Island 2000 Trust Blog

Winter’s an excellent time to have a wander along Ryde sea front and look for birds. There a Mediterranean Gulls all over the place, grebes and sea-ducks just offshore, Redwings galore up in the park and who knows what else. One of the most delightful sights though is a flurry of Sanderling as they rush about at the water’s edge picking up whatever uncovers there. Somehow they look as if they’re on a different speed-setting to the rest of reality. This lovely picture of Sanderlings roosting on a shingle bank isn’t actually from the Island - it’s from Rye Harbour and the fabulous nature reserves there. To see more amazing wildlife photography visit their website: rxwildlife.org.uk

Take a look at this clip. It was filmed on Sean’s camera and shows a stunning cloud of Starlings wheeling about over Newport before dropping out of the sky and into the conifers around the College to roost for the night. The UK’s Biodiversity Action Plan was recently updated. It makes changes to those species and habitats defined as priority species or habitats. Some of the new entries are pretty shocking: Hedgehog, Toad, Eel and the dear old Starling. It’s sad to think that a bird once so fantastically common it was almost a pest is now considered a national target for conservation effort.

Here you can see the progress of The Purple Kite from scraps of plywood pulled out of a skip, to the proud craft bobbing down the river below.

Like many projects, it’s the result of a random turn in a conversation. Simon was talking about beavers and streams, then someone said it would be great if we had an inflatable canoe for surveying wildlife in ponds and rivers. After that someone came up with a challenge: to make our own boat in one day using only recycled materials and anything we could find in the office and then row it across the River Medina and back.

We set to work in our small inventions workshop in East Cowes which SEEDA let us use specifically for making interesting and unlikely creations.

Well, we failed to make it in a day and cheated by buying a box of screws, but as it took shape over the next week our confidence grew that it really would stay afloat with us in it. It started to feel more and more like a proper boat.

The more organic lines can be explained by the fact that there weren’t any plans and there wasn’t a lot of measuring either.

This picture shows Simon ceremonially rubbing down the boat in whiskey prior to painting.

There are two port-holes in the bottom for observing fish, rocks, seaweed and submarines passing beneath us.

At this point the boat had no name, but by means of a democratic process, we arrived at The Purple Kite. The Island 2000 logo is of course a purple kite and it is also, by sheer coincidence, the rarest species of sea-bird to be found in the British Isles, never having been observed or recorded.

Launch day - a last minute attack of responsibility makes us leave behind our recycled life-jackets and ask Offshore Challenges next door if they can lend us something more reliable. They hand us two very swanky-looking flotation devices which, we understand, deploy automatically as soon as they get a whiff of sea-water. Simon instructs us that if it looks like we’re going down, we’re to throw them back onto the land to avoid the punitive cost of recharging the gas canisters.

Luckily, this isn’t necessary as it turns out to be the driest rowing boat we’ve been in. We launch from the slipway just next to the car ferry, waved off in a cloud of sherbet by well-wishers and curious staff from Red Funnel. The oars are on the long side for such a small boat, but The Purple Kite is easy to row and very manoeuvrable, sitting surprisingly high in the water.
If you’d like to see the cross-Medina escapade for yourself, take a look at the Youtube video below.

We’re now planning to produce some commentaries on the wildlife of the Isle of Wight’s rivers, viewed and recorded from the water. The Purple Kite is available for other water-borne tasks or challenges. Any suggestions?

Here is the splendid Petrobius maritimus or Sea Bristletail. It’s really a bigger cousin of the Silverfish you may be more familiar with. These were found holing up in a crack in that big lump of limestone on the way down from Flowers Brook to Steephill Cove. We were walking the coastal path between Ventnor and the Botanic Gardens on Sunday with Friends of Nature members (part of the Gift to Nature scheme - have a look at the website for details) and these fabulous things were one of the winter wildlife highlights.

Deep in the woods perched the pixie. I hid myself in the bracken and waited for his magic to begin when suddenly he turned his impish eye in my direction and spoke: “Can I come down now please, Dad, and why are you crawling about under those leaves?” And so the spell was broken and I returned once more to the human world.

Yes, it’s the mighty Ganoderma - the Artist’s fungus, so called because any patterns or words you might scratch into its soft underside will stay there for good. The sturdy shelf that Jerry’s sitting on here is just the fruiting body, the toadstool bit; the rest is devouring the insides of its Beech tree host. This particular one is in the woods behind the Griffin Pub in Godshill, a place I visited for the first time last year when I went on a fungus foray there run by the IW Natural History Society and led by Dr. Colin Pope. It was absolutely brilliant - loads of weird and wonderful things, plus an excellent rope-swing for the kids and the pub to look forward to on the way back. Toadstools, rope-swings and Guinness - it really doesn’t get any better.

Here you see a rather pitiful sight.

A skinny little toad we rescued from a concrete bunker into which it had presumably fallen and become trapped. It was terribly thin but still quite active, so we released it onto some nice wet and wormy ground where it might feed up in peace. I tried to encourage it with a woodlouse but it seemed a bit reluctant to have a go. It was the best I could find at the time. The really sad thing is that it isn’t just this unfortunate individual toad that’s having such a hard time - it’s all of them. Back in the summer there were revisions made to something called the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (UKBAP) and in particular to its list of species of conservation concern - in other words the plants and animals in decline across the country. There are a few shocks in it. The once familiar Toad as we’ve said, but also Hedgehogs, Starlings, House Sparrows and Eels. Creatures we think of still as familiar and even common-place (whether we’ve seen them recently ourselves or not) really aren’t anymore. There’s a great deal we can all do though to help, perhaps at or in our work, certainly at home in our gardens, and more generally in the way we respond to what we see going on in the world around us. We are very lucky here on the Island to share in an environment so well-blessed with wildlife, truly a refuge for so many species in serious decline or even now extinct elsewhere across the south. But that doesn’t happen by accident and it’s neither a given nor a guarantee for the future. There’s an awful lot of hard work going on out there to protect and conserve wildlife - not just because it’s green and good but because the natural world is a part of our daily lives and a part our wellbeing. Without it around us even the shiniest of nice new technological marvels is a pretty dull thing. So be kind to toads please.

I have just returned from a family trip to Frankfurt’s Christmas Market, where we spent much time marvelling at tat from a different culture. I was very taken however with the fantastic painted bird boxes on offer at one stall. I now feel we have done the poor old Grey Wagtails and House Sparrows a dis-service with our 1960-esque concrete carbuncles. I wonder if we may find tiny burned out cars lining the Troll Trail before long, and the better off birds emigrating to Germany where they can buy a stylish pad for a few Euros.

Well I hope you’re not eating.
But if you are, imagine swallowing the packaging too and coughing it up later because that’s what Barn Owls do. These are yummy Barn Owl pellets - regurgitated fur and bone from mice, voles and shrews. We collected these from beneath a nestbox we know is regularly used just outside Newport because we wanted something to point our fantastic USB microscope at. The one opposite is just with the digital camera on macro, but the one below is taken with the microscope.

The detail is amazing, just look at those little teeth.

And just to add to the horror, in amongst it all was an insect pupa!

To the untrained eye these are indeed just nibbled nuts in neat rows. But to the nature detective there’s more: the top line is the work of Red Squirrels - nuts shattered or split in two. The second line belongs to Dormice - a very neat hole and nearly smooth inner rim. 3rd line down probably comes from Wood Mice - parallel grooves and a scratchy surface. And 4th is the raggedy work of Bank Voles. These Hazel nuts were all collected from hedges on the edge of Newport as part of a set of ecological surveys we’re undertaking, but it’s just fascinating to think of all this busy rodent activity going on out there. The woods must be a chorus of crunching. Of course none of these species actually lays out their discarded shells in this neat and convenient way, this is characteristic evidence of the work of Sean, a rather larger mammal.

Look at this stunning thing:
It’s a Jersey Tiger moth. This lovely species is pretty much restricted in UK distribution to the Channel Islands and parts of the south coast . On the mainland it is commonest in south Devon, but colonies have recently appeared in Dorset and here on the Isle of Wight. So this may be a stray continental migrant or home-grown. There is also a thriving population in central London, but who knows if this is a natural expansion of range or perhaps more likely the result of an introduction. It’s clunky latin name is Euplagia quadripunctaria and is presumably a reference to the four distinct spots (rather than the two additional blobs) on the bright red underwings.
Sean, our conservation manager, photographed this one while out on his project rounds.