Hi Everyone,
Just a quick update from me. It finally feels like spring is here and the start of my season of surveying has begun. The focus of my traineeship is entomology as a whole, however looking at dead wood invertebrates, especially beetles has been something that I have been keen to look at. My traps at Blenheim Palace have now been in place for a month now and I checked them all last week and am beginning to sort through and identify the material. This is rather exciting as you never know what you may find, especially on an under recorded site. All my sightings will inform management on the site for saproxylic invertebrates. This work on Blenheim’s invertebrates is due to be featured on TV soon but I don’t want to give anything away just yet! I have also been educating people about this work through social media to highlight the plight of dead wood invertebrates and spoke about my survey work at the Buglife conservation team meeting last week. I also presented a poster at the Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes Environmental Records Centre’s annual recorder’s seminar, which was great fun and gave me a chance to show recorders sampling techniques such as vane traps which they may not have came across before.
Myself checking on one of the vane traps at Blenheim
Ryan’s been busy! Great work surveying rare & not so rare deadwood invertebrates @BlenheimPalace for the first time! https://t.co/tgjmUQtjly
— NE Thames Valley (@NEThamesValley) May 3, 2016
Also at Blenheim I have been starting to survey the bees and wasps on site. I have done some surveys for these groups before but nothing this formalised or extensive so that is rather exciting.
I have also been doing lots of planning work in order to put out pitfall traps for ground beetles at Woodwalton Fen. Ground beetles (Carabidae) and rove beetles (Staphylinidae) are the beetle groups often used to quickly assess sites as they can tell you quite a lot about the habitat quality. Rove beetles are a lot more tricky to identify though so for the purpose of this year, I am going to look at ground beetles first and then the rove beetles if I have time.
The fieldwork season is here and I can’t wait to share my experiences and results with you all.
Ryan
You can follow updates on Twitter here and here
Find out more about Buglife and Natural England