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River Wranglers

• Chalkstream river restoration
• Wildlife ponds • Rewilding projects
Test Valley, Hampshire, UK.

16/10/2025

Another nice little garden pond dug, filled and planted. Hardy native aquatic plants plus a wildflower collar sown around the edge. Won’t be too long till it greens up, though just getting the water in there - lots of wildlife already getting involved apparently! 🌞

23/06/2025

Owl box & bat cave installation at the old pump house.

We can make bird & bat boxes to order, or please get in touch to see what’s already in stock 🦇 made with reclaimed materials. Installation for a very reasonable fee. Lovely.

14/08/2024

Wheat harvest in the valley of ponds at manor farm, bit of a colab between various folk in the ‘Broughton Massive’ spearheaded by (+ Dusty + )

This one’s Maris Wigeon, an old school long straw variety - quite a bit got stomped on by deer but reckon an estimated yeild of half a ton or so. Some will be milled into flour for people food and some stored unmilled for bountiful winter bird food.

The browner strip you can see next to the harvested Wigeon is Triticale, a hybrid of wheat and rye, which will be left to stand for the birds to eat. Lovely.

Masterful drone shots thanks to Ed .crispin

23/05/2024

While the reservoir / future wetland wonderland is still filling it’s absolutely crucial we keep the rooks at away from the exposed liner.

We’ve lost 2 ponds / liners to rooks who root about for grubs by pecking holes in the liner, turning what was a bowl into a sieve.

So we’re using a multitude of scaring techniques - including our terrifying scarecrow (actually more for the deer than birds), dazzling CD spinners & bangers.

Also, bit grim / macabre: we have 2 dead rooks displayed as deterrents. Both found already dead, this year's young that sadly didn’t make it. This is our last resort scaring technique which has worked for us before when all else failed.

We love rooks & have big respect for the whole of Clan Corvid. But what ‘our rook teachers’ taught us was that we need to lay a thick turf collar round our ponds down into the water line, so even when the water level drops, the liner is still protected from the threat of sharp beaky faces.

As a beak proof pond could ensure our resident rooks can drink & bath in this reservoir for many generations to come.

Anyway, next step is laying this thick turf collar - then we can start worrying about the deer & their ploddy, stabby feet…

13/05/2024

This is why we love willows in river restoration work (& in general), they’re the tree that just won’t quit!

You can hinge ‘em, shove bits of ‘em in the ground, leave a bit of ‘em in water - and they just keep doing their thing: dappled shade (graciously sharing sun with understory), food & habitat for the fauna - plus medicinal properties to boot.

And if one part of the tree is on the way out, it’s always got a contingency plan…

10/05/2024

2nd layer in the reservoir's underlay trifle... spoiled silage!

Some interesting smells, the best smelling silage was giving off a delicious apricot jam waft in the sun & the worst, well...

(see our previous post for why and what's going on here)

26/04/2024

Finally some dryer days to get onto the next stage of the reservoir project: protective underlay for the reservoir's very precious & gigantic pond liner.

As you can imagine: pond liner + sharp / stabby / pierce-y things in the ground = serious tears before bedtime for the whole project. Especially in the deeper parts of the reservoir where the liner will be under considerable water pressure.

& just to make things more interesting, the monumental rains have washed the top layer of soil away, exposing no end of sharp, stabby flints for the liner to contend with.

So before we can even unwrap our very precious & gigantic pond liner, we need to underlay the entire reservoir with a protective layer of cushioning. & this starts with laying a rot proof barrier to keep hungry worms out of the aforementioned critical cushioning layer...

For this we’re repurposing used silage wrap - which we decided to lay orange side up for a laugh. Simple things right?

22/04/2024

Lil bumble asleep in a dandelion… a one-stop pollen & nectar B&B for bees, butterflies, hover flies & moths - yet still one of our most over looked & downtrodden native wildflowers.

Here’s 3 exciting bits about dandelions that hopefully'll make you love them even more.

1. Dandelions produce incredibly sugar-rich nectar. Compare their nectar with that of fruit tree blossoms (which are a big deal in the world of nectar flows): pear & plum blossom nectar hits around the 20% sugar mark, with apple blossom getting up to about 40% sugar. Dandelion nectar is 50% sugar! It has been said the dandelion can tempt the honeybee from the apple blossom… nice.

2. Dandelions are a member of the daisy family (Asteraceae) which, as we know, are great friends to the pollinators, as what might first appear as one flower is actually many many many tiny individual flowers (florets) each refilling their pollens & nectars in an almost continuous bottomless brunch spring / summer extravaganza. So not only is their nectar sugar rich, there’s always lots of it, all available in one place. Very nice.

3. Dandelions are wind pollinated… dandelion clocks and all… so they actually don’t gain from their relationship with pollinating insects, thankfully neither do they suffer. But still they continue to make a wonderful strong-flowing high octane food source for visitors regardless, which is *chef's kiss.

Anyway, hopefully attitudes to dandelions are changing, being seen less as a w**d to sq**rt round-up on & more of a happy yellow can-do-attitude lifeline for what's left of our precious pollinators.

Big up the dandelions - & also the apple blossoms which have been doing their thing this week too.

18/04/2024

Kick-sampled the Wallop Brook today and were glad to see the sample trays full of life, including 2 mayfly larvae (first time we've seen them so far!)

Plus a pretty unusual cased caddisfly larvae case as seen in the first photo. Mostly the caddisfly larvae we see in the brook choose to house themselves in a more humble / motley selection of tiny gravels or leafy debris - but whoever made this decided to go for something a bit extra. & we enjoyed it muchly.

Highscore for the brook this time, thanks to all the rain (perhaps that's helped water down the absolute filth the water companies see fit to dump into our waterways)

21/03/2024

Spawn!

These last few years frog spawn has been worryingly thin on the ground / water across the brook backwaters and ponds.

But this year we did find a load of frog spawn! Only problem was it were in quite an unsuitable and polluted puddle. & as we know poor water quality has hit the amphibians hard.

Luckily we were able to extract the spawn, temporarily house the spawn, then deploy the spawn back into the backwater ponds by the brook (classic spawning patch of prior years) & also into 2 ponds across Manor Farm.

Making sure there wasn’t too much difference in the water temp between the river / ponds & the bucket of spawn, so as not to shock the little guys. Good luck to you spawn. Live long and prosper.

🌞

07/02/2024

Reservoir Dogs.

Our biggest pond project to date: a reservoir at Manor Farm.

The big idea started with wanting to restore an old farm pond that’d had its liner picked to death by rooks - but as we face hotter & dryer summers we thought why stop there?

Now the plan is to transform the surrounding area into a massive new pond / luscious wetland habitat.

This new habitat will also capture & store precious rainfall, helping to ensure there’s a great big dollop of freshwater in the landscape year-round. Which as we know is critical for wildlife survival.

Big thanks to the plant team: Phil & Dagan (also see if you can spot the nice doggo in the digger cab.)

More to come.

Address

Broughton
Edinburgh

Website

https://linktr.ee/riverwranglers

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