Eek!! Can’t believe its November allready. Time for another blog.
I’ve had a really busy couple of months with attending the kick-sampling course, harvestmen and beetle identification workshop and going on placement to Peterborough and Inverness.
I have really enjoyed all the workshops and I have been putting in practice what I have learnt from them. Harvestmen are sooooo amazing!!! Since the course I have gone through all my collected specimens and identified them. It has been really great getting to know this group better. I have collected a few hundred Phalangium opilio and the males have horns on thir chelicerae and I’ve also collected lots of Platybunus triangularis which are really cool.
The beetle workshop was also amazing and it was great to learn more about the different beetle families and look at more detail at some of the specimens that I have collected.
Placement 1: During my trip to the buglife office in Peterborough I learnt so much about Brownfields and about beetles. As soon as I arrived in the buglife office I was in a meeting discussing all the work I had to do while I was there. My main tasks were to read up on the information they had about brownfields and learn more about beetle identification. Sarah Henshall the buglife brownfield officer in England helped me so much while I was in Peterborough and she also took the beetle identification workshop up in Stirling. Sarah has been looking at beetles for several years as her PhD looked at ground and rove beetles. It was great having someone to help me go through beetle identification and we concentrated on ground beetles that I collected at my sites. I was also shown how to card beetles which basically involves glueing them onto a piece of card, which is a lot trickier than I ever thought. I have collected several species of ground beetles from my site and I’m so pleased that I have now almost finished my identification of the ground beetles that I ave collected.
While down in England I visited several brownfield sites in Essex that buglife are working with and hoping to do more work on to protect the invertebrates at these sites. These brownfield sites in Essex were completely different to the sites I’m working on in Falkirk and it was nice to learn more about the different habitats found at brownfields.
While in Peterborough I also wrote a report on a brownfield site at Radstock in Somerset that buglife are hoping to get involved with. Although the site has planning permission the builders have walked away from the development. After reading all the information on the site I realised how amazing the site was for wildlife especially invertebrates. The report that I wrote sumarised all the information about the site and this will be sent to various people to help protect the site. During the evenings and weekends I spent time identifying the hoverflies and ants that I took down with me.
Placement 2: I spent last week in Inverness with Gwen the upland invertebrate apprentice to learn about spider identification with her mentor Simon Mclaughlin. I went up to Inverness on the 4th with Leslie the headwaters apprentice to attend the CIFAL climate and biodiversity conference. During last week I learnt about Gwens apprenticeship and the habitat in the highlands and also spent a day with Meryl the invasive species apprentice which was amazing!! Meryl took us to a Salmon farm were due to dams on the river they collect the adult salmon and milk them so they can later fertilise and hatch the eggs and release the fry back into the same river. They got out this large male and he was the largest salmon I have ever seen! On thursday I spent the whole day learning about spider identification which involves looking at the sexual female and male organs the epigyne and palp to identify the spider to species. At first I thought this was going to be impossible but since having a go it has been really interetsing. The detail of palps on adult male spiders are so intricate and under the micrscope they look amazing.
I’ve had a great couple fo months learning about brownfields and identifying the species that I have colllected. Over the next couple of months I will be continuing my identification of spiders and beetles as well as reading about brownfields.
Thanks for reading and will be in touch soon.