Scottish Wildcat Project

So I'm pretty snowed under with work at the moment and so time for blogging has been much reduced. My Easter break is in about 2 weeks but I have lots of deadlines to meet before then. So I thought the best thing to do would be to bring the work to my blog. Genius, eh? 

For my Mammals: Species, Diversity and Conservation module, I recently had to produce a poster on a mammal species of my choice, with the poster based around a scientific paper published since 2000. I wanted the species I picked to be something which can be found in the UK, cause I knew other people would probably go for something more exotic, and also because there are plenty of interesting mammal species found here which I could write about. 

So in the end, after hours of looking through the internet for a suitable and interesting paper that wasn't gonna send the reader of my poster to sleep, I stumbled across a paper about the conservation of the Scottish Wildcat. The wildcat's main threat in the wild is the hybridisation with other wild-living cats. There are now issues with identifying "pure" Wildcats in the field as a result. This study basically helps deal with this issue. To avoid repeating myself too much, an image of the finished poster is below, which should summarise the study reasonably well. Hopefully you should be able to read the text, although the tables and graphs will be pretty difficult to see.

If you're interested about the study, click here to view it online, it's really quite a good read. 

It looks as though March might be a slightly quieter blogging month for me than February was, but I'll see what I can do, and I may have a couple more posts like today's to keep things ticking over. Thanks for reading :D 

And The Cold Spell Continues...

Well actually, now I've finally got round to posting this, temperatures have now started to climb and I think we can expect warmer conditions next week. But when I went out for a walk around campus on Saturday it was still only about 4 degrees, and even with plenty of layers on it was pretty chilly. 

Just a standard patch walk really, but saw an interesting range of species along the way including Kestrel, Kingfisher, a Grey Heron flying overhead (which isn't as common as you might think on the lake), a few Great Spotted Woodpeckers, Redwings and Mistle Thrushes, lots of Goldcrests and Nuthatches, Jays and Siskins. The photos below show the view across the lake: 

There wasn't anything particularly out of the ordinary on the lake other than a Kingfisher flying over the water surface, and a couple of Tufted Ducks, which aren't always around on campus. As usual, the lake was pretty much dominated by Black-headed Gulls as seen in the photo below. As you can see, some of the gulls, like the top one in the photo below are starting to show their spring plumage with that dark chocolate brown head beginning to appear. 

Moorhens like the one in the photo below were seen plodding around the edge of the lake too: 

And these Mallards looking who were looking rather smart...

As I was heading over to the woodland, I saw this Jay hopping around on the ground underneath the trees. Please excuse the terrible photo- they're incredibly hard to approach without them flying off. 

The first bird I saw when I walked into the woodland area was a Blue Tit, which is photographed below. This one was perched on a branch just a few metres away and kindly allowed me to take a few pictures:

Quite a few Goldcrests were seen in the woodland although again, I was unable to get anything other than an average record shot. The thing is, when you see them they often stick around for ages and are very happy to forage around in the vegetation in close proximity to you, but they just don't stay still for a second and are constantly shuffling along a branch, hanging upside down or hovering around. The best I managed is the photo below. 

I was constantly looking around, hoping that the next tiny bird I saw would be the Firecrest, but I'm really starting to think it may have moved on now. Haven't seen it in a while and no one seems to be mentioning it anymore. Still, I feel pretty lucky to have seen it, and maybe it'll turn up again next winter, we shall see.  

And one more final record shot for the day, the Nuthatch in the photo below. Despite the fact there are lots of them here on campus, they're really very shy and getting close to them is pretty difficult, similarly to the Jays. Anyway, enough excuses, the photo I managed is below: 

That just about rounds up my walk yesterday, hopefully by next week the temperatures will have risen enough for it to start feeling like spring :D  

Campus Bird Survey

The last of the field sessions for my ecology module on a Thursday was a couple of weeks ago. The aim of these field sessions was to improve people's bird identification skills in preparation for a campus wide bird survey- and to get people on the module involved in birdwatching for enjoyment purposes too.

As a group we've seen a really impressive number of species on campus (probably in excess of 50), with highlights being the Firecrest, Little Owls, Waxwings, Treecreepers, Siskins, Fieldfares, Redwings, Jays, both Green and Great Spotted Woodpeckers, lots and lots of Nuthatches and a Kingfisher. It's been great to get so many people involved in birdwatching, and has just shown how much biodiversity is present in such a small area. It really isn't necessary to travel such long distances to see stuff, when so much can be seen within walking distance.

So today was the day where the group was given the opportunity to put the skills gained over the last few weeks to the test in the campus survey of bird life. The group was split into 25 groups, with about 3-4 people in each. Each group was designated a small area of campus to cover (each area was about 200mm squared). The map below shows the way in which the campus was split up. The picture isn't very clear, but our group was allocated square 5  which hopefully you can see on the map.

The area of campus we were given actually contains my halls within it. The bird life that can be seen in this area is very reasonable, but not as diverse as the woodland, Harris Garden and lake areas of campus which are on the east and particularly south eastern areas. Squares such as 6,7,12 and 19-25 would probably have shown the highest number of species. But I was quite pleased with the square we were given as I knew the area quite well. The photo below shows a close up view of our particular square:

As the picture shows, our square covered some of the sports fields on campus, as well as a decent amount of tree cover. P2 marked on the map is a car park, and around there is where I saw the Redwings a few days ago. We were given an hour to walk around the square and record what we saw. The total tally for each bird seen in the hour was recorded- not the total number of birds seen at any given time as in the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch. So there is potential that some individuals may have been counted more than once. Birds that were seen overhead were recorded, but we had to put a note beside those stating that they were seen flying overhead, as opposed to staying in the area studied. 

We started by heading out onto the sports grounds to see what was feeding on the ground. I was very surprised to see the group of Redwings which I thought had left campus, as they were no longer feeding around the car park area. There were around 15 Redwings in total, as well as 3 Mistle Thrushes and some Blackbirds. In the cluster of trees in the middle of the sports grounds just about on the boundary of our square we saw two Nuthatches chasing each other around near the base of one of the trees. Pied Wagtails were seen hopping around on the grass of the playing fields too. 

We then headed over to the other side of the path, walked around the car park for my halls and scanned the shrubs and trees on the other side of my halls where we saw Blue, Great and Long-tailed Tits, a Chaffinch and two more Nuthatches. Also seen flying overhead were Black-headed Gulls and a Red Kite. A Wren and a Greenfinch were heard calling too. As we moved on we saw yet another Nuthatch and heard lots more Great Tits. 

It was actually quite difficult to drag the birdwatching out over an hour, as the patch was quite small, and we'd looked over pretty much all of it after about 40 minutes. We decided to have one last look around the playing fields to see if anything else had turned up. We were pleasantly surprised to see a Great Spotted Woodpecker climbing one of the trees in the middle of the playing fields, and added this species to our list for the hour. The final species list can be seen below. I have not included the numbers of the species we saw as the counts form we filled in has been handed in to collate all the data. 

• Red Kite
• Black-headed Gull
• Feral Pigeon 
• Woodpigeon
• Great Spotted Woodpecker
• Pied Wagtail
• Wren
• Robin
• Blackbird
• Redwing
• Mistle Thrush
• Long-tailed Tit
• Blue Tit
• Great Tit
• Nuthatch
• Magpie
• Carrion Crow
• Chaffinch
• Greenfinch

So a total of 19 species were seen, not bad at all for an area of campus which definitely isn't one of the most biodiverse areas. 

So what next then? Well the data from all the groups will be collated, and the top 25 most common species on campus will be identified. Each group will then be given one of these species to produce an A1 poster about, with information on campus distribution, behaviour and a few other things. When this poster is done, I'll share that on the blog. So after we handed in our count forms, that was it for the day. 

Because I was surveying the birds throughout the hour, I didn't have my camera with me to take any pictures. So I decided I would head out later to see if I could get any better pictures of the Redwings around the sports fields. Below are a few of the photos I ended up with. The conditions were still pretty overcast, so the light for taking pictures wasn't too great, but the light was still better than what was available last time I tried to photograph them. The Redwings were much more reluctant for me to get too close to them as well, so maybe it's a different group to the ones I was seeing before around the car park.

After a while the sun came out from behind the clouds and allowed for a slightly more colourful image: 

After a while photographing the Redwings, I became distracted by a pair of Red Kites performing some impressive aerobatics above my head. I managed a few average pictures...

After seeing the Red Kites and watching the Redwings for a little longer, I decided to head back after a really satisfying day. And just to cap it all off, just as I was starting to type this post, I heard a Tawny Owl calling outside as I had my room window open. So that's another species seen/heard on campus for the first time to add to the Mistle Thrush I saw earlier in the day. 

February has been a fantastic month in terms of bird life here on campus and hopefully that will continue as March arrives. Spring is just around the corner and it'll be great to see some changes taking place here over the coming months. 

Thanks for reading and have a great evening :D