We went on a River Study as part of our local HE group earlier this week. It was a visit lead by a couple of education officers, who, as education officers go were very cheery.
Looking for beasties. I'm surprised they found much at all in November but there were a fair few minnows and flat mayfly nymphs.
See, I told you the education officer was cheery! She proceeded to produce a strip of typed letters in varying print darkness and placed it behind the tumbler of river water. This was to measure how clear the water was.
Measuring depth with a jointed stick. I will remember this. I could make one of those with two garden poles and some masking tape.
Here is Hermione standing at the end of a tape measure having measured out ten metres. She was watching for a fir cone which had been placed n the river at the start of the tape measure. Someone else was on stop watch, measuring the speed of the flow.
They repeated all of the above at a different area of the river and recorded and compared results.
We've not done much on rivers before and decided this would be a good place to start. Disappointingly we don't seem to have many, or perhaps I should say any, books about rivers. We went to the library this afternoon to try to remedy that but they had none either *sigh*. We got two books out about asylum seekers instead - bit of a change in course (if you'll pardon the pun) and we'll revert to rivers some other time. Perhaps rivers are something best done in better weather as we would no doubt want to do lots of hands on stuff and I'm not up for yomping about on cold river banks right now, no way!
Oh, nearly forgot to say, I have organised a Festive Poetry and Baroque Music Recital for our HE group. Sounds rather grand doesn't it? I'm quite sure it won't be *grin*. We are blessed to have a very talented young lady in our group who plays baroque recorder music and also lots of budding poetry reciters - throw in some carols and mince pies and there you have it!
I must say that at times like this having access to a hall which we can use almost whenever for only £4 per hour is a real bonus. It makes it so much easier to say, 'hey lets do this!'
