All posts by David Pottinger

The Great Nature Watch Campaign

Conservation, Education, Plants and Animals

As mentioned on the BBC Breakfast news yesterday, and from the Canal & River Trust:

Take a trip to your local canal, river, reservoir or lake and record what you see there. It’s a fun activity to do with the family and will help us to monitor and protect the wide variety of precious wildlife that the waterways are home to.

This year we’re calling on everyone to ‘Stop, Look and Listen’ to what’s happening around them, following our own survey results which show surprising gaps in people’s nature knowledge.

We’ve been working with with the renowned Wildlife Sound Recording Society to create a series of nature noises and challenge people to identify them as part of our Wildlife Ear and Eye Q test. Surveying toddlers to OAPs, the results showed that 25% of parents and 30% of children could not identify the sound a duck makes.

We also found that 23% of parents and nearly a third of children thought that ducks have yellow feathers, perhaps the result of children’s TV programmes such as Peppa Pig.

Findings also show that 76% of parents believe that they are less knowledgeable about nature than the previous generation with 68% of parents also believing that their children are less knowledgeable about nature than they were at their age.

When put to the test the gap in wildlife knowledge between parents and their children is actually surprisingly close, however the gap between grandparents and their adult children and grandchildren is much bigger.

They’ve developed free apps for Apple and Android smartphones to take part in their survey, details are here.

They also have a fun Ultimate Wildlife Sounds Quiz eg ‘Which naughty bird is mimicking a police car siren?’

Why not try a survey at Fleet Pond Nature Reserve?

Day Flying Moths

Education, Plants and Animals

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Cinnabar Moth (credit: Wikipedia)

Peter Martin, President of Fleet Pond Society, writes:

“Although moths are often thought of as dull and uninteresting, there are some moths that fly during the day and they are usually the more colourful ones. One of these, the Cinnabar Moth, was given its name by a Mr. M. Wilkes in 1773 because of its vermillion colouration.

In the field which borders Fleet Pond Nature Reserve, Ragwort plants can normally be found in June and July. The moth lays some 30 – 40 yellow eggs on the underside of the leaves and when the caterpillars emerge they can easily be spotted, as they are often in clusters and have very distinct bright orange and yellow black bands around their bodies. They are very voracious eaters and can totally consume the Ragwort plants.

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Flowering Ragwort with Cinnabar moth caterpillars (credit: Wikipedia)

Ragwort contains alkaloid poison and it can kill cattle and horses if consumed. At one time, the Cinnabar caterpillars were exported to Australia and New Zealand to eat the Ragwort plants there before they died and could be eaten by the animals. It is surprising that the poisons do not kill the caterpillars, but these are passed on to the moths as cyanide derivatives which deter birds from eating them.

The moths, which have greyish-black forewings with a vermillion line along the leading edges and two spots on the outer-edges, have hind wings that are all vermillion apart from a greyish-black border. If you are walking round the Pond between late May and July, do go into the part of the field nearest the Reserve and you may see these beautiful slow-flying moths or even the very showy caterpillars.“