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.
Here’s a better shot of the Yarrow Broomrape with AlarmGnome temporarily disabled. It really is a very beautiful thing, much more so than many of the broomrapes which tend to look dead even when they’re alive. The reason for is that they have no chlorophyll and so aren’t green at all. They don’t need to make food in the usual photosynthetic
way because they are in fact obligate parasites living off the food and water in neighbouring plants by tapping into their roots. Many broomrapes are very specific and are named after their hosts. Yarrow Broomrape parasitizes yarrow - a very familiar plant which makes it all the stranger that this broomrape is so rare.
One of the island’s rarest flowers is in safe hands. The rather beautiful Yarrow Broomrape (the purple flower in the picture) has acquired ‘AlarmGnome’ technology thanks to a grant from the SBPF (Spurious Botanical Projects Fund). If anyone should approach the plants AlarmGnome issues a first warning: ” Step Away from the Flowers”. If this doesn’t ward them off and they get still closer risking harm to the Broomrape, then AlarmGnome gives a second warning of “Back Off Now, or Suffer”. If this still doesn’t deter the deranged intruder then AlarmGnome becomes AttackGnome and you really don’t want to know what happens next.
Suffice to say, it’s not pretty.
Three of us were lucky enough to go on a Dormouse Ecology course this month, held in Cheddar by the Mammal Society. Dormice are European Protected Species, due to their sadly diminishing numbers, and it is illegal to handle them or check their nestboxes without a licence (renewed annually).
Once they come out of hibernation in May, dormice look for places to use as daytime rest areas, as they’re nocturnal creatures, and also to start building their summer nests in. We were taken up to Cheddar Gorge to see a survey area where 50 nestboxes have been provided. After a few false starts (other creatures such as Wood Mice or small birds are partial to nesting in the boxes too!), we were lucky enough to find 3 occupied boxes. One of the cute critters is shown here – undoubtedly a huge ‘ahhh’ factor involved!
Dave Dana, dragonfly recorder extraordinaire, has reported 2 very exciting records from the Gift to Nature pond at the sandown Wetland Walk. He found Hairy Dragonfly Brachytron pratense and Four-spotted Chaser Libellula quadrimaculata, both rather scarce on the Island and the former scarce just about everywhere! This is a great reward for the conservation efforts of the Trust, many volunteers and Southern water who own the site. Here’s one of Dave’s fabulous pictures of the chaser.
Is this the year of the Lesser Whitethroat? I’ve never heard so many around as in the past couple of weeks. It’s great to hear such an obscure little bird it out and about shouting from gardens,the seafront, the railway embankments but its such a skulker you just can’t get more than the most fleeting of glimpses. Quite a pretty bird in a dark kind of way, especially when they’re all freshly arrived and still quite neat: slate grey with a darker face and blue legs. The song is a machine-gun-like rattle, not terribly musical but quite distinctive. Listen out for it and so long as you’re not near a war-zone or on MOD land you can be fairly confident that you too have heard the Lesser Whitethroat.
We’re working through both the Gift to Nature and Landcare programmes to develop a series of carbon-conservation projects under the title ‘Island Climate Care‘. One such project is a focus on Isle of Wight wetlands to gain a better understanding of their carbon capture role. We are especially interested in the deep peats of the East Yar Valley where we have worked to keep water levels high and the peat wet for the past 10 years but we are only now beginning to realize the essential importance of protecting and managing these as flooded prehistoric carbon stores. There’s still a lot to learn, about the methane/CO2 balance, about water quality and peat formation and about coastal and estuarine peat. There is a growing recognition too that ponds in the landscape provide a vital service as silt-traps and organic stores. We create or restore a pond somewhere on the Island every year but now we see them as contributing to a bigger picture. Island Climate Care will be working with partners on specific schemes to protect and enhance Island rivers, marshes, floodplains and ponds not only to conserve wildlife but also to take some demonstrable local action against climate change.
Sean took some fabulous pics of these delightful Long-tailed Tits carefully constructing their nest from lichen and spiderweb (can it get any more ethereal?). Eventually the nest will be a dome with a small entrance hole and by then well-hidden by the rapidly sprouting willow.
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Flooded Peat nearAlverstone.