Devon Wildlife Trust Placement – August 2016

by Amber Connett & Harry Shadwell

Getting ‘in touch’ with nature…

Amber and Harry are currently on placement with Devon Wildlife Trust. Every month, they are posting a summary of what they have been doing. here's the latest...

During August we have taken part in a wide range of activities within the Trust, including various training courses. One of the training courses we completed was based on environmental education. It was a very fun day at Wembury Marine Centre which demonstrated ways in which we can engage both children and adults with nature. The other training course was based on safe guarding which taught us all the different things that must be considered when you are holding an event or working with children and vulnerable adults. 

At the start of the month we helped out with seed harvesting from a donor site. This involved the seeds being collected using a quad bike and then sieved by us. The seeds are then dried and used on other sites to increase diversity.

We also spent a few days at our Avon Valley site, Brimridge farm. We conducted pitfall trap surveys for invertebrates, in which we caught a variety of species such as the Violet Ground Beetle and Crab Spider. During the evening we took part in a bat survey using handheld bat detectors. We heard lots of Pipistrelles and a few Greater Horseshoe bats as well as finding two Lesser Horseshoe bats hanging around in a garage! Also that night, we set up an actinic moth trap near the ponds and ended up catching over 20 species of moth!

Left: setting up the moth trap before dusk. Middle: searching for bats with the bat detectors. Right: Bloody-nosed Beetle releasing its characteristic red fluid.

August has marked the end of two of our projects: Unconfirmed County Wildlife Site (UCWS) surveys and botanical monitoring of Culm creation sites. We finished writing our UCWS reports and sent them off to Devon Biological Records Centre for analysis at their panel meetings, in which we hope most of the sites we surveyed will be designated. The data collected from botanical monitoring will be inputted later in the year and we will write a summary report of our findings. 

Towards the end of the month we restarted our Marsh Fritillary surveys, this time looking for their larval webs. As with the adult surveys, our results will be sent to a long-term monitoring database at Butterfly Conservation in order to give a better indication of the successful breeding population. We will be continuing these surveys throughout the first half of September as this is when the webs are most conspicuous. 

We have also continued our Riverfly monitoring across our three sites. This sampling also involved taking a water sample using kits sent to us by the Freshwater Habitats Trust. This was used to measure the concentration of nitrate and phosphate in the rivers. This is part of another widespread monitoring scheme allowing the trust to build a better picture of water quality across Britain.