Author: Matt Bishop

CO-OP funding local groups

CATCH have been selected by the CO-OP out of tens of thousands of applicants to be supported by local funding. It’s easy to do, all you have to do is become a member of the CO-OP (like a rewards card in other supermarkets) and for every £1 spent in any store, if you have selected CATCH as your cause to support, we will receive £0.01p – NOTE: You will need to select CATCH as your chosen group, and scan your card on each visit.

This doesn’t seem like a lot of money but this runs from now until October … ...read the rest

Litter Pick

On Saturday June 12th CATCH completed another litter pick sweep of the town stretch of the River Cale. As usual, we found some items that you wouldn’t want to find in a small river.

Education is the way forward with tackling the problem.… ...read the rest

Donation page

Hi everyone, we now have a donation page where you can give as little or as much as you would like to see put back towards our quest of being a Community group aiming to return the Cale to a self-sustaining ecosystem that is rich in biodiversity, and to be enjoyed by all.

Any contributions are gratefully received, and we can assure you will be channelled back into projects for the town.

Please see our Just Giving page:

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/catch?utm_term=RjV7JmRNK

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Emergency litter pick

One of the things we really rely upon from the community is for anyone seeing anything untoward in the river to report it to us by the various ways of contacting. On this occasion someone had clearly missed their dustbin and accidentally placed their rubbish into the river by ‘Batch Bridge’.

Janice from our Committee and other eagle-eyed people in the town spotted an accumulation of rubbish and CATCH decided to deal with it.… ...read the rest

Hedgehog Highways!

A few conversations regarding hedgehogs recently. Don’t forget to set up the ‘hedgehog highways’ through your garden so that our friendly hogs can freely roam and feed….here’s one of ours……

Oh, and feel free to send us pictures of your set up and we will post on here!

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Pollarding the River Cale

We spent a Saturday morning having fun and doing some good for the River Cale by pollarding some Willow that had become unmanageable. This is to enhance the required 60/40 light/shade ratio for a healthy river. The willow had been left too long before dealing with it (about 10 years) so we are having to be brutal in order to bring it all back under control.

With a bit of work done, a breakfast roll and a coffee from the ‘Cale Cafe’ in the recreation ground the volunteers were firing on all cylinders, and what a great achievement for the … ...read the rest

Finally we are allowed back out…..

With hopefully the recent pandemic of Coronavirus steadily in decline (long may it last!), the CATCH crew (not all present in the attached photo) have returned to the river a few times to carry out some essential monitoring and tasks. The next few posts will hopefully bring you up to date with all news relating to our beautiful River Cale…… Glad to be back……

This website has received update on activities since April, so please be patient as you scroll as it’s been a while since we added anything.… ...read the rest

Otters on the Cale!

As with any river restoration project, as the pieces of nature’s puzzle fall into place, so does the food chain. CATCH are very proud of the river condition, and nature’s restoration. First we removed the rubbish, then we helped educate people. With the cleaner river came higher invertebrate numbers in the water, and we were able to return native species of fish to our town section after several pollution incidents. The town have allowed us to create habitat all along the town stretch of river, where we have now seen Dippers and Kingfishers returning.

To compliment the smaller creatures in … ...read the rest

Himalyan Balsam bashing again

One of our annual (and usually public) events had to be carried out within just the committee this year, but because of Janice (the sensible one of the group) she corralled us into doing a huge amount of good this year in controlling this invasive non-native species of plant.

We headed upstream from the town, towards Bayford and proceeded to pull as much of the Balsam as we could before it went to seed. This means that it will be less likely to spread back down into the town in years to come and so we have only native plants … ...read the rest