May 2024, Darren Tansley of the Essex Wildlife Trust, who spoke at our Halesworth Ash Climate Convention Any Questions Panel, was the invited key note speaker at Blyth Woods Annual Public meeting on 9th May 2024.
His talk, ‘Conservation at a Landscape Scale’ began with the question, what is a river? He put up two images of rivers: one from Scotland, a set of meandering fingers across a landscape, and the other, a bucolic photo of the River Stour, on a summers day.
In our industrialisation drive we straightened our rivers, drained and straightened our ditches, put in weirs and locks to navigate and control water flow. Then we began building homes in flood plains. All of these man made alterations have detrimental effects on humans and nature. Fish cannot get up river beyond weirs. Floods are inevitable, fresh water is wasted out to sea, pollution is captivated.
Water quantity decreasing – it’s all going out to sea. An excellent two slides again of the river Chelmer with the lock and after the lock taken out. How little of it flowed naturally.
Water quality – not only farmers fertilisers / weed killers, but road ‘debris’ particles from tyres, break-pads (I didn’t think about this)
Solutions: to re-find old river systems and bring them back into usage. Essex had done this along a part of the Chelmer, found the old river along side adjacent fields and restored it.
Solution: to restore old ghost ponds. Using drone air photographs over old maps (map of Scotland eg) , can see where old ponds were, and bring them back.
With both of these restoring projects, the old seed bed is often resurrected.
Bever re-introduction.
