While anglers may well be reaping the benefit of a wet summer (where they can find fish), we at the Trust are struggling to complete the essential survey commitments we have. Unless it stops raining soon, I fear we may not complete our schedule on time if at all.

However, we always have plenty to do and today we set about cutting willow from a site ahead of performing bank stabilisation on a site in the lower Ayr. We couldn’t have picked a better day for it and with 2 volunteers helping we managed to secure a few hundred 12′ poles for use as stakes and all the brash that came from them. The brash we bundled into willow faggots and by the end of the day, we had the trailer loaded to the limit with a very useful quantity of material. We will need to gather more but that can wait until we are rained off again. tomorrow morning, we will place the stakes into water to keep them alive and encourage root development. We find soaking cuttings for a few weeks increases the success rate and survival.

I took the opportunity to try out a time lapse setting on my new iPad and produced this short clip quickly to show how we build faggots for river bank stabilisation. They can be made with any brash but today we used willow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNig0z-GRJU