Hi, this is Suzie and I’m the new Brownfield Site Ecology Natural Talent apprentice working with Buglife. My mentor is Craig Macadam the Buglife conservation officer in Scotland. I am now in my sixth week and it feels like it has been one really long day as I’m already so buy doing field work, doing courses and meeting other staff members. So here is my first blog!
I will be looking at Brownfield sites in Falkirk and Falkirk council are really interested in working with Buglife to help protect sites of interest in the Falkirk area. This is really good as Brownfield sites can have a greater diversity of species than greenfield sites especially invertebrates and this is due to agriculture and plantations as well as other factors. So far I have been working through the vacant and derelict land register sent to me by Falkirk council and I am currently doing habitat assessments at each site to establish which sites I will sample further for invertebrates. So far this has involved a lot of walking and I thought I was being really lucky with the weather until I got soaked yesterday!
I am really enjoying the work as I love the outdoors and learning how to identify animals and plants and I have learnt so much already in 6 weeks.
Last week I went on a staff outing with most of the Buglife crew and we went up to the Cairngorms to do some sampling. It was a really interesting experience for me as I have never been there before and it was really nice getting to meet everyone. We sampled at various sites in the Cairngorms finding lots of interesting things and then we went down to Dumfires and Galloway. I also attended a BTCV Scotland staff conference which I also really enjoyed. It was great meeting the memebers of BTCV Scotland and hearing about the hard work that they do- plus no statistics!! Bonus 🙂
I will keep blogging regularly and keep you all up to date of my work so far.
Cheers for reading 🙂