth and habitat quality). Ours, overall, is categorised as moderate to poor.

The Wiltshire Wildlife Trust recently won some funding to train volunteers so they can go in pairs each month to count water invertebrates of the eight main groups of pollution-sensitive invertebrates (or Riverflies); such as Caddis flies, Stoneflies, Blue-winged Olives, Shrimps and Mayflies. If the numbers drop suddenly from the baseline then a pollution event may have happened and the EA is notified.

In fact, so far this monitoring is showing that numbers are quite good. This is reflected in the abundance of life we can see above the water. Salmon are present and spawn lower downstream from Tisbury. The fishing clubs, instead of releasing farmed Rainbow Trout, are concentrating instead on enhancing the habitat on their stretches of river to encourage wild native Brown Trout to breed.

All this is encouraging, but what about the muddy water? Where is it coming from?   What’s in it? Who to blame?

Farmers and some farming practices are certainly at fault, so the local farmer’s group The Nadder Valley Farmers Group (of which I am Chair) decided to set up a water quality testing programme. We obtained a year's worth of funding from a grant from Farming In the Protected Landscapes grant scheme and set out to sample our river at 20 sites, weekly, for 52 weeks. The Wessex River Trust provided the expertise all the way through from its inception and Tracy Adams, our conservation advisor, tested each week for Phosphates and Nitrates, and less often as well for E. coli and sediment.

Well, we have completed the year, and would like to present to you the results on October 23rd in Tisbury, at 7pm in the Victoria Hall. Booking is essential. Please see Focus magazine p32 or contact us for details.
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Peter Shallcross