Following our visit to the Culroy last week when we never even saw a minnow which I thought unusual, we briefly headed there today armed with electrofishing equipment to check that there hadn’t been a disaster overwinter. Muir, our new biologist came along and we quickly fished a very small pool and run upstream of all our sites. We did extract 5 fish which was a result but perhaps could have been better but encouragingly, there was one salmon smolt, a nice sized trout smolt too and a lovely big brownie near a pound in weight.
That was enough to prove that the burn hadn’t suffered a catastrophic pollution incident but we had a quick look at invertebrates when we were there.

A lovely wee salmon smolt about ready to head on the trip of a lifetime. Lets hope he makes it there and back. We need every single one these days.
Invertebrates are long term indicators of water quality and don’t tend to react quickly to pollution unless severe. If we found a healthy mix, then that should indicate that the burn is largely pollution free at the point of sampling and thankfully it appeared to be. The sample was abundant with a good number of high scoring species. We didn’t score it but I’d guess it was A1 or 2 using our scoring system.