Island 2000 Group

Spring is Here, Spring is Here…..

Ian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:28:21 +0000

…..life is skittles and life is beer, to quote the excellent Tom Lehrer.

And how do we know? Because willow buds are exploding all around us.

Read updates from Twitter for 2010-03-07

twitterfeed — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

great-spotted woodpeckers are drumming, coltsfoot's out on the cliffs, celandine's are smiling. Oh yes, It's Spring! #
How to Make a Dormouse Smile… http://75wcz.th8.us #

How to Make a Dormouse Smile…

Ian — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:53:51 +0000

give him/her a nestbox and dinner.

Here you can see the kit we’re currently installing one hundredfold in woodland strips that cross a large development site here on the island. Surveys beforehand indicated a small population of dormice using parts of the hedge and copse network, perhaps an ‘outreach’ from the larger populations know further east. The development can go ahead but only with large connected corridors of woodland retained and enhanced. This little kit is the ‘enhancement’ bit comprising a nest box , a feeder, and some tasty food. We’ll be putting out a hundred of these combinations through the woodlands to be conserved and monitoring the response of the dormouse population in the years ahead.

(The dormouse box looks a lot like a bird-box but is attached with the hole facing in towards the branch/trunk; birds still sneak in and use them though).

Save the Whale

Ian — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:09:23 +0000

Ten years ago we installed along the coastal cliff path at Brighstone a superb limestone bench, carved by local artist Danny Stimpson to be a white whale. It was a part of the great Chines project that spawned three such carved Portland stone benches (you may have come across them all on your travels) along with specially designed cycle-racks for each of the chine car parks; there was a schools pack and a colour brochure and all manner of environmental improvements too – it was a big piece of work. Well, the Island has shrunk in those ten years and the whale is now perilously close to the edge, perched on a little spur of land on either side of which the land has been completely eaten away. If it does go over the edge it will disappear irretrievably into the thick porridge of the slumping cliff from where it will slowly, slowly make its way down to the beach, emerging there in perhaps another 10 years. In a way this would be rather good – the whale making its way back to the ocean – but we’d still rather it stayed up on the cliff if at all possible thank you very much!

So, we’re working with others to see what we can do and to do it as soon as we can!

In the picture you can see the whale in by the fence and a little further east a great scar as the land has slipped away taking with it the coastal path.

Sandman Snowman 4

Ian — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:36:07 +0000

Our fourth annually celebration of the Island’s lack of snowman-making opportunities took place on Hope Beach, Shanklin on Sunday 24th January. of course this year the event was given the rather marvellous twist of following on from an extraordinary period of real island snow! So amongst the many wonderful sandmensnowmen there were snowmensnowmen and even a hybrid snowmansandmansnowman and a couple of sandmensnowmensandmensnowmen. I think I’d better stop there. Take a look at our smugmug gallery for them all:

Thanks to everyone who came out and and made beautiful things.

A Most Unusual Sight…

Ian — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:36:08 +0000

Something rarely seen on the Island: deer tracks and droppings. These were photographed today in a field in Brighstone, the pointed hoof slots and neatly cylindrical droppings strongly suggest deer and not sheep; there were three sets of tracks followed the field edge before disappearing. These are very likely escaped animals (there are one or two deer farms, perhaps more accurately described as deer collections) as the Isle of Wight famously has no wild deer, and a very good thing too! Why? Aren’t deer beautiful and lovely and ‘proper’ wildlife, none of your invisible bugs and boring mosses? Yes, but they eat woodlands, just go and take a look at the lengths the New Forest managers have to go to to foster any significant natural regeneration of broadleaved woodlands. And why is this such a big deal? Because the island is the best place in England for red squirrels and dormice – both specialist woodland rarities thriving here and yet extinct or nearly so across large parts of the mainland. Deer could not sustain a viable population here after the Solent land-bridge flooded eight thousand years ago – we are a proper island after all, we lack larger mammals, we lack the more sedentary birds (lesser-spotted woodpecker, nuthat textbook island biogeography.

Times are hard…

Ian — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:00:52 +0000

The snow offers great opportunities to practice your wildlife sleuthing, following tracks and signs and working what this footprint means and whose might be that spoor. Some of the signs remind us though just how hard it is out there for wildlife to find enough food to combat this cold. Take a look at the picture below, taken in a frozen yard where a pile of old branches had been piled earlier in the year. You can see where rabbits (and possibly other small mammals too) have nibbled away all the bark they can reach – not a lot of goodness in it but better than nothing at all.

Ferntastic!

Ian — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:49:27 +0000

I was out surveying in the miserable fog and slush listening to the redwings coughing in the gloom when all at once I came across this fantastic fern covered in ripe orange sporangia, somehow rather summery and warm-looking. It rather cheered me up.

The fern is most likely to be the Western Polypody Polypodium interjectum.

Snow!

Ian — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:44:43 +0000

It’s still here, looking a bit tired now but what a splendid effort nonetheless, Island snow, a rare thing.

It’s certainly made many of our sites look beautiful as shown by these pictures taken by Claire Hector who runs the Newport Rivers group. Here’s our sculpted reading man at Towngate now pondering a splendid snowball:

And here’s an impressive set of swan prints from the same site:

Badger Bridge

Ian — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:01:58 +0000

Rather splendidly , not far from the road bridge at Brighstone Viaduct, a little upstream and down in the chine woods, there is another more modest bridge in use. A fallen oak limb spans the chine stream at a height of about 4 feet; leading up to it on either side are very well-marked badger runs (there’s loads of badger activity down there) and sure enough half way across the log, at a particularly tricky and slippery bit there are the tell-tale claw marks that make it clear that badgers are indeed edging their way across here on a pretty regualr basis. How many take it a bit too fast end up in the stream we can only imagine.