Camera Shy Pine Martens in Dalby Forest

Now they are the second rarest carnivores in Britain, and these adorable creatures only survive in small
populations within Wales, Shropshire, North Yorkshire and Scotland. With a Population estimated at
3,500 according to Peoples Trust for Endangered Species!
However they are found around Europe facing similar issues. 

My Fellow Practical Conservationists and I travelled to Dalby Forest; where we volunteered our time setting up camera traps and looking at 100's of photos and videos hunting for Pine Martens.   

Dalby Forest is home to the Yorkshire Pine Marten Support Programme ran by NatureSpy; which is a non-profit organisation, who relies on YOU, the UK's best citizen scientists to help them with projects. They aim to support existing populations of Pine Martens and develop a long-term conservation plan.

Pine martens are the size of a cat, which is chestnut brown with large rounded ears with pale fur tips and a creamy yellow or orange chest and throat patch, and they have a long bushy tail.

Top image is a Pine Marten proudly showing off its catch, which can clearly be identified by its
 yellow bib Pine Martens are vital to the food web,if a prey species has a population boom,
then they adjust there diet to eat more of them, The bottom image shows two maps,
  1. shows the Red Squirrels in the UK, and 2. shows the Pine martens in the UK,
these two maps are very similar, with our help they could look the same.
Top image Credit to Woodland Trust © Bottom image Credit to Vincent Wildlife Trust ©

Why should we care?
Good question! Ultimately humanity is the reason that these animals were facing near extinction, through forest destruction for buildings and roads, hunting for their fur and accidental poisoning meant for foxes and crows. We owe them, as well as ourselves to save them because of this they are now protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act. 

Studies have reported that pine martens are helping fight back the grey squirrels allowing for the native Red Squirrel to make a comeback. Pine Martens have been seen preying on grey squirrels. This means that locally and nationally these red squirrels could make a comeback.

By helping the Pine Martens grow, there is the possibility that these isolated populations could with a little help from us, merge together allowing for larger populated areas in British woodland. 

Video credit to Wildwood Trust 2016 ©

How did we help?
We learnt how to set up camera traps and it isn't as easy as picking a tree and sticking a camera to it, there are many things to consider! Whether the sun is going to hit the camera, whether it's going to be disturbed by people etc... 

Hunting for pine martens is a lot harder than it sounds, due to their elusive nature, they hide high in the trees but can be tempted down by smelly peanut butter and honey as bait giving the best possible chance to snap a pine marten!

1. Get your camera! this one is a browning, 2. Find the area that you want to camera trap, 
3. Go off track exploring to find the perfect area, preferably with a tree stump that you can bait.

that has a clear animal trail going through it, 4. Set up your camera making sure that it is tilted the

 correct way to be able to get the tree stump so it capture any animals that are there. 

To learn more on camera trapping click here!

The second half of the day was spent looking at images and videos that had be captured by cameras, this was really interesting! As the cameras are really well hidden there's no possibility of the animals getting camera shy!
Plenty of Roe Deer, Grey squirrels and Stoats were seen, but no Pine Marten.

Camera trapping is effective as a long-term survey of animals. However, is costly to start up and maintain, and having to go through each image individually would be time consuming luckily there is an army of able body citizen scientists (Like you!) willing to look at images of animals to identify them.

A Camera trap within Dalby Forest snapped this curious Roe Deer grazing away
on the 14/07/2018 at 01.45pm (The camera is American and so is the date
displayed on the camera) Credit: NatureSpy 2018 ©

How to get involved?
How involved you get is down to you! It really depends on how much time and money you want to put into it. You can help spread awareness by following them on social media; Facebook and Twitter.

NatureSpy also run courses that you can take part in, there is 2 courses online, and an accredited Camera Trapping course which when you start you get a free camera! (find out more here).
These all cost a bit of money, so if the you can’t afford that then don’t worry! You can volunteer in other ways.

To be able to volunteer with NatureSpy you have to have a good knowledge of British wildlife, a good level of physical fitness as you will be spending a lot of time off-path hiking to set camera traps for possibly 3-10 miles a day. You can volunteer by downloading the application and emailing it to NatureSpy which can be found here.

MammalWeb hosts the images captured by NatureSpy from the North York Moors, The graph shows
all the hard work you citizen scientists have done in 6 months and how many species have
been identified! Its really easy to get involved! just keep reading...
Image Credit: MammalWeb © and NatureSpy© edit created by myself. 

Or... you can always spend your evenings at home, watching some TV and identifying animals by images/videos that are uploaded from camera traps all over the world; MammalWeb for UK based traps and Zooniverse for global traps. 

Thanks for reading,


C. 

References
De Bondi, N., White, J.G., Stevens, M. and Cooke, R., 2010. A comparison of the effectiveness of camera trapping and live trapping for sampling terrestrial small-mammal communities. Wildlife Research, 37(6), pp.456-465.
Sheehy, E., Sutherland, C., O'Reilly, C. and Lambin, X., 2018. The enemy of my enemy is my friend: native pine marten recovery reverses the decline of the red squirrel by suppressing grey squirrel populations. Proc. R. Soc. B, 285(1874), p.20172603.
http://www.mammalweb.org/?view=projecthome&option=com_biodiv&project_id=17

*All images are taken by myself unless otherwise stated*
*Quote image created on Adobe Spark.*

Spurn Point: The Battle of the Plastics!

Since 1994 'beach litter is at its highest since records began' and the amount of plastic
found on beaches has risen by 140% according to the Marine Conservation Society

My fellow Practical Conservationists and I travelled to Spurn Point. We volunteered our morning to collect waste on the beach, and the afternoon doing a spot of bird watching.

Spurn Point is owned by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (YWT) as its most iconic nature reserve, it has a variety of habitats, including a beach, mudflats, saltmarshs and many more. 

It's a famous location for bird migration but also known for a wide range of other crucial migrating wildlife such as dragonflies, butterflies and ladybirds. Due to the reserve's location, a large amount of plastic waste accumulates after being brought in by the tide, which poses a threat to all of them.

Spurn beach; a rough sea to match the miserable weather, but its okay #Pracconshull is
still hard at work hunting plastic down the beach. Everyone is dressed smartly,
suitable walking shoes, waterproofs and gloves!

How did we help?

The YWT at Spurn conduct a beach clean once a week as part of their Waves of Waste initiative, by doing this they protect the wildlife from the plastic debris found on the beach. When we arrived at the beach there seemed to be no plastic in sight, but upon closer inspection bits of rubbish could be seen. We grabbed a litter picker and a plastic bin bag (I'm sorry!) and went off hunting for plastic.

Beach cleans are effective as it minimizes the risk of birds getting trapped or ingesting plastics, it will reduce micro-plastics within the food chain and of course keep our coasts clean. 

After just 1 hour of beach cleaning over 10 bin bags were full of fishing wire and rope,
agricultural rope,plastic bottles with tops and metal cans! the equipment used for this
was a simple litter picker, a bin bag and a pair of gloves for warmth and safety. 

Why should we care?

Spurn is an internationally important nature reserve with sensitive, diverse and wildlife-rich habitats. It is a recognized as a Heritage Coast, National Nature Reserve, SSSI, and lastly a Special Area of Conservation. This is due to Spurn's unique ecology and geology. 

Many birds occupy Spurn at some point during the migratory months. Migrants are funnelled down towards Spurn Point, sometimes more than 15,000 birds can fly past in Autumn with usual numbers being 3,000! 

Mud flats are a crucial feeding ground for wading birds, if these are covered in plastic, they will eat it, either directly or indirectly via micro-plastics. If we lose this habitat then these migratory birds wouldn't have anywhere to stopover at, as there aren't many places like this within the UK, it would affect multiple ecosystems. 

These habitats are side by side on the walk down to Spurn Point, here we have a beach
a grassland and a salt march, by cleaning the beach it prevents the plastics from bleeding
into the other habitats when the tide is high.

Micro-plastics
Plastics break down into micro-plastics, which enter the food chain via fish. Because of this even we end up eating micro-plastics! 

I looked under a microscope at some of the plastic I collected to see first-hand micro-plastics in action, as I was looking at them you could see them breaking away into tiny particles.
 

In 2017 Auta stated that the presence of micro-plastics within the marine environment pose a great threat to the entire ecosystem, as it effects feeding and breeding in many species, especially birds. Law backed this stating that in 2014 more than 300 million metric tonnes of plastic is produced per year, which has been detected worldwide in all major marine habitats. 

Some science with a view, just outside the window was the beautiful marshland behind
the Discovery centre. Looking through the microscopes at a section of rope collected
I could see the plastic break down into micro-plastic.

How to get involved?

Video by National Geographic 2016 ©

At home you can make changes within your everyday life to reduce plastic consumption by applying the reduce, reuse, recycle initiative to the plastics within your home, or switch to reusable alternatives. 

To get involved with YWT you can take a trip down to Spurn Point (Dress warm, as you will be exposed to the chilly north sea wind, appropriate footwear is a must as there is plenty of walking!) and check their events page for when they have an organised beach clean, Or you can organised your own with Surfers Against Sewage.

If you're not able to take part in a beach clean you can always become a member of YWT for £2.75 a month or donate! This will help them fund more projects to save our coasts. 

With your help we can stop these micro-plastics entering the food chain, and we can save the ocean one beach clean at a time! Just this year a Sperm Whale beached in Spain, full of 64 tonnes of plastic in its stomach.

Thanks for reading!


C.


P.S here are some more photos from the day!

References

Auta, H., Emenike, C. and Fauziah, S. (2017). Distribution and importance of microplastics in the marine environment: A review of the sources, fate, effects, and potential solutions. Environment International, 102, pp.165-176.

Law, K. (2017). Plastics in the Marine Environment. Annual Review of Marine Science, 9(1), pp.205-229.

*All images are taken by myself unless otherwise stated.* 

Citizen science: What a QUACKING survey!

East Park in Hull, how calm and relaxing does this look? A hidden gem within a busy city. 

Firstly, how beautiful is East Park in Hull? 

Myself and my fellow practical Conservationists travelled to East Park in Hull. We volunteered our time to surveying non-breeding wetland birds. East Park has two ponds containing a large variety of wetland birds, which come during wintering, breeding and stopovers for many birds during migration. This is important especially during migration at national and international levels.

Why should we care?

Here is a curious Greylag goose, this goose
walked straight into the middle of our group
to say hello!

In 2008 Whelan stated that birds are a vital part of the worldwide biodiversity, and that they provide us with ecological services and without them the ecosystem would suffer the loss of predator and prey food chains, scavengers’, pollinators and ecosystem engineers. 

Migratory species, link ecosystem processes and fluxes that are divided by great distance and time. Wetland birds are important within the UK countryside, do you remember going to the park to feed the ducks? Imagine future generations might not get to experience this.

Europe is home to more than 500 wild species of birds, and a shocking number of 32% of EU birds are currently in poor conservation status, the Bird Directive aim to protect all wild species of bird that occur naturally within the EU. 

Whats is a WeBS survey and how do we do it?

We carried out a ‘mock’ BTO’s (British Trust for Ornithology) Wetland Bird Survey (WeBS) which monitors non-breeding water birds within the UK. The aims of WeBS are to identify population size, determine trends within numbers and the distribution and to identify important sites for these waterbirds. 

This beautiful Mallard is easily
distinguishable due to his
brightly coloured head. 

WeBS is done between September – March with all species recorded that are on the water, or 100 meters around the wetland.

To do this we walked slowly and quietly around the lake using a clicker to count all birds, especially if there was a large number of them, its quicker and more accurate. Writing down what we species we saw and how many. We used a species identifier if we didn’t know what it was. Most birds are used to people at East Park so binoculars weren’t required, however they can be useful.  


What we found

That is a lot of birds!
makes it difficult to reliably
count them!

We found 16 different species, the most common being the Greylag Goose (who liked to come say hello!) during this we had to take human error into consideration. It all comes down to knowledge and ability to identify a species, and when they start flying round because of a dog barking it really is quite a challenge. This is common in citizen science surveys like this! 

Volunteering is crucial!

Volunteers play a crucial role in these surveys. Without their time and efforts, we wouldn’t have access to a large quantity of data. These long running surveys show us the fluctuation between the years. This identifies species that are at risk within the UK, allowing for conservation efforts to be targeted in the habitats that have specific species in need, it also allows us to identify areas that are more impacted by human disturbance, so that these areas can be protected.

Please don't feed the ducks bread! and please keep your

dog on a lead whilst around the pond, many birds die due

to loose dogs.

This where you come in!

Volunteers are needed all over the UK to actively take part in these surveys, without you species in need won’t be noticed! Volunteers are the only reason WeBS is able to function. 

How to get involved?

There are many ways that you can get involved, you don’t have to be a professional bird watcher, but you have to be able to identify most wetland birds, this is a skill that you can gain from using a species identifier, or you can attend a course run by WeBS, its usually a 1 day course which focuses on bird surveying. (Find out more here.) 

You can take part in bird surveys from home, the easiest one is Big Garden Birdwatch (RSPB)
If you would like you can become a member of BTO for £3 a month or donate!

Thanks for reading!

C.

P.S here are some more photos from the day!

Bat your eyes on these beauties!

My fellow conservationists and I travelled to Tophill Low Nature Reserve (@tophilllow), and spent the morning travelling through the woodland surveying the local bats with East Yorkshire Bat Group (@EYBG1).

Soprano pipistrelle (Pipistrellus 

    pygmaeus) found at Tophill.

A little information on Tophill Low; its an active water treatment site, established in 1959 and officially opened as a nature reserve in 1993. It’s a 300-acre site bordering the River Hull. Surprisingly enough not much is left to nature, it’s under constant management; if you want to keep up to date with everything they do give their blog a read!

Getting acquainted with Geoff and his team from EYBG was a pleasure, they talked about what they do for bats all over the country, from professional research to household advice. Their surveys allow for the protection of bats, in the case of building development within the area.


During the walk, a record of all the bats seen was taken, this helps us increase our knowledge and understanding of bats ecology. We checked a total of 11 bat boxes that morning and found a total of 12 bats, 8 of them were male and 4 of them female. Some of the bat boxes had fresh droppings in, suggesting that it had been used recently. Unfortunately, I only saw one species Soprano pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pygmaeus).

Getting ready to fly! Geoff is showing us them shivering
to warm themselves up so they can fly away.

The bats that were removed out of the bat boxes were cold and dormant, and it took them some time to warm up and get ready to fly, if you handled them for too long off they flew!

Interesting fact for you... a pip weights 5g when fully grown... that is the same weight as a 20p coin.

What’s the point in bat conservation?

Apart from them being really cute and cuddly, why do we need to protect them? Because the countryside and Wildlife Act 1981 says so? Well yes obviously... but why?

This is a male and female Pip; they
were found in the same box.

Bats play a crucial role in their environment, as they are an indicator species. Changes within the bat populations could be an indicator of biodiversity change. They are a natural form of pest control for insects and pollinate several plant species.

In 2005 Battersby stated that there had been significant declines within European countries bat populations, including Britain, this being due to a reduction within the diversity of insects as a consequence of the loss of hedgerows, and over grazed agricultural pastures. However now according to the IUCN red list they are listed as being a 'least concern' with a stable population. 

One of the EYBG volunteers
climbing the ladder
to demonstrate. 

Stebbings stated that with large scale management of the landscape over time the population of bats can be restored to their full glory, by managing the landscape it enables us to create shelter and optimal insects for the bats to feast on all night long (stopping them from feasting on us!). Bats need roosts near habitats in which they can forage, such as Tophill low, with woodland and water, with safe passageways such as 

hedgerows to shelter them from predators.

How can you get involved? 

You can sign up to EYBG for a small fee, information for this can be found on their blog, or you can donate a bat box which you can build at home, read a simple guide on how to here!

If you want to go and survey bats please don’t go out on your own, please set something up with EYBG! You’ll be doing plenty of walking with them, and some ladder climbing, so come prepared, (comfy walking shoes, warm clothing) read more information here!

Or if you just fancy a day out to enjoy the scenery and to see what sort of cool things they get up to at Tophill Low you can visit them for the day between 9am to 6pm for a small entrance fee (£3.50 per adult).

(Google Maps, 2018)

Thanks for reading!

C.



P.S. here are some more photos from the day!

Welcome!

Hey all,


Welcome to my Blog!


Let me introduce myself to you really quick, I'm Charlotte but most people call me Charly. I'm currently a final year Zoology student at the University of Hull. You can find me on twitter @ZoologyCharly I tweet sometimes!

So... I'm taking this module called practical conservation where i go out and do some volunteering, come home tell you all about it, why its important and ultimately how you can get involved, pretty cool huh?

This blog is going to have a lot of cute animals on, but there is also going to be some serious topics to discuss to, for example did you know that approximately 30,000 species per year which is works out about three per hour are being driven to extinction (Harvard University)


Stick around and see how you can help from home!



Chat soon,


C.