[email protected] wrote: > Martin > Again thanks for your insights. Is the CMP a public document?
It's available to download from http://www.british-waterways.org/montgomery/conservation-management-strategy Apologies, it's a 'strategy' not a 'plan'! > After that I need to lie in a darkened room for a month and think about > a way forward for the Uttoxeter Canal. I suppose at least as a waterway with little in the way of surviving watered sections, there's less likely to be so much of this precious wetland habitat. But try not to inadvertently create too much of it as you restore the canal... Seriously, although it might seem like 'giving things away to the enemy' I suspect that talking to local nature interests earlier rather than having them spring surprises on you later is the best way. They aren't all necessarily hard-liners who automatically equate boating with destroying wildlife and will instinctively fight it. But sadly some of them do seem to be. No doubt every square inch of > that will be crawling (literally) with rare species that, strangely, > seem to get everywhere ;-) Annoyingly it does seem to be the case that 'nationally scarce' species are to be found in abundance wherever we want to restore a canal. Maybe the answer is for ourselves and the nature conservationists to get together and build lots more canals. Actually that's more or less what happened at the Aston Nature Reserve and its recent extension (other than the fact that the nature lot didn't do a huge amount to help at least at the original reserve), where volunteers built a 3-acre wetland as a prerequisite for navigation to be permitted on the canal. If (and it may be a big 'if') we could be confident that agreements to lift restrictions on navigation once reserves are established will be honoured I don't have too much trouble with this approach, especially in those sites (such as the Mont) where the rare species arrived on the scene while the canal was derelict and before we started restoring it. On the other hand, it seems rather a different matter on those (such as part of the Basingstoke) where the rare plants arrived as a result of the canal being restored but before it had been reopened to boats. Martin
