Friends of the River Rib May update
Mark from the Friends of the River Rib shared some updates from their group. Obviously the Rib plays a large part of the landscape around the church and in the significance of the valley and having met him recently at the Thundridge Parish Council meeting in May, we have a great deal, personally and as a group, in common. If we could get landowners permission, I wondered if the church might be a good venue for educational events taking in the river at some point in the future.
Friends of the River Rib Meeting, Standon Village Hall, 7.30pm – Monday 10th June
This will be our second meeting and an important one as I would like to make progress on a few items. It would be greatly appreciated if Friends not located in Standon get along to this meeting so that we have a good geographic spread. Once we are up and running more formally we can look to rotate meeting locations to even out the travel. I will send out an agenda nearer the time, but I do know that Sarah Perry of HMWT will be with us to answer questions on the Living Rivers Project. We are also hoping to have someone join us from another of Hertfordshires River Friends organisations.
Friends of the River Rib Meeting Poster
I have updated the leaflet we have been using recently to include the date of the next meeting and have included it as an attachment to this email. If you are able to print off and pin it on a noticeboard local to you that we would be greatly appreciated.
Standon and Puckeridge Parish Council Meeting – 21st May
I went along to the SPPC annual meeting and in the open session took the opportunity to introduce FOTR to the parish councillors and leave them with leaflets about our group and objectives. From feedback, the visit was well received and I look forward to meeting councillors again in the near future.
Walking the Buntingford Rib
Following on from an article written for Buntingford’s town magazine by Sarah Perry of HMWT, Sarah met with the mayor and a number of concerned local residents to conduct a walking survey of the River Rib in Buntingford. You can read a report on the day by Dave Edwards on the website, who along with his colleagues have joined our circulation list, extending our geographic coverage still further. I look forward to hearing more about specific concerns on the river in Buntingford at our next meeting.
Social Media
As well as our website, I have now also set up a Friends of the River Rib Group on Facebook, which I will endeavour to populate with local river and wildlife related stories and information on the group. I have also just joined Nextdoor and will be spreading word of the group there too.
Riverfly Partnership
All being well we will take receipt of our loan riverfly monitoring kit on 10th June, so will be able to start monitoring shortly after that.
Going forward, riverfly monitoring will be a key part of FOTR so I will keep this section in each newsletter as we will be constantly looking for more volunteers to take up this activity. More monitors = more sites being monitored. This link takes you to the Riverfly Monitoring Project website which gives lots of background information on the partnership and its aims. https://www.riverflies.org/
Thanks again for your interest and support. How we take this group forward and what we achieve is very much down to us, the local community. Growing our numbers and spreading awareness of the group is probably the most important thing we can do at the moment so please continue to spread the word and point anyone interested in our direction so we can get them on our circulation list and keep them informed.
Thanks and best wishes
Mark, Friends of the River Rib
https://friendsoftherib.wordpress.com & FriendsoftheRiverRib@gmail.com