It’s a buggy world…

Sooo busy…it’s oddly wonderful I must say!!! 🙂

Since my last blog I have been up to loads of wonderful exciting work! Don’t really know where to start but I’ll try to inform you all of my adventures!

As usual the training is brilliant! The funding and fundraising course was great and really useful! I thoroughly enjoyed the Buglife – Coleoptera (beetle) Identification workshop! I must say I really do love inverts and this year is proving to strengthen and test my knowledge on the wee beasties and of course learn and more learning!

I must say, I was rather chuffed to have written an article about myself and the type of work I will be doing as a NC trainee for BRISC Recorder News! (Just in case you don’t know what BRISC stands for – Biological Recording In Scotland). All the other trainees are mentioned in the article too!

Snap shot of the article, email me if you would like it!

My fellow NC Kate Williamson and I have sort of turned in to a double team when it comes to bugs and beasties!! Kate enlisted my help for the Cultenhove Fun Day that was held on the 12 April 2012 for COP Easter Family Fun Day in Cultenhove, Stirling. We spent two wonderful days bonding and searching for insects (it was kind of cold) for our bug and beastie stall and we hit the jackpot! We captured 2 Drinker moth caterpillars and a small tortoiseshell butterfly. Amongst other specimens we had ground beetles, creepy crawly centipedes and various spiders.

The Cultenhove community was astonished by the small eerie bugs to the amazement of kid’s faces to being up close and personal to the small tortoiseshell butterfly and drinker moth caterpillar (the adults were amazed too!)

 

As Kate has already mentioned the fun day was an excellent experience for us both plus it was great to show the local community their wildlife!

Balallan House, The Conservation Volunteers (TCV) Scotland’s head office opened its doors for the first time to hold the iSpot Family Fun Day.

The day before the event it was a miserable day, setting up marquees and hunting for specimens in the rain but on Saturday morning the glorious sun was shining! Actually, hunting for bugs wasn’t too bad. John and I stopped in at a local shop on our way to Aberfoyle and we had the BEST steak pie ever!! Really, we can’t stop going on about it, so definitely think we will return to that site to hunt for bugs (stopping for steak pie of course!).

Anyway, back to the iSpot event, the aim of the iSpot event was to promote the use of iSpot as a recording tool that can be used to encourage new volunteers to biological recording and raise their interest and awareness of environmental issues and biodiversity generally.

The morning session consisted of various talks including Citizen Science, Local plant recording, local communities’ members I have been working with; Westquarter Wildlife Group and Lionthorn Woodland Group Association.

The morning session was also the first time Kate and I delivered a presentation about Natural Communities and Community Engagement…we were a little nervous but we have received great feedback and overall delivered a great presentation considering it was our first time! 🙂

The afternoon session consisted of opening the grounds of Balallan House to the public for an afternoon of educational drop in sessions, stimulating learning experiences mixed in with a little bit of citizen science.

Out in our garden Kate and I had our Bug and Beastie stall which comprised a selection of local bugs including ladybirds, millipedes, beetles and weevils. We also had the fish tank set up with pond life showing newts, water boatmen, diving beetles, damselfly larvae and many more!

 

Fellow NC Faith Hillier placed with Froglife also shared our stall exhibiting pond life and Faith was a huge hit with the kids as everyone likes to pond dip! The kids dipped the pond and emptied their catch with Faith identifying with our help of course! Lucy Tozer another NC trainee was also on hand helping with the pond life and bugs and beasties!

Besides our stall, we had a stall on garden birds by FCS, local plants and a garden survey the kids took part in.

Inside Balallan house, we had iSpot set up for people to come along and use. iSpot is very simple, in short, you take a picture of something you don’t know (bird, invert, fungus, plant, etc) upload it onto the iSpot website and an expert can identify it for you! It’s just brilliant! We also had microscopes set up with a selection of bugs for a closer inspection.

Overall, the iSpot event was immense! I truly feel we tapped into every individual that came along and that iSpot will be used widely by new, novice recorders and just anyone that is interested in the natural world.

This event was great experience for me, not only for the front delivery of holding the bug and beastie stall but a lot of hard work went on behind the scene and just shows how much time and effort is required to deliver such a high standard event. Everything I have learned will most definitely be transferred to my upcoming events with the local communities I have been working with in Falkirk.

The dragonfly and damselfly identification training workshop is coming up very soon on the 26^th and 27^th May! The aim of this project is to update the known distribution of British dragonfly and damselfly species.

I have mentioned this workshop previously but I am again to drum up some interest!!

It has been identified that there are two 10km squares in the Stirlingshire area either with no dragonfly records since 2000 or no records ever.  With this is mind, we are offering high level training to dedicated individuals with the intended result that these people become confident in identifying and recording dragonflies and damselflies.

This identification training workshop is different from other TCV workshops as there is a high degree of commitment required. Essentially individual who sign up will be Odonata Survey Team members and will be expected to follow up the workshop with field survey days, carried out on pre-determined sites with support and guidance from TCV Scotland and partners.

The data gathered will be sent to the British Dragonfly Society and our finding will contribute to the UK Dragonfly Atlas so it is as up to date as possible when it is published in 2013.

If you are interested and know you are able to commit fully to the follow up survey days I would love to hear from you, please email me a.joaquin@tcv.org.uk

On top of all this and more I have several community events taking place and several identification training courses! Fun times ahead baby!

Ohhh yeahh, 1 more things…. back home in Dunoon, at our house my other half spotted a PINE MARTEN!! I must say… it made my day!! This is the first sighting for where we stay and I recorded our sighting on the Mammal Society Website and we now have our own 10km square record!! Yayy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Until the next time… 🙂