Today was just me and Adrian (corehead site manager). We had 2 tasks to complete today. Firstly, works to move the brash from the felled commercial tree stand near the cabin had churned up a quagmire that was spilling out into the adjacent stream. Apparently it was a bad time of year to be adding mud into the watercourse because it is part of the fish spawning season. Excess mud/silt can act as a pollutant as the mud suffocates eggs by starving them of oxygen and damages the gills of emerging fry. To mitigate this issue we began by installing a silt trap.

silt trap installation

Installing the silt trap involved the following steps:

1. Use a "digging bar" to start the hole for the fence posts on either side of the stream. Here any larger stones are displaced and the "pilot hole" is created.
2. Insert the fence posts into the pilot holes and sink to the required depth with the "fencing maul". Use the weight of the maul to generate a large impulse with the post.
3. Attach the silt fence material across the 2 posts with enough extra material at the bottom to direct this upstream
4. Place rocks on the extra material flap to hold this at the bottom of the river and prevent silt from getting under the trap.

Once we had installed the silt trap, we could see that some sediment was being filtered but a lot was still getting through. To further mitigate any risks, the vehicles causing the issue were moved away from the problematic area and the last part of the work was completed by hand.

plastic waste clearup

The previous owner of the Ericstane site had taken to taking bales up to the animal fields, tearing open the bales and just leaving the plastic wrapping behind to get trampled into the soil. There were therefore Several mounds of plastic left as a memorial to this practice - putting the stain in Ericstane. In order to clean up the mess we went through a process of liberating tangled plastic sheets and loading them up into the trailer that was coupled to the polaris ranger vehicle which we traveled to the site in. It was pretty messy business but by the end of the day we had liberated 3 trailers full of plastic from the ground and ready to be diverted to a plastic recycling facility.