23-05-2023: April and May catch up - Habitat days, woodland workshops and wildlife surveys

 

Ending May with a Big Balsam Bash at Elmbridge Meadows

 Kingston University's Biodiversity Action Group has had a busy few months.

Starting in April we had the first of our amphibian surveys at Kingston Hill where the smooth newt population was happly found to be displaying in the areas of the pond where we had cleared the reeds and then laying their eggs on the reed vegetation around the clearings. 

Though the moth trapping from the same night at Roehampton  Vale didn't result in any moths in the trap.

We had our second woodland workshop of the academic year, work on bark weaving skills under the guidance of Mark Lloyd. 

This was followed by the remaining habitat work at Tolworth Court Sports Ground, where we were hand strimming areas of the meadow which hadn't been cut for around 9 years. Some of the more woody material was pulled up by hand, mimicking the sorts of ground disturbance obtained by cattle grazing. The stimming cuttings were all raked up and removed from the site to stop the nutrients from the cuttings going back into the ground. By doing the work by hand, it was far easier to avoid and minimise any impacts on established any hills in the grassland and avoid patches of flowering lesser celandine and other flowering plants. 

Then we continued with our Flower-Insect Timed Counts (FIT-Counts) at our sites with different teams trying to cover all of our survey locations. We were short by one site in April - we are on a mission this May to make sure that we cover them all. 

Then (still in April) we joined the local Geocashing volunteers on one of their events as a thank you for all of our events they normally attend - we used the opportunity to also show people how to do flower insect timed counts to help spread the word about this national scheme and then we undertook a large litter pick across Wimbledon Common as part of the Geocachers mega weekend on the Sunday. 

Coincidentally for this weekend, we found out about the City Nature Challenge from a post by the biological records centre for London = Greenspace Information services for Greater London (GIGL) - four hours before it started. So on the days on site as well as during the event at Wimbledon Common and anywhere else people were over the four days, we also logged as many records as possible to try to contribute to the scheme (some background on the scheme here: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/take-part/citizen-science/bioblitz/city-nature-challenge.html). This is definitely a fun activity to do and brilliant as it gets people out and active in nature, actively concentrating on seeing whats there and every record from all areas of London count. We manged to contribute 693 records to the survey out of 7987 observations with a total of 1354 species identified in London by 520 people. Find out the world wide results for the places that took part here: https://www.citynaturechallenge.org/current-results 

I'll be looking to organise this properly next year at the uni to get as many people signed up as possible and trying to get all of our sites surveyed.  

May has been a continuation of wildlife surveys and habitat work with a second night of amphibian surveys, a 4th moth survey which was more successful as we actually caught moths! More FIT-Counts and finishing with two balsam bashes, one at KP where we tackled the first flush of balsam growing at KP and MM, and then our annual Big Balsam Bash at Elmbridge Meadows this Saturday gone. 

The next few months will be continued wildlife surveys with the big butterfly counts across all of our sites in July and August for people to sign up to - sign up on our Eventbrite page here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/kingston-university-biodiversity-action-group-17787553342?internal_ref=login

Hopefully see you all at one of our upcoming events. 

All the best

Sivi