Island 2000 Trust Blog

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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.

We’ve teamed up with Biffa and IW Festival and asked artists to decorate 10 bins that will be used as part of the festival this coming weekend. You can see eight of them here, we’ll post pictures of the ninth one, done by Michael Forrest, when we’ve delivered it to the site. The tenth one is the lovely Bee Bin that Aaron Fletcher did which will actually be used as donation bin over the weekend in the Gift to Nature tent. We don’t know where they’ll end up but hopefully they’ll help festival organisers in their efforts to make the festival a more green and litter free place. Dave Badman enlisted help from students at Chale Primary school to do his large bin. After an educational lesson all about waste, recycling and what to do with your rubbish the children designed their own cartoon story based on imaginary festival goer ‘Rocky’, as he says, “Don’t be a litterbug”!

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.

Multi sensory artwork hits East Cowes

Have you seen the painted Alphabet on Castle Street, East Cowes as part of Island 2000 Trust’s No Barriers project? Not only is this a colourful visual treat, passers by can now get their ears tickled too. Artists Aaron Fletcher and Nathan Holt, who painted the alphabet and all the alliterative words to go along with it, are also part of Ventnor based ‘Blank Beats’. They created their very own ‘Alpharap’ rapping the words that are part of the alphabet they’ve created.

Island 2000 have set up a system whereby you can now call free phone 0800 959 6400 and listen to the ‘Alpharap’ down the phone and on the move.

The Island 2000 Arts team said, “We love the idea of this artwork and we don’t think there’s anything else like this on the Island. It’s a temporary multi-sensory public artwork, but more excitingly, it’s street karaoke!”

The track is available to listen to until the end of August 2008. To listen to more Blank Beat tracks log onto: www.myspace.com/blankbeats

The Education and Community team have been busy installing raised beds in gardens on Pan Estate.  A joint project with Medina Housing Association is encouraging residents to “grow their own” by providing a raised bed, soil, vegetable seeds and a tool kit for up to 50 households in the ward.  Most of the beds are now installed and ready to be planted up for the growing season, and Island 2000 will be holding a series of drop-in sessions throughout the summer offering advice on gardening using raised beds and suggesting recipes that will use produce from the garden.

Ray and his raised bed

A raised bed frame takes shape