Take a break and make a difference for UK wildlife
You don’t need to travel far to help wildlife. Jo Price spent a long weekend in Suffolk getting close to nature and discovering how volunteers can make a difference to UK conservation efforts.
“Who wants to empty this trap?” asks Andy Jefferies, our expert guide and leader during a wildlife conservation holiday. In the spirit of making the most of my volunteering weekend I enthusiastically stepped forward. What happened next was one the best encounters I’ve had with a UK species to date.
I carefully emptied the trap into a clear plastic bag and a miniature rodent appeared before our eyes. The trickiest task followed: I had to catch it so we could record its sex. I cornered the creature in the bag, picked it up by the scruff of its neck and held it so we could take a closer look. It was a female field vole and she weighed 21.5g.
To my surprise, when her weigh-in was concluded she didn’t leap off my hand in a bid for freedom. Instead, she sat contentedly on my palm and groomed herself to get her mussed-up fur back in order. The five other volunteers laughed in amazement, and even more so when she finished her toilette and decided to run up my arm and hide in my hood.
Once she had been retrieved from my clothing, we returned her to the site where we she had been caught and she darted off into the bracken.
HELP IS AT HAND
This small mammal survey was just one of the tasks that we volunteers were involved in during the April 2016 Bank Holiday. We had joined a Wild Days Conservation trip in the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).
The weekend involved taking part in practical group tasks outdoors that were related to wildlife. In addition to enjoying our experiences with nature, our aim was to gather valuable data on species and habitats that could be used by established conservation organisations.
Our work began at Dunwich Heath, a National Trust reserve and a beautiful area of coastal lowland d heath covered by heather and bright yellow gorse.
“Our objective over the past 30 years has bee en to preserve good quality heathland and extend it,”” says senior ranger Richard Gilbert.
He explained that the heather is cut each yea ar on rotation in strips. After 30–40 years the purple-flowering plant dies back so the open habitat ne eeds to be maintained. Once the heather has been cut back, the surface of the soil is scraped to help the see eds to germinate again.
“We want to get different growth stages and mix them up to create a patchwork habitat that can support a variety of species,” he says.
The reserve provides the perfect environment t for reptiles, supports rare birds and is the home e of muntjac and red deer. But our job was to focus ono surveying the smaller mammals that live on the heath.
In order to record their numbers we prepared 50 BioEcoss mammal traps by filling them with dogg meat,
TO MY SURPRISE THE FIELD VOLE DID NOT LEAP OFF MY HAND IN A BID FOR FREEDOM. INSTEAD, SHE SAT CONTENTEDLY ON MY PALM.
seeds, meallworms and straw. A pygmy shrew can eat up to 125 per ceent of its bodyweight daily so the food and bedding hadd to be included to ensure that the mammals we caught wouldw not go hungry or cold while they were confined in the traps.
The traps were then placed in five locations across the reserve in a range of habitats, which included wetland edge, heathlland edge, scrub and woodland, hollow surrounded by woodland and woodland farmland.
Wrapped uup warm and bleary-eyed at 6.30am the following moorning we listened to the sound of a booming bittern as we retrieved the traps from the dewy undergrowth with anticipattion. Forty-six had not been triggered but four had and we wwere really keen to find out what was inside.
The scrub anda woodland habitats were the most successful sittes. In total we recorded one pygmy shrew weighing 3.5gg, two male wood mice weighing 28g and 19.5g and the female field vole that sat on my hand.
The data wee collected was uploaded to the iRecord website (wwww.brc.ac.uk/irecord), a central repository