The Wildlife Trust is 50 (nearly)

A quick extra post tonight, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust is now coming up to fifty years old. Fifty years that have seen huge changes in habitats, conservationists and attitudes to the environment. Shortly after the Wildlife Trust was formed it took on the management of Farlington Marshes, very much as a move to try and secure the future of a fabulous wildlife site that had been under real threat. Saving the best from loss was very much the story in the early days, now we are taking a more landscape scale look at habitat and species survival. This history is traced in a new book produced to celebrate the anniversary, more about this book can be found here.

There are also all kinds of event planned for the fiftieth year, more on these can be found here. Some will be happening at Blashford and others may well be coming to a venue, perhaps quite and unexpected one, near you.

Water, Water

I was busy with various things that kept me largely in the Centre today, considering the weather not the toughest choice. In very heavy rain first thing all I saw of note from the Tern hide were 2 dunlin flying about. I could only see 2 goldeneye, it could be that the others were lurking out of sight, but it could be that yesterday's arrivals were actually just en route somewhere else when they were forced down by the wind and rain in the early hours.

When I went to lock up the Tern hide a kittiwake had just been seen over the lake, another new bird for the BTO Challenge. Sadly there was no sign of the ring-billed gull reported the other day, although the gulls were mostly in the north-east corner of the lake and so hard to see well. There was a flock of dunlin, numbering at least nine, but I think more.

The heavy rain today caused the Dockens Water to flood for the first time this season, it overflowed into the alder carr and thence into the main body of Ivy Lake. This input of acid New Forest water into the more neutral to alkaline water of the lake both raises the lake level and changes the pH, at least a little. This last point may have something to do with the increase in Crassula helmsii in the last two years. This plant likes more acid conditions and in the last two years no river water has been added to the lake from the Avon, but the Dockens Water has flowed in several times. The other effect of this rush of water might be to pull the sea trout into the Avon and even into the Dockens, where they will eventually spawn.

Goldeneye Blow In

A remarkable change in the weather this morning, I set off from home in a gale, arrived in rain and within an hour it was almost flat calm and sunny. Looking out from the Tern hide first thing there was a group of 12 goldeneye, including three adult drakes. Yesterday there were just three redheads, so they had obviously arrived overnight. Given the dreadful weather in the latter part of the night they must have set off early. There was also a steady movement of woodpigeon heading east, I saw some 700 in about fifteen minutes, they usually tend to move west at this time of year. I also saw 3 dunlin flying about, later there was one on Ibsley Water, possibly one of these three. There were also 2 black-tailed godwit which flew over heading south.

It turned out yesterday that there was a report of an adult ring-billed gull, along with an adult Caspian gull on Iblsey Water during the mid-afternoon. Despite a tentative claim today it did not seem to have returned and the only Caspian gull was the second winter bird that has been seen a few times recently. There were also at least 8 yellow-legged gull, I saw 7 adults and a first winter bird, along with 2 common gull. The lesser black-backed gull roost included a variety of shades from dark mid grey to nearly black. Some of the last must be intermedius type birds, who knows perhaps some might even be the elusive Baltic gull, although the best candidate birds for this that I have seen have all been much earlier in the autumn.

Finally and only long after I got home I read of a large white bird with long neck and legs seen flying towards Blashford at the end of the day, perhaps a spoonbill? If it was and it is still there tomorrow we might have another bird for the BTO Challenge. I could also do with confirming the ring-billed gull and firecrest records made recently as both of those would be new for the year as well.

TV and Another "Tick"

All sorts of goings on today, despite a pretty cold night there were a few moths in the trap this morning including beaded chestnut, "November" moths, feathered thorn, red-green carpet, grey-shoulder knot, large yellow underwing, turnip, red-line quaker, yellow-line quaker, shuttled-shaped dart, large wainscot and mottled umber, the last a very well marked one and pictured below.
Today saw the team from BBC Autumn Watch on site to film a piece about common garden birds filmed on the feeders around the car park at the Centre and at the Woodland hide. I understand things went well so you can see Blashford on TV on Thursday next at 20:00 on BBC 2. The team can be seen below during a break in filming.

I also snapped a couple of shots of birds at the feeders myself, including this great tit, an adult and one of the birds that was ringed last winter.

I also got a coal tit at the same feeder and by coincidence this bird was also one of our ringed birds.

For some a visit from the BBC would be quite enough excitement for one day, but not for me, the highlight was actually nothing to do with the TV. It came in the form of yet another bird "tick" for Blashford, at least for me, I have not looked up the records yet. This came in the shape of a group of 3 red-breasted merganser, all red-heads, actually I think young birds. Below is a poor shot of the party, but at least you can just about tell what they are.

Other birds today included a green sandpiper on Rockford Lake with perhaps 700 coot and a good number of wigeon. From the Ivy North hide a singing Cetti's warbler and a couple of blue tit behaving like poor man's penduline tit, in that they were pulling apart the seedheads of reedmace, perhaps the real thing will turn up, perhaps, maybe, one day.

Towards dusk on Ibsley Water the young female peregrine was testing out the gulls for weakness, although did not find any easy enough to catch. The gull roost was as large as ever and I saw at least 2 yellow-legged gull along with the thousands of lesser black-backed gull like the ones in the picture taken from the Goosander hide.

The Day Ends with a Bang

A lot going on but not much to report, at least as far as the wildlife goes. A few redwing flying over early on and a single redpoll going west were the most interesting. Even the moth trap did not contain much, a late and very tatty setaceous hebrew character and a few each of yellow-line Quaker, "November" moths, feathered thorn, large wainscot and a single beaded chestnut.

The Lower Test volunteer team were working on the reserve again today and they have completed putting up the wire to exclude rabbits from the millennium meadow so the grass will grow better and give better habitat for mini-beast hunting.

Looking ahead we have a visit from BBC Autumn Watch coming up, I will post the broadcast time when I know. They are coming to look at birds on the feeders, I just hope there are some to see as this is about the quietest time for our feeders, most of the birds are out in the woods eating natural seeds. Actually I think this is going to be a bumper season for the woodland hide feeders, but not yet. The numbers of finches about are high with good numbers of siskin, redpoll and brambling in the country and they will be looking for food come the New Year so a visit in February could be very productive. There are also lots of waxwing "up north"and who knows perhaps we will get a few if we are very lucky.

At the end of the day a loud band near Ivy Lake gave a brief worry about illegal shooting, but it was probably an early firework set off near Rockford Lake, the wildfowl were througly spooked though and I expect they will be jumpy for a day or two after tonight.

Alien Encounters

On Tuesday I returned to Blashford after just over a week off, suddenly autumn has arrived, the leaves have turned and lots fallen.
My week, or at least the three days of it that have passed so far, has been dominated by aliens. These have not been little green men, although some have been green, some small but others very definitely not.

I came straight back to the government agency fera on site from dawn culling ruddy duck, these ducks came from North America and escaped, ironically, from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge. The government decided to try and eradicate them from the country, a brave decision, both because eradicating any species is very difficult indeed and because it is a less than universally popular thing to be doing. For the reserve it means trying to minimise the impact on other species and visitors and hoping that they do a "good job" so they do not need to come back.

The same morning we had one of our twice yearly meeting of the partners who run the Blashford Lakes reserve, at which one of the issues was the "favourable condition" of the reserve. This is a status assessed by Natural England and is designed to ensure that designated wildlife sites remain good for wildlife. Unfortunately having aliens species can be one thing that means the assessment will go against us. In this case the offending species are Crassula helmsii and common carp. The first is a plant from Australia introduced for garden ponds, but thrown out when it became too abundant and now widespread in ponds and lakes in the countryside. With changes in the chemical control that is allowed there is now very little that can be done to control it and so we are no longer so seriously "marked down" for having it on site. The carp are a different matter, they are alien, although they have been in Britain for hundreds of years. We have one lake where they have bred in such numbers that we have now been told they have to be reduced in number to restore the bird population of the lake. This will be a difficult process, not just because of the practically problems but also because of the number of interests involved.

The picture shows Crassula growing amongst native plants in an area where we are trying to reestablish a fen and reedbed habitat. The Crassula is the green background plant with tiny leaves. If we did spray the unwanted Crassula here we would kill off all the native plants as well. What we don't know is if the Crassula will prevent the native fen flora from establishing.

On Tuesday afternoon I went out netting the edges of Ivy Lake and Blashford Lake in search of the "Killer shrimp". This is a species is similar to our native freshwater shrimp, but about three times the size, so far it has only been found in Grafham Water, Cambridgeshire. It has come in from Eastern Europe and is a small but aggressive predator. The worry is that by changing the balance of species at the lower levels of the food chain this will have knock on effects on everything else, it will have an effect, just how much and on what scale only time will tell. In this case eradication seems out of the question, so trying to prevent spread is the main response. It seems certain this species arrived by accident, possibly in the bottom of a boat.

Wednesday came around and in the evening we hosted a meeting about wels catfish, a species from eastern and southern Europe. They can get really big, perhaps 2.5m long, although so far usually more like a metre or so and twenty or thirty kilos in this country. They eat all sorts of things including fish, crustaceans and even birds. They can and do breed in this country and climate change is only likely to make things better for them. This species was legally imported into the country to certain lakes, but people have moved them from the original sites to other lakes without permission. The impact of this remains to be seen, although it seems one of the favourite prey species is the American signal crayfish, another alien introduced into fish farms which has got out over the fence. The signal crayfish has indirectly more or less exterminated the native white-clawed crayfish, not by direct competition but by carrying a disease to which the native species has no immunity.

Surely enough aliens for anyone, but no, today I was at a conference in Brockenhurst organised by the New Forest Non-Native Plants Project, it was all about alien species, in this case mostly plants. It ranged across Crassula, giant hogweed, Japanese knotweed, Himalayan balsam, water primrose and several others. There was much discussion about control methods, although most species are here for good and it is just a matter of how we live with them. Most of these plants were deliberately introduced for our gardens and were often hailed as marvellous garden plants for many years before the problems started. Some plants do not seem to have caused a problem in themselves but the diseases they brought with them have, fungal diseases seem particularly to be a problem, sometimes skipping here to new species with deadly results.

So what have I gleaned from my encounter with the aliens? Well it seems we have been very slow to learn from past mistakes and increasing world traffic and trade will probably mean things will only get worse. Even though the spread of aliens species is regarded as second only to climate change as a threat to wildlife globally and costs something over 13 billion Euros a year in Europe, as a society we still don't really take it seriously. We are living in an experiment, we can do almost nothing to control it and we do not know what the outcome will be. What is certain is that with finite resources adding species is going to change things and some species will disappear or at least get much rarer, a lot of them natives. There will also be lots of unintended consequences, the introduction of grey squirrel was not intended to eliminate the red squirrel, it was supposed to give us an extra species. It is likely we will have a more uniform world, I will not need to travel to see some of the world's wildlife, it will come to me, but some of the wildlife unique to this area of the world might be eliminated or at least get so rare that I may never see it. For me encountering a species in the place it has evolved to be is part of the experience, the story of the place is encapsulated in the species.

Obviously for others this is not the case and every alien seems to have a champion or several. Many people willingly admit to spreading Himalayan balsam because they love it and think it improves the attractiveness of riverbanks. There are wels catfish enthusiasts that will go beyond the law to spread their favourite fish to new waters and lovers of the ruddy duck, Canada goose and grey squirrel who would never concede that their introduction was a bad idea. Then again I have a garden and am as much a sucker for the latest flash new plant as the next person, I wonder if any of the plants lurking in my borders are just biding their time before heading out across the countryside, I hope not but I really don't know and neither does anyone else.

Blashford is a Bird Atlas Hotspot

The BTO Atlas project is drawing to a close, this coming winter will be the last of the four that will supply the data for the final atlas and at the end of next July the whole project will have come to and end. This is the third breeding atlas and the second winter atlas and they have covered the whole of Britain and Ireland and give an unparalleled overview of changes in distribution and now also population density. These are huge undertakings involving thousands of observers making millions of records. The arrival of the Internet since the last atlas, twenty years ago, has allowed much easier recording and the opportunity to see the pattern of records unfolding.

Locally the Hampshire Ornithological Society is intending to survey every tetrad (2x2 km square) in the whole county. Nationally the aim is at least eight in every 10km square, so this is more than three times as much work. It will give far and away the most detailed view we have ever had of the birds of the county. By surveying the birds in this way it is possible to get some idea of the habitat hotspots in the county and birds are one of the few groups that can be surveyed in this way, most wildlife groups simply do not have enough people interested in them to make such a survey feasible.

Blashford Lakes straddles two tetrads SU10 N and SU10 P, Ivy Lake southwards is in N and Ibsley Water is in P. The number of species recorded in these two tetrads is testament to the diversity of habitat and intensity of observation. The Ibsley Water tetrad (SU10P) has recorded 121 species in winter and 117 in the breeding season. SU10 N is somewhat behind with 98 species in winter and 81 in the breeding season. These data have to be viewed with a little care, there are a few records that I think are in error, such as Bewick's swan seen in SU10 N, I suspect this should have been in tetrad P, similarly a record of white-fronted goose, there are also a few duplicates around "pied" wagtails and various redpolls. I would urge everyone to take part, but please check that the records are entered for the right location, to make it easier there are maps on the website. To view data, maps etc. for any area you can visit www.bto.org.uk and follow the links through to the atlas.

I admit to being a bit of an atlassing enthusiast, the methodology makes me visit places that I would never otherwise go to and sometimes this can result in surprising finds. Locally I have come across an area with good numbers of yellowhammer breeding, a once abundant species that I hardly ever seen nowadays. What is more the locality is within a mile of my home and I never knew they were there. What this illustrates is that although we all like to visit well known good sites for wildlife and Balshford is certainly one of these, we should not forget that wildlife needs much more than a few "hotspots" to survive. We need healthy habitat across the whole of the country for wildlife to survive and every bit of habitat counts, good though nature reserves can be they will not conserve our wildlife. In fact what we will need is a Living Landscape, the Wildlife Trust's vision of a country fit for both people and wildlife, but see the Trust's website for more on this www.hwt.org.uk and seek out "Living Landscape".