Mandy Stevens reports:
Friends of the Shuttle carried out another successful litter pick along the Riverdale stretch of the river on Thursday 25th September. We collected 20 bags of assorted rubbish (including 8 bags of recyclables) and assorted bits of ironware.
The Shuttle team relax with some of the rubbish collected. Both the Shuttle and Cray river-keepers are now separating recyclables (clear bags) from other waste before it is taken away by the Council. We would rather be spending time on habitat enhancement work, so appeal to the public to dispose of their litter responsibly in future!
We also tackled a small patch of Himalayan Balsam just into the Love Lane stretch (see photo). We were pleased to see a fair sized shoal of large-ish fish (the fisherman amongst us thought Roach or possibly Rudd) – certainly not the sticklebacks that we see in the river quite often. Good news for the biodiversity of the river and also for the Kingfisher who nests nearby.
A Shuttle volunteer looks for embedded litter by Love Lane allotments, before taking out the patch of Himalayan Balsam (centre) before it seeds.
FoTs will be holding a planning meeting next week and we should have dates for forthcoming events up on the BexleyWildlife calendar soon.
