This activity is to support the River Fly Partnerhip.
It commences with taking a kick sample from the river, in this case by the white railings alongside the B3046.
The river bed is kicked, a specified quantity of water collected and the contents examined for various creatures.
As this images shows it is quite a soup!
and here is Barry & Chris hard at it..
They are using a sorting dish, not unlike one you might see at a party, only this one had diagrams underneath to aid identification:
This is a close up of one section ready for sorting, showing a number of little critters.:
The aim is to correctly match the insect with the diagram:
After sorting through the whole sample, the number of insects are recorded. The whole process took about two hours.