Spare time?

In my "spare time" I volunteer with my local wildlife explorer group ( my wife Lisa volunteers too and both of the kids take part - it's a real family affair). Wildlife explorers are junior members of the RSPB and one or twice a month we get together for a few hours after school in our local library or we meet at a local nature reserve or public park to learn together about wildlife and wildlife conservation. We play games, carry out fundraising activities, collect data for schemes like the RSPB big garden survey and sometimes we carry out practical conservation work.

This weekend we got together on a foggy and frosty morning at Tophill Low Nature Reserve to help our friend Richard the warden to make a Grass Snake Refuge. Grass snakes are really common on the reserve and we often see them basking on the piles of twigs and straw that Richard provides for them. So to make ours we had to cut fresh willow twigs and trim them to size to make a base for the pile. And then heap straw onto it. It took the whole morning and it was great fun - as the selection of pictures at the end of the post clearly show!

It was also a valuable learning experience. Richard taught us something about grass snake ecology and we learned about practical habitat management. We talked about working safely and learned how to use tools properly. We learned a lot from one another about team work and about communication skills, and we learned that it's ok to have fun while you work! And I say we because I do mean we. The children learned a lot, but we learned with them.

Learning out of the classroom

Today Margaret Boyd and I hosted a group of colleagues, teachers, students and other interested friends to share with them  the highs, lows and perhaps most importantly some of the results of our research project "Harnessing the value of biodiversity". Oh,  there was cake too.

Over the last two years we have worked with 8 primary school teachers and more than 200 children aged 9/10 to explore the potential value to both tea hers and children of a short student centred field based learning exercise. The exercise involved the children exploring a local habitat and collecting, identifying, describing, observing and photographing the organisms that they found there. One school looked into their pond (a pond not used for learning - infact the  school paid to visit a similar pond some miles away because that must be better!!!)' another focused on invertebrates in a garden area, one looked at a local shore and another looked at the plants in their school grounds. The children then collaborated to produce a photographic field guide to their chosen location. A book that they were told would be used by their peers to carry out their own investigations. This has happened!

You can read about our work at our project webpage and you can find papers our group have published about this and related work at our website. But essentially today we discussed the following main findings:

1. There are lost of reasons that teaches don't take their class out doors; cost, risk, expertise, school culture, concerns about behaviour etc etc. But these barriers are not insurmountable, nor do they apply to all teachers in all situations. It was great to hear today about the ways that teachers we've worked with have found ways to overcome barriers like using local resources to minimise costs but maximise time in the field or learning with children rather than teaching them. It was even better to hear teachers describing the ways that they have continued to take the children out as a result of working with us, or even better that they have encouraged their colleagues to.

2. Fieldwork promoted engagement and ameliorated the behaviour of some children. Children told us that they learned about local biodiversity (good job too!). But they also talked about learning to work with one another and learning to work in a new way with the adults teaching them. They clearly enjoyed the exercise and thought of themselves as scientists and experts.

3. Children who completed the fieldwork exercise tended to score higher in standardised science and literacy tests than other children in their year group who hadn't taken part. The analyses are still ongoing but it looks like there is a lasting benefit to having taken part in fieldwork that is related to the fact that real experience consolidates enhanced memories and enables children to access key components of literacy (descriptives, jargon, similes etc.).

Leading this project has confirmed some of my preconceptions about the benefits of fieldwork but it has also changed the way that I think about the benefits of fieldwork too. In particular over the last two years I've started to think less about teachers as a group of colleagues and children as a population and then by extension about the average teacher and the average child (although when it comes to some analyses this is of course appropriate and essential). Instead I've started to think more about the diversity of individual teachers experiences and the way that individuals will react to barriers in their specific context. And about individual children and the fact that different levels of benefit may be experienced by different children. I can see this becoming the focus of my thinking and my research efforts for the near future.

Lists

I've just driven a round trip of almost 900 miles to spend the weekend helping friends to celebrate their civil partnership. Long car journeys are rarely fun, particularly when there are kids on the back seat, and especially when the in car DVD system fails during the first mile as was the case this time!

So what to do to while away the 20 hours of journey time? Well I fell back on the old staple - list making. I love to make lists and luckily my kids can be cajoled into making lists too. This time we made 3:

1. birds
2. wild mammals
3. road kill (bird or mammal)

There was only one rule, species had to be seen and confidently identified from the car or at one of our rest stops. More on what we saw later.

But what about listing? I make lots of lists. Lists of birds seen at a particular site or on a particular day, lists of species recorded as part of a particular project, trip lists, holiday lists, the list is endless! Some of these are a simple aide memoir, some are essential data, for my own research, some feed into national schemes such as distribution atlases.

To be useful a list needs clarity, accuracy, detail and context. We need to record what exactly we saw, when and where as a minimum. It also helps if we record additional information about things like abundance or behaviour, you just never know when that stuff will be useful!

I remember once being particularly frustrated when I was working on a study of intertidal algal distributional changes over a 100 year period. I found one old list in a dusty archive but couldn't use it because it lacked an exact date and location. Even worse I found another that suggested absolutely nothing had changed on a particular beach for 45 years....then I realised that the author of the second list had simply plagiarised the first rather than visit the site and check the facts! I also found a list that claimed that the algae at a site had changed almost completely ..... But that author had ignored key nomenclature changes and assumed that synonyms were actually different species. The key point is that my research would have been far easier if the list makers had done their job properly.

So what about my lists from the car. Turned out we had a great trip:

Mammals
Roe deer
Red deer
Bottle nosed dolphin
Grey seal
Rabbit
Bat sp

Road kill
Collared dove
Hedgehog
Pheasant
Barn owl
Fox
Wood pigeon
Roe deer
Rabbit
Red squirrel
Badger

Birds
61 species! Including:
Golden eagle
Grey plover
Whooper swan
Pink footed goose
Red grouse
Grey partridge
Good answer
Golden eye
Eider
The list (and the listing) goes on....

Sloe start to autumn

A week or two ago my wife noticed that the Blackthorn or Sloe (Prunus spinosa) along the paths out of our village had no fruit on them. She noticed this because now is the time to make sloe gin (an annual affair in our kitchen). Today we noticed that none of the Sloes in our area have berries.

Although I didn't think about it at the time I guess that the poor spring we had (wet and cold) must have coincided with flowering and perhaps a lack of pollinators for the flowers must have prevented fruit set. The plum tree in our garden did very poorly too and the apples failed completely (luckily there was a bumper pear crop - but the pears flowered earlier). We also had very few moths in our moth trap this spring. But I suppose that this isn't a disaster for the Sloe itself - after all Sloes are long lived plants and last year there was a bumper crop. Hopefully there will be again next year too. What about the Sloe gin? Well I am a very lucky man. My wife had frozen part of last seasons foraging and so we have several bottles of sloe gin in the making around the kitchen as I write.

Birding dilemma

This week the first easterly winds of the autumn brought a steady stream of migrating birds to the coast where I live. Work commitments meant that I was unable to get out to see any of them. Today though my son Will and I set off full of hope. But the winds had turned to the west and the area was an ornithological desert. At last, in the fading light, our patience seemed to have been rewarded. On the cliff below us we heard the chipping call of a warbler. We could see the bush the sound was coming from about 30m below us. But we couldn't see the bird. It called away for perhaps five minutes and for the whole time we stared at the bush. Then in a flash it flitted out and made a dash to a second bush perhaps 10m along the cliff. Neither of us got our binoculars onto it as it flew but we both got to it just as it reached cover. At that exact second it became a blur of brown and white and all we saw was the yellow legs of a female Sparrowhawk that must have been waiting just as patiently as us on the cliff face below us. The Sparrowhawk grabbed it's prey and effortlessly glided away from us. So here is my dilemma. Do I feel robbed of the chance to identify my mystery warbler, or should I revel in the excitement of seeing such a fantastic piece of behaviour? On reflection I think I'm warming to the latter.

Tongue spots

 

How old is this bird?

Recently I was catching birds to fit them with rings (bands) as part of my activities as a British Trust For Ornithology (BTO) ringer. Specifically I was catching birds at Tophill Low Nature Reserve as past of the BTO Constant Effort Site  scheme (CES - more about that another day). As part of the activity we need to know the age of the bird we catch so that we can find out something about annual breeding success. So how old is the Reed Warbler in the picture?

 

Note the two black spots at the rear of the tongue

 

 

Well I know for a fact that on the day we caught it (back in August) it was only a few weeks old. And I know that because when it opened its beak I could see that it had two dark spots on its tongue. Lots of passerine chicks have tongue spots when they hatch that gradually fade as they age. I've always understood that the function of the spots is to make the gape of the chick more obvious to parent birds at feeding time - sort of like landing lights on a runway!