Blog 7

On Tuesday 11 March we released our trout into the wild. In the morning we carried out our final checks. We made sure that all classes who wanted to had seen the trout before they left. We then visited as a class and got our photos taken beside the hatchery. Sadly, another two trout had died, which took our total to 30 dead eggs/alevin. That meant we were releasing approximately 170 trout.

During our lunchtime, Caroline captured our trout and put around 5 trout into each tub for us to release. When we arrived back from our lunch she was waiting for us in the classroom. At this point some of us started to feel quite sad and emotional because we would no longer be able to look after our trout. We would miss following the rota to see what duties needed to be performed. We also felt quite excited because we were finally releasing our trout – what we had been working towards for five weeks.

It was a beautiful sunny day and we walked to the ABC park. It was lovely to see so many of our parents and carers waiting for us at the park. Caroline helped us to get into groups of three and the first group was called forward to release their trout. If we were wearing wellies we could stand in the burn. We then had to open our tubs and gently put the tubs into the water. We then tipped the tubs slightly which allowed the waters to mix and many of our trout disappeared very quickly. A few of us were lucky enough to see our trout swim off but many were just too quick for us!

We have really loved this topic and will be sharing our thoughts with the rest of our school. We would also like to share our work with other schools who have not yet been involved in this topic. We really hope to do something similar to this again.