We had variable weather and extra water coming down the river for the first week or so, before getting a cold snap that lasted a few days.
The Willowgate trout fishery and café is now up and running and it is good to see that there are already regulars coming back to fish and to enjoy the café. As more customers are finding their way down to us on the river it was good to get our first customers to arrive by boat. The crew of Newburgh sailing boat “The Answer” popped in for lunch before sailing back to Newburgh.
We have had a bit more time to catch up on some of our seasonal jobs this month. Once again the tractor and grubber have been going over the beaches and hailings, tearing up the silt and weeds.
The wind and tides then do their work on them cleaning them back to their original gravel state that the migratory wading birds like to take advantage of. We have had good numbers of Redshank using these areas, but it was good to see the return of some greenshank to one of these hailings after an absence of a few years.
A few days were spent working down at Newburgh on the footpath along the back brae. A lot of the overhanging branches have been cut back, and both verges have been strimmed short to give all the spring bulbs a chance when they start pushing through.
Another job that always occurs at this time of year is keeping boat mooring lines clear from all the drift, branches and logs that the spates bring down the system with it. A lot of this wood is cut up, along with an endless supply from the tide-line, and then used in the wood burning stove at the Willowgate café.
The Perth harbour boat “The Fair Maid” was busy working on the river this month, down at Tayport, where it was doing a bit of dredging around the entrance to the harbour.
With colder weather setting in we have started going round some of our feeding stations putting out nuts, seed and fat blocks, and running out chaff in the woods. The smaller birds are quick to find this feeding and can be seen in good numbers most days. Out on the river there are a lot of teal about just now and we had over one hundred golden eye near Newburgh. We are also seeing large flocks of starlings dropping into roost at the reed beds on Mugdrum Island.
There has been another trip out with the boat and net at the sparling (last month).This was a follow up on the work already done in the spring time, and it proved to be a very worthwhile trip with good conditions and a good catch. All the information on sizes, numbers etc. was recorded and will be collated along with previous notes to help build up a bigger picture of the sparling in the Tay estuary.
There was big spate and flood alerts in the second half of the month. This lasted for nearly two weeks before hard frost and dry weather retuned, the river level began to fall back again as the month ended.
