05-04-2022: Spring roundup invasives, orchards and moths oh my!

So I realised that I’ve been a bit lax on updating the blog from the end of January. So here’s a mini blog with more photos and some updates from some of our events in from late Jan to April!

The Big Garden Bird Count

For those who were curious, we were able to get all of our sites surveyed this year 😊

The table below has this years results– all of which was submitted to the RSPB – thank you to all of the volunteers who took part over the 4 days of surveys to help us survey all of our sites. 

19 species on a count had Tolworth Court Sports ground take the top spot in our count for most species as well as the most number of individuals. The large flocks of black headed gulls seen on or next to our site are the reasons why River house is in the surprising second place for number of individual birds, though as a campus, Roehampton Vale beat River house to get second place for the second highest number of species spotted.

The crow was the most spotted species seen on 10 out of 13 sites surveyed.

Rhodo bash 2

During the same weekend of the RSPB bird Garden Bird count, we managed to fit in another Rhodo bash at Kingston Hill 

Unfortunately we had to postpone our third planned rhodo bash due to covid, but we still managed to get a lot cleared. Our trail cameras set up in the area has caught some footage of one of our foxes hanging around the area (the video quality has had to be reduced slightly for upload).

Orchard event

We finally make it to the orchard at Saint John the Baptist in Kingston Vale - an event that we had planned to originally take place in Feb 2020! KUGAB volunteers joined volunteers from the church and learnt how to care for these large established fruit trees from Lewis from The Orchard project. A really fun afternoon, topped off when we were invited to see a newly restored orchard in one of the neighbouring housing estates off Kingston Hill. So that’s three orchard habitats in a relatively close geographic range, all helping to support each other by being sources of pollen for trees in similar fruiting groups. 

The secret orchard discovered at the end of the day

Invasive march events – bamboo

March saw us back on the hill on one of our Wednesday afternoon events and on an all day Saturday event - dealing with pockets of invasive bamboo which had taken a bit of a back seat to the rhodo clearance wok in recent years. 

Where we got to in the first afternoon

Some of the piles at the end of the day

We continued work on areas where previous events had reduced the stands to manageable levels and excavated a lot of the roots. There is still more to do as the bamboo is spreading across patches in the north of the site too, but we will preserver to help clear this invasive from the woodland. 

Moth trapping on brown and green roofs

With the completion of the Town House building at Kingston University which contains both garden roofs and terraces and brown roofs, we are starting efforts to categorise how the roofs are of benefit to pollinators. We have started to undertake surveys for moths on the roofs – starting at the Town house as we find our feet with surveying this new group of animals. Similar surveys planned at Knights Park (Mill Street Building) as well as on our oldest green roof on the Business school at Kingston Hill.

Some useful feedback from an expert on brown roofs has resulted in us rethinking our plans around natural colonisation of the brown roofs on the Town House, we’ll also be investigating seed mixes to help make these areas more biodiverse sooner rather then later. 

The results of natural colonisation so far

Who knows…maybe there will even be a mini experiment by leaving one roof of the 4 available roofs unseeded to see if seeds introduced at different elevations eventually make it across all roofs, and see how long it takes. We've already had a verbena make it onto the brown roof from our roof gardens/ground floor planting thanks, no doubt to the birds.  

Woodland workshop

And finally, we had our latest Spring woodland Workshop at Kingston Hill on Saturday. It was a great day as we attempted for the first time in real life, to make miniature chairs using whittling skills that will help prepare for the spoon carving workshop planned for the Autumn. 

The only other time that we have tried to run this course was during the first months of the pandemic, where we adapted and ran our first (and only) virtual woodland workshop to date https://kingstonunibiodiversity.blogspot.com/2020/05/07-05-2020-very-first-kingston.html. 

In the course of explaining the history of green wood craft and chair building Mark told us that traditionally, the skilled work of putting a chair together using a wood turning lathe and carving it was done by skilled workers called Bodgers – the same word/title that has somehow gone on to mean the opposite in modern slang. 

Looking into the word entomology as a small aside, according to wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodging  it seems that the modern slang version of the word to mean something done badly may derive from Australia, bit given that the word itself probably travelled to Australia from the UK – it does raise a question of how some words can over time, come to mean the opposite of how they started. But there may be several other explanations – if you know of one, or other examples – feel free to post them in the comments below 😊

The day was lots of fun for the volunteers with one of them working at ‘til we had to take down the tarp to finish her chair. 

Our next event this April is training our eel monitoring volunteers on Wednesday 27th of April, ahead of our monitoring work starting in the river.

Between April and September where we will be monitoring our eel trap twice a week, measuring and releasing any animals caught further upstream so that they can carry on their journey to the bits of the river they will grow up. Then years later, they make their way back to the Sargasso Sea when they are ready to breed. There are still spaces available and you can sign up to the event here on our Eventbrite page. 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/eel-monitoring-training-with-zsl-and-kubag-2022-tickets-277389799357?aff=ebdsoporgprofile 

Until next time