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Poor old Gilbert is getting restless. Despite the fact that there is more interest in wildlife than ever before, it seems that most of the so-called conservation organisations are losing interest in species. Instead they prefer to babble on about landscape scale conservation and ecosystem services (whatever they are). Could this be because most of their staff don't have any knowledge about species if they don't have four legs?
This is my attempt to encourage an interest in good old-fashioned natural history.

Monday, 30 April 2012

It stopped raining.....

........ just long enough to lull me into going down to the New Forest to set up the frass traps and sticky traps that I am using to assess invertebrate populations as part of my Wood Warbler studies.


Needless to say, the heavens opened before too long and I got drenched. The volume of rain over the last 48 hours is obvious from the photo below which is of a stream that I can usually jump across.


Before the rain got too heavy, I did see four male and one female Wood Warblers. The female was one that I colour ringed last year a couple of kilometres away. Wood Warblers are notorious wanderers and previous colour ringing studies have shown a very low proportion of birds returning to where they have bred before so it is good to get a result so quickly. Apart from the flooding, the severe weather was apparent from the number of freshly fallen or snapped beech in the woods.

Little else to report; fair numbers of Redstarts, my first Cuckoo of the year and the common caddis fly Limnephilus griseus which I've not seen before (but I've only had the key for a few weeks!).

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