Yesterday, Trout in the Trym volunteer, Peter Coleman-Smith, helped Westbury Wildlife Park make and install straw eel ropes on two of the weirs on their property.
These biodegradable temporary structures are a new volunteer-led approach to improving connectivity of rivers for elvers (juvenile freshwater eels). Locally they have been pioneered by the Somerset Eel Recovery Project. These were the first in Bristol.
Eels badly need our help as their numbers have dropped 95% since the 1980s. Despite being incredibly abundant for millennia (and food for otters, herons and humans) they are now red-listed and protected. Weirs, hydropower turbines, pollution, climate change and especially overfishing (of elvers and adult eels) had taken a disastrous toll.
We learned as we went along yesterday and the Park will now maintain them, repairing or replacing them as required.
Ideally Bristol City Council will agree to support eel ropes on some of their weirs to increase the impact throughout the Trym catchment. Discussion is underway.
