We’ve been looking at some barns out in west Wight and it seems they’ve been the roost of choice for at least one Little Owl. The pellets you can see in the picture show the characteristic black shiny beetle wing cases - Little Owls are master beetle catchers.
After much development work we have finally managed to get the new Gift to Nature website online. It’s been a bit of a mammoth task! The new site has more content than the old one, embraces our new logo and fits in with the design of the Island 2000 site. We’ll be adding even more new content over the next few months to make the site more usable. Highlights include a series of Youtube videos, details of our new business membership scheme and an online shop which also offers a range of free publications, plus free delivery on all orders over £5. www.gifttonature.org.uk
Finally managed to edit and upload the video of the re-opening of Yarmouth Pier. If you can’t see it below you can view it here.
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You might remember a few weeks ago we were off to try out Simon’s hairtubes to see if we could find evidence of Dormice at a site. Well, one of the tubes turned up a few strands (and all the peanut butter bait was gone) so something must have crawled through. Here’s a microscope image (not great as it’s taken by pressing the digital camera into the eyepiece and trying not to wobble). It does seem to show typical Dormouse hair structure - closed oval cells (the dark blobs). It’s not exactly conclusive, but interesting.
Sat 12th July saw the launch of the first ‘Children’s Guide to the Isle of Wight’. It was held at Quay Arts in Newport and was endorsed by a Royal visit from Queen Victoria no less.
The Children’s Guide is a candid and colourful book written, illustrated and edited solely by Island Children and reflects their views about the places they like the most, the places they like to eat and the things that they most like doing on the Island.
For any visiting family the guide gives a real insiders view about what makes the Island special and what you might like to do on your visit.
There were two activities on offer, you could make a badge showing your favourite place on the Island and then pin it to our giant Island map. Book designer Jonathan Ward also ran a book making workshop so that you could make your own personal guide book. Our very own Master Chef , Charlotte Ager, made us a beautiful cake to celebrate with too.
Dame Ellen MacArthur sent the team a message of support,
“Hello Everyone, I just wanted to say that I’m really, really sorry that I haven’t been able to come along to cut the cake today and congratulate you on your great Guide. I love all the colourful drawings! I really enjoyed reading it and there were a lot of things I didn’t know before so I learnt a lot and I am looking forward to using it to discover new places on the island. Aren’t we lucky to live on such a great island! Hope to see you all soon, Ellen”
The guide costs £5 and can be brought from Island outlets or directly from Island 2000 with free P&P, follow this link to buy your copy and take a peek at some of the pages: Children’s Guide
Any profits from sales of the guide will be reinvested into future projects and publications for Children on the Island.
Available now! For more information or to purchase online with free delivery please see the Children’s Guide page here.
Here you can see us baiting the Dormouse hair-tubes with crunchy peanut butter and taping them up in likely spots - places where there is plenty of tangled cover with fruit, nut and berry-bearing species and honeysuckle in particular. We’ll be back in a week to check for little hairs and naked mice.
Here are some nice pictures of a female Slow Worm we found while surveying a site in the south of the island. You can tell it’s a female by the quite marked narrowing of the abdomen and also by the ‘neck’ formed by a slight narrowing behind the head. Mr. Slow is in the background.
This is our latest homemade bit of kit thanks to Simon’s ingenuity. It’s a new and improved Dormouse hairtube. When we’re surveying for Dormice we generally try to find evidence of them feeding on hazelnuts. But of course if there are no hazel trees then we’ll find no nuts, but there may well be Dormice tittering at us from the undergrowth nonetheless. So, we use temporary nest tubes - just day shelters we can tie up in likely spots and check in the day when any animals that may have made use of them from the night before will still be in there snoring. This can take a while to get results but is if you like the ‘industry standard’. As a quicker supplement to this hair tubes are often used. These are lengths of plastic drainpipe baited with peanut butter (we think they prefer crunchy) and cut to allow 2 strips of sticky tape to run across the diameter. The theory is that the hungry/greedy Dormouse will squeeze under the tape to get to the bait and in doing so will leave behind a few hairs stuck to the tape. We then come along and check any hairs under a microscope to see which mammal they might be (could be mice or voles too). It sounds like an instrument of torture but the tape’s not that sticky, so they don’t come out bald. The trouble has been that clever Dormice can just as easily run across the top of the tape, so Simon has devised a tube where there is sticky on both sides and the tube is positioned so that the tape is vertical and the animals have to squeeze past one side or the other come what may. Good thinking. We’ll be testing these out this month.
Well, it’s 1.30am on Saturday, and it has been a hectic week. We were pleased to welcome Solo, organisers of the Isle of Wight Festival as our first corporate members of Gift to Nature recently. Part of our partnership with the Festival involves us manning a tent with information on Island conservation and in particular our Bees project developed jointly with the Festival. As usual with these things, everything took longer than usual to arrange, printers let us down at the last minute and so on. Then to top things off the weather on Thursday meant vehicles were banned from the festival site in the late afternoon - just as we needed to get all our gear on! A hectic morning followed on Friday, but we managed to get set up in time for things kicking off onsite at 2pm. We had a bit of a soft start on Friday afternoon, but will be pursuing Festival Goers tomorrow (I mean later today) with a vengeance, encouraging them to plant our fabbie bee wicks and part with their cash in pursuit of Bee conservation. Give Bees A Chance.
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