From early September 2022 onwards, Pete Tyjas’s famous Fly Culture podcast has been hosting a series of takeovers by The Fishtolian: a mission by Pete Coleman-Smith and Jon Ogborne to find wild brown trout in Bristol, inspired by the Trout in the Trym project. From the series intro: Bristol would never be the first place […]
Archive for the tag 'Volunteers'
July 4 2022
Urbantrout sidecasts: Monday 4 July
Citizen science is making a comeback… … and it’s boosting a British river revival (with this 20-year milestone for the Wandle too!) Weir today, gone tomorrow: demolition work starts on the River Kent’s Bowston paper mill weir Tackling plastic pollution with beach cleans in Cornwall, with lots of resonance for urban river restorationists including mental […]
May 19 2022
Fins and Finns: Rewilding Oulujoki and other Nordic rivers
One of the wider Urbantrout team has recently been spending time in the Finnish city of Oulu, and simultaneously we’ve noticed a certain uptick in news from Finland’s urban and otherwise post-industrial rivers (of course, correlation still doesn’t amount to causation, no matter how influential we like to think our various team members really are…) […]
April 30 2022
10 years of Urbantrout and Trout in Dirty Places
This month, it’s 10 years since Trout in Dirty Places launched on a (mostly) unsuspecting world. Merlin Unwin Books and Granger’s fly shop threw us one hell of a party, and for a few days, the weird idea of fishing in urban rivers was making headlines across the media, including the Independent, Radio New Zealand, […]
August 5 2021
Pic of the day: Riverfly monitoring with a TWIST
Thanks to lots of enthusiasm from local volunteers, Somerset’s urban rivers now have a new cohort of qualified riverfly monitors to look after them. Click through to this report on the Wild Trout Trust website to find out more, and how to get involved in the exciting new TWIST (Transforming Waterways In Somerset Towns) project…
July 25 2020
Talking urban rivers on Farlows LIVE
Volunteer activities on urban rivers have certainly seen some setbacks during the Covid-19 pandemic, but forward-thinking organisations of all kinds have taken the opportunity to stay in touch with their supporters online… … and that’s just what Farlows have done with their series of Farlows LIVE interviews on Facebook. On Friday 17 July, this site’s […]
December 4 2019
Sharing the international urban river love: Urbantrout goes to Baltimore
Here in the UK, when we think of American rivers, it’s likely to be the mighty Madison and other Montana rivers that come to mind – or maybe the spring creeks of Pennsylvania that almost mirror the geology and water chemistry of our own chalkstreams. What’s less well appreciated is that the US (and especially […]
November 25 2019
Pic of the day: The Mersey Mermaid
Now we know salmon are running the Mersey again, why should the Little Mermaid be far behind? The Mersey Rivers Trust‘s intrepid crew of volunteers hit the river in Stockport on a grey November Sunday… … and here’s what else they found besides a smutty-faced little Ariel… (Photo: Mersey Rivers Trust)
September 30 2019
WTT Urban Conclave 2019: Launching the new Trout in the Town Urban River Toolkit
If you’ve read Trout in Dirty Places, or followed this site’s blog posts for long, you’ll likely know how much of a role Manchester’s beautiful but plastic-polluted River Tame has played in the growth of the urban flyfishing and river restoration movements (hint: quite a lot… and it’s still continuing!) Which naturally meant it was […]
August 23 2019
Pic of the day: A new sign of the times in Wincanton
Here at Urbantrout we’ve got quite accustomed to being awed by the innovative spirit shown by the team at CATCH in the Somerset town of Wincanton… … and now they’ve done it again, with a project to install a new and much improved sign on the approach to Hawker’s Bridge over the little River Cale. […]
