Odonata Madness!!

Howdy folks!

Well it’s that time again to update you all on what I have been up to in the last month in a half! Jeezee how time flies when you’re having fun!! I can certainly say that I have been one busy trooper over the months!!

Got a feeling this is going to be one very long blog! 🙂

I was invited to attended Westquarter Wildlife Group’s ‘Meet the Species Event’ on Saturday 19^th May at Westquarter Glen, Falkirk.  The event aimed to encourage interest and appreciation of the glen’s wildlife, beauty and natural history, especially amongst local school children, in an area of social deprivation.  The glen provides opportunities for a wide degree of wildlife recording, sampling and practical conservation work and the event aimed to illustrate this to the local community.

With help from my colleagues and dedicated volunteers John, Kate, Graham, Megan, Alan and Brian we set up our environmental education stall encompassing bugs & beasties, selection of pond specimens, kids activities, bug hotels and a variety of free informative leaflets the community could take away. As always we had several juicy specimens to reveal to the community such as a Dor beetle (aka Dung beetle which is one of our largest dung beetles), birch shieldbug, large red damselfly and a selection of tadpoles, newts and damselfly larvae. It always amazes me when the kids don’t believe me when I tell them I have caught all our specimens locally! But this is why we are here, to educate and let kids know what type of wildlife they have on their own doorstep! I take great pleasure in teaching kids cool facts about bugs and beasties and encourage families to biorecord when out in nature.

In addition to our bug & beastie stall, Alan and Megan were situated in the community centre informing the local community about iSpot. iSpot is a website aimed at helping anyone identify anything in nature by uploading photos with experts on hand to aid in identification http://www.ispot.org.uk/

The ‘Meet the Species’ Event was a brilliant event and we had a great turn out from the community! We have received wonderful feedback from the event and were told TCV Scotland was the KEY player of the day.

The Lionthorn Woodland Community Association Group’s Fun Day was another excellent community engagement event! The Fun Day aimed to get the community of Lionthorn to explore, use and biorecord the woodlands. The Fun Day incorporated a mixture of fun kid’s activities, arts & crafts stalls and we had our ‘Biopod’ set up. Again, we brought along live bugs & beasties and pond life the community of Lionthorn could get up close and personal with. My Colleague Helen also helped out at the event and had a butterfly activity in which the kids had to hunt for the butterflies on sticks scattered around the woodland and identify them. This activity proved to be very popular with the kids!

Finally my Odonata (dragonfly & damselfly) identification training workshop took place in the HEAT of May which was optimal weather for Odonata so we were all thrilled and excited at the thought of seeing Odonata on the wing!! The Odonata team consisted of 11 keen, enthusiastic and outgoing individuals from across Scotland.

We met on Saturday 26^th May at Balallan House to learn about survey techniques, adult and larval ID and sampled Balallan House pond for larva and adults. We found large red damselflies mating.

On Sunday 27^th May, the team met up and we set off to Flanders Moss with our sun block! We didn’t have to travel far into the moss to see Odonata on the wing. We stopped at a small pond and we caught four spotted chaser dragonflies, blue-tailed damselflies, large red damselflies and azure damselflies.  As well as adults on the wing, we sampled the pond and came across a variety of larva! With our knowledge from the day before we keyed the larva and recorded our findings as the aim of this workshop was to train up keen volunteers to become more confident in recording Odonata to update the known distribution of British species in areas of Stirlingshire either with no dragonfly records since 2000 or no records ever.

The Odonata identification training workshop was amazing and everyone had a great time learning about Odonata and at the same time building their confidence up to go out and survey sites in Stirling that have no records.  I had received high quality feedback from the Odonata team which as brilliant! However, during the Odonata weekend the Sun was sizzling down on us all and I must say that weekend was the hottest weather I have ever worn my wellies in!!!

Since the identification training workshop we have met up for another field day to survey one of the sites listed as having no records since 2000 or no records at all.  We visited Earlsburn Reservoir Number 2 on 17 June. It was a dull, cold and rainy day so we didn’t expect to see many Odonata on the wing.  I split the team into 3 groups and sent them to different locations around the reservoir to survey. Each team had all the survey equipment, ID keys and a gps to waymark the survey areas.  At lunch, we all met up at the van and discussed our findings…..none of the 3 teams or I found any larva or Odonata (or anything else in the reservoir). We then found out the reservoir was drained in March this year for maintenance and this could have affected the Odonata as well as reservoirs having high and low fluctuations of water levels. Even though we sampled zero it is still a scientific result and will contribute to the dragonfly atlas and the results may change when we sample the reservoir in August.

Since we didn’t find any Odonata after lunch I brought the team to another site that needs to be surveyed, North Third Reservoir. We wondered down and found an ideal area where Odonata might be…and to our luck we came across a teneral (newly) adult emerging from its exuviae! The whole team including myself was very excited! During our short visit we came across a variety of Odonata larvae and a large red damselfly.  The team will need to resurvey the reservoir in the near future to gather more data.

With the data we have gathered I have been adding the gps waymarks into google maps to observe where Odonata is present or absent. Our data will also 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.

I assisted my colleague Helen at the Glasgow Science Festival that was held at Kelvingrove Art and Gallery Museum.  Helen had a stall called ‘Name that species!’ where the participants have to look at the Glasgow beasties or specimens and they can then draw them, describe them, describe their movements and think of a suitable name for them… just as Darwin or Victorian explorers would have had to have done when they were on their travels. Helen enlisted my help to bring along live specimens of bugs & beasties found in Glasgow so the kids could look at live specimens to learn cool and exciting facts about invertebrates in and around Glasgow. After the kids learned about bugs and named that species we stamped their explorer map that they were given at the beginning of the event. Once the kids went around all the different stalls in the museum and collected each stalls stamp they were given a badge for completing the explorers route!

As well as assisting Helen I helped my fellow colleague Kate at the Cultenhove BBQ. The community centre in Cultenhove were having a BBQ and we had our famous bug & beastie stall for the kids to get up close and see local bugs during the BBQ.

National Insect Week took place from 25^th June to 1^st July 2012. National Insect Week is designed to show you more about the insect world in all its fascinating diversity. National Insect Week is organised by the Royal Entomological Society and is supported by a large number of partner organisations concerned with many aspects of insect science, natural history and biodiversity.

For National Insect Week the Forestry Commission Scotland asked me to take park in their insect activities at David Marshall Lodge.  We ran drop in pond dipping sessions at the pond with help from Kate and two EVS volunteers.  It was a wet, wet, wet day but the kids had a blast and were very excited to see pond life and we had a few kids rolling around in the mud! Great day!!

 

My last event to date was the Ugly Bug Bonanza event at Blair Drummond Safari Park.  We set up a variety of stalls such as bugs & beasties, pond life, kid’s activities, kid’s microscopes and free informative leaflets the public could take away.  The event was great plus we got to see all the exotic animals of the park! The children we engaged with were all very interested and excited to see our native bug life found on their doorstep!!

In addition to all of this I have been on several courses such as Phase 1 Habitat Survey, Bird ID and Invertebrates on Brownfield sites.

I knew I was busy, but looking back on what I have accomplished I have done heaps in a month and a half its mind blowing but loving each minute of it!!

At the moment I am planning my personal project so keep tuned!

Chow for now and I won’t leave it too long till the next blog!

My Star catch…a Golden ringed dragonfly, caught out at Ardyne!!! It’s a beauty!!! 🙂 and a new biological record for the area!