It was a good long run out along the River Lea to Cowslip Meadow nature reserve, home to one of the springs that feeds the river.

There waiting for us was Konni from the Wildlife Trust, she had been helping a nature conservation task here last week and noticed some litter and dumped items that needed removing. One of the items was a chair in the river but leaving that until last we set to work with Sam and Omar clearing out the dumped mattress and other items.

Meanwhile David and Gill went to the opposite end of the reserve to tackle an unwanted non-native shrub going a bit wild, it was a very dense bush and it took quite a bit of pruning to even see the core of it, but get there we did. Eventually we found it was actually several different shrubs and defeated them all.

With a nice neat pile of cuttings made the two teams reunited for a final ten minutes of litter picking and commenced a search for the reported river chair! Searching along the dark riverbank by torchlight, hooked pole in hand, surrounded by tall riverside plants, it was difficult to find anything that looked like a chair. We searched and searched all the accessible bits of squishy riverbank until socks got wet and we had to declare the chair missing in action, its powers of camouflage clearly outsmarting us!

That just left the return run back into town to finish off the evening.