Water hyacinth, Eichhornia crassipes, on the uMngeni River, a JOJO home and a Goliath heron

Thanks Bill for the pictures which tell their own story.  Bill Fereday sent an email after a day on the river with bart Fokkens of DUCT, on 19 September 2014 and I have copied his story here with his photographs.

What is sad is that the area to the right of this behind where "Joe Joe" lives, used to be a lovely vegetable garden about the size of 3 football pitches, they had money for this from a NGO, now it's just overgrown with invasives and other weeds. I don't know why this happened, my plan was when we made the trail  we would buy our fresh provisions from them, I still wish that trail had happened.

Bart and I went to do some work on the river yesterday and got a bit of a shock when we found the river completely blocked for about 200 meters with water hyacinth, we tried to get through but it was just too thick, we sprayed as much as we could but now it's going to be down to grappling hooks a muscle power to try to pull it out, as you can see, the grass is becoming a problem growing further into the river. This is about 1km up from the N2 Bridge

We may try to get the machine that can chop the blockage up but the machine costs a lot -  money DUCT doesn't have, I come much cheaper!!

We found 6 large dead carp in the river, the strange thing was there were no other type of fish, we did remove two nets spread across the whole of the river, neither had fish in, maybe the other fish had already died and the Carp were the last to go. I also got to see my first black mamba of the year.

The Goliath heron made my day!