Your river needs you! Especially if it’s the River Stiffkey…
The Riverfly Monitoring Initiative is citizen-science which enables anyone who cares about their local river to head out in their wellies and get busy doing something that will make a difference.
This year Literature & Landscape and the Norfolk Rivers’ Trust hosted five educational events for school groups and one taster session for a group of local adults as part of our October 2024 festival.
Chalk streams like the River Stiffkey have a unique ecology and a rich array of natural fly life that is particularly vulnerable. Those flies are every river’s canary.
Pollution and the damaging effects of over-abstraction are invisible to the casual eye, so if you want to know what is really happening beneath the surface the best way to find out is to look closely at the creatures that live in the river bed. Underwater invertebrates depend for their survival on the precise conditions in which they live. Pollution-tolerant species may thrive in polluted rivers, while in those same circumstances the numbers of flies that depend on clean water will plummet. Count the changes in insect numbers, and you will be able to track what is going on with your local river. Keep a long-term set of data and your numbers can be used to prove damage – or improvement following successful restoration work – and if necessary hold polluters to account.
The simple presence of a regular group of active volunteers can also deter incidental polluting crimes.
And it can be a lot of fun to put on your boots once a month, roll up your sleeves and rummage about in the river bed. Not only might you meet like-minded people but you will become familiar with dozens of miniature monsters – beasts whose mouths look like tusks, or that have three tails or look at first glance like pieces of wood or clusters of stones.
It’s an underwater safari of creatures from science fiction… in miniature!
The Riverfly Partnership scheme uses a simple standardised nationwide monitoring system and is hosted by the Freshwater Biological Association.
Please come and join our volunteer group – and invite your friends along too.
Email info@literatureandlandscape.org or tim@norfolkriverstrust.org for further information and to sign up.
With many thanks to our sponsors who are supporting and providing this initiative:
Literature & Landscape 