23-01-2023: Fun and games with wildlife cameras and battling invasive plants

 It’s been a busy two weeks since we started back at Kingston University. 

Starting with trying to get all of the trail cameras checked for footage and changing batteries. Anyone who sets up trail cameras will know that they can often become home to a lot of different wildlife…I thought I got most of the life out of them on location, but some managed to escape detection and come back to the office with me! All rehomed to habitat on site…just in a different campus.

Footage from the camera on the pollinator hive showed an unexpected site, as well as the hive being active in January and the camera saying that the temperature being picked up by the camera thermometer in the middle of the day was 20 degrees at times! (this was between the 11-13th of Jan); that in the morning when the camera was reading -7 degrees, that this blue tit decided to visit the hive when the bees weren’t active, picking off any dead bees that had been cleared out of the hive by the workers in warmer weather. The blue tit was a repeat visitor on at least one other occasion and that the pollinator hive bees’ visitors aren’t just limited to blue tits, but foxes too! - check out the videos below. 

It’s a good thing that there are wildflowers in bloom around the campus, even if they are frozen, hopefully at the point that the bees are active, the flowers have thawed enough for access to nectar, as well as their own honey stores in the hive itself. 

The riverfly monitoring managed to score a 5, despite the very cold conditions - as ice formed in the water in the bucket as we were sorting and counting species! There was ice everywhere, including these ice crystals that seem to have grown out of the muddy ground next to the pond at Kingston Hill. 

On Saturday we had our first biodiversity event of the year, with a bamboo and rhodo bash. 

We had an amazing turn out of volunteers and made good progress on working through the rhodo and bamboo. A lot of the bamboo was processed to add to our new insect hotel in the main part of the campus.

The wall of cut rhodo will be processed soon, by chipping as much as possible to help stop cut material re-rooting. Hopefully another two years of working on the re-growth and further root removal in this area will allow for replanting with tree species without having rhodo regrowth impact the success of establishment. 

I’ll post an update with the RSPB survey results soon.

Til then take care