Changing Times

October is turning into a slightly strange, rather unsettling month, with lots of change and a fair amount of uncertainly.  My traineeship with Yorkshire Wildlife Trust officially ends on the 17th October, so I have been trying to tie up any loose ends. This has included sorting out my PPE and uniform to hand back, which makes me a little sad. I have been wondering what to do with the extra 2-3 days I will gain when I leave. I hope to continue attending the practical workdays run by the YWT Lower Aire Valley volunteers, and have also taken part in the TCV 'Green Friday' workday down at Skelton Grange, which is an environmental centre just a few miles from home.

I carried out some more small mammal surveys at East Keswick with their local wildlife group and the Yorkshire Mammal Group. This involved a whole weekend of trapping and checking. We had some good results, with over 50% capture rate (mostly wood mice) but unfortunately no harvest mice or pigmy shrews. However, through talking to people there I have a volunteering opportunity with West Yorkshire Ecological Data Network, so am going to visit later in the month. It will be a desk-based job data inputing, but will give me a different experience and may open up more opportunities.

I have also been applying for several jobs. Coincidentally, a course has just started on FutureLearn (an online learning system) which is all about writing job applications, so I have been working through that and hoping to pick up some tips on how to make my application hit the right note.  If you haven't heard of FutureLearn it is worth checking out, as they run a range of free courses covering various topics.

Study wise, I have concluded the team project for my Open University Practical Environmental Science course (SXE288) which was quite intensive in the last few weeks of September, especially as I was also writing up my mammal survey for MMU at the same time.  I have now started a new course, S295 The Biology of Survival, and the workload is fairly manageable so far. It is a combination of investigative biology and evolution, and looks as thought it will be really interesting.

One of the first tasks for the course has been a bird prey discrimination experiment. This basically involves making hundreds of coloured dough balls, putting them out for the birds, and counting how many of each colour are taken.  I have been training the birds for the last two weeks, and this weekend started the proper experiment.  I set up my naturecam to make sure I captured all the relevant data, and am pleased to say that with a new memory card this is now working properly and getting some really good shots - I didn't realise there was so much diversity in my garden. I normally only see sparrows and blackbirds, but have caught dunnocks, robins and blue tits on the camera. It is magpies that seem to be eating all the dough balls though - I wouldn't normally encourage them into the garden, but they are helping to get me some results.

The Great Dormouse Hunt

Last weekend I attended my first proper outing with my local mammal group, to check dormouse nest boxes in woodland north of Ripon.  I was quite excited at the prospect of seeing my first dormouse up close and personal, and tempted by the tea and cakes promised at the end of the day.

It was an early start for a Sunday morning, and nearly an hour's drive to the site. I met up with the rest of the group at 9:00am and, having split up into three smaller groups, we stomped off into the woods. In all, we had 350 nest boxes to locate and check. The nestboxes were all located on a map, laid out on a grid system and marked with a length of orange tape, but nevertheless some were quite hard to find.  As there is no access to the woods, a lot of the vegetation was overgrown and it was difficult terrain to walk over.

Unfortunately, none of the groups found any dormice in the boxes, and only a few possible nests were discovered. I also looked for signs of eaten hazlenuts on the ground and didn't see any. Dormice were released in the area ten years ago and have been recorded there until recently, but it looks as though the colony has either moved on, died out, or is finding somewhere else to nest.  Some of the nestboxes contained old bird's nests; others were completely empty.  Wood mice had moved in to a number of the nestboxes, and shrews were occasionally found. We even came across a couple of bats in one of the nests.

It was nearly 2pm before we stopped for a lunch break. After this, we moved on to a second woodland to carry on the search. Unfortunately it was much the same story.  The woods were full of wonderful fungi and other life, but no dormice.

After a long day, we finished around 5pm by which time the tea-shop had closed.  So not only did we not find any dormice, but we didn't get any cake either!  Still, it was a friendly group, nice to be out in the open air all day, and a good experience - I'm now more familiar with how a dormice release programme would be carried out, and the long-term monitoring needed to follow it up.