“It’s the first one ever seen in Britain!” Such was the response to a rather special visitor to my university-home county of Cornwall over the past fortnight. If you didn’t know, a Dalmatian pelican Pelecanus crispus realised it had a significant amount of trust fund money after fledging the nest, and rather than settle down with the rest of its kind in the Danube delta, decided to travel the world. This spiritual journey inevitably lead it to Cornwall, where it has been no doubt thrilling the local gulls with its stories of ‘mad nights’ vaping with crows in Poland and why every bird deserves the soul reawakening that can only be found by fishing solo in Germany. Maybe.

The Cornish bird itself, as photographed by my friend Ben Porter.

It arrived very conveniently in the middle of my university finals, and I almost defied my agnostic-atheist views to pray that it stayed a little longer. To my joy, it did hang on, and at time of writing is still gallivanting around the Land’s End area. I went to see it myself twice last week. The first time we were lucky to be treated to a brief fly-by within seconds of arriving at the spot: like a great white biplane, it soared effortlessly regally among the gulls, drifting South-West towards the coast. A day later, it had set up shop at a local RSPB reserve, and this time we were treated to wonderful views of it sat squat in the centre of an estuary, occasionally preening itself or waddling through the mud like a portly drunkard trying and failing to walk in a straight line for the police. Our best views were obtained from a train station platform, which I’m eternally grateful for the porter granting us permission to use. “Five minutes, then yer’ off before the train gets in” he informed us, with a considerable mustering of authority. By the time we were done however, he was so fascinated we were kept back a good deal longer as we explained the situation to him.

Definitely the pelican, as we saw it from the station platform. Photograph by Billy Heaney.

Regardless of its origins or reasons for being here, the bird that is quite happily settled in Cornwall, oblivious to the hordes of cooing twitchers, is far from the first Dalmatian pelican in Britain. In fact, you might call it something of a homecoming. Surprising as it may seem, the Dalmatian pelican is an extinct British native. Continue reading →

‘Familiarity breeds contempt’ goes the old and slightly clichéd saying. Unfortunately, this applies to many wild animals who are neither elusive, an occasional migrant or threatened with extinction, yet don’t seem to have an appearance or demeanour that woos themselves poetically to humans seeking to find a connection with nature.

If you wish to see a prime example of this, pity the poor wood pigeon. Taking away any prior knowledge or prejudices, you would have thought with their dumpy frame, beady eyes that give it a permanent glaze of bemused curiosity, and the smattering of iridescent indigo in the collar suggesting of hidden beauty, it should at least gain a lot more public sympathy.

Instead, by being so numerous it is either ignored completely or derided indignantly. We should be admiring it’s success for actually coping so well with our intensive-farming patterns, an achievement any animal deserves a medal for; but does their ubiquity simply remind us of the failures we have seen in most other farmland bird populations? And when some go the next level and call them ‘rats-with-wings’, are they simply thinking more along the lines of their urban cousins, the rock dove or ‘feral pigeon’, and the perceived waste nuisances they cause on our streets? Continue reading →

Originally published in the Spring 2015 newsletter of the Hampshire Mammal Group. I’m currently running my third season of mammal surveys at the site to be compiled in a three-year report.

Immediately north of Romsey lies 200 acres of land beautifully reclaimed by nature. Fishlake Meadows has a complex history – originally just drained farmland, when the pumps were switched off in the 1980s the site was swamped into a myriad of pools, ditches, reedbeds and wet grassland. Its various owners never knew what to do with it – one of them, a certain Kevin Keegan, even threatening to convert it into a golf course – till the current landowner decided to sell it off to Test Valley borough council in July, who are set to develop an ecological management plan and create a new nature reserve for Romsey.

Continue reading →

It’s been so long since my last post, you’d be forgiven for thinking I’d joined some no doubt disgruntled hedgehogs or adders in hibernation. Since the inspiring launch of the youth conservation movement in Cambridge back in September, I’ve promptly followed up my nature writing workshop at the event with, well, a complete lack of nature writing (bar very slow progress on the book. But that’s another story, literally). Things happened since, nature things, I promise, but university.

Of note however was the best use of my student loan since the end-of-first-year garden party. Last month I welcomed two new room-mates free of rent, a pair of female harvest mice Micromys minutus. Being a naturalist with a penchant for our fellow mammals, and having cared for these fascinating creatures for some time as part of my volunteer duties at the New Forest Wildlife Park, they were a natural choice of companion.

The animals were bred by a private keeper back in Cornwall, and have settled in very well to their vivarium, which is furnished with stalks and shoots for climbing, and a thick layer of hay and aspen shavings – already this is peppered with holes and burrows like swiss cheese, leading to hidden and no doubt very cosy nests. Going up is where they’re truly at home however, and they have proven to be the most efficient distraction from study as you admire the incredible bio-mechanics of their prehensile tail and almost supernatural nimble feet on the most thread-like of branches.

Although I currently just have two ladies, long-term I would like to go into breeding them. It is where it gets complicated however – mix too many of different genders, or keep the young in with Mum & Dad for too long, and the sweet demeanours that steal the souls of anyone who beholds my pets becomes a ferocious rodent equivalent of Luis Suarez. This can be avoided with careful management however, and ideally I would want to use the offspring in educational outreach – they’re very active, engaging, and yes, cute, a rare insight into the secretive world of British mammals, and potentially quite threatened in this country.

The trouble with harvest mice is we don’t really know enough of their distribution to know if they are in trouble. An early mammal society survey in the eighties suggested they were in decline, but new search methods developed since then could potentially gain a more accurate insight of the data – so the organisation is now keen to get as many people as possible out in search of signs of these charming animals. You can find out how to get involved here.

I myself have been doing my part on Fishlake Meadows, a wetland site where I’ve been conducting a long-term mammal monitoring project over the Summer. Traditionally, harvest mouse surveys are undertaken searching for nests in Winter, but this isn’t so efficient during my survey season. So I tried out the rather ingenious ‘bait cane’ method, only really tried out last year in Cheshire for the first time, involving bamboo canes, plastic cups and tape in the hope of getting poo (god bless mammalogists). By sticking seed in the cup, tied halfway up the cane in the understorey of the reed-bed, a couple of days later any harvest mice that came for a nibble will have left droppings like calling cards, which can then be sent off for analysis. Of my 20 canes, over half had droppings which looked very much to me like harvest mice (the only other possibility really being wood mice, which would’ve been larger). I can’t be certain until they’ve been analysed, which unfortunately is still being sorted out (the poo is in my student house freezer currently – yes, my friends have been notified), but I’m confident this will be the first record of the species for the site.

The harvest mouse survey, and later room-mates, have been but two highlights of a great wildlife 2014 – more on which to come soon. But for now, I leave you with the first poem I’ve written in donkeys years, typed in a spur-of-the-moment five minutes while observing my mice go about their business.

Hidden, hurry, scurry, scatter,

Harvest mouse sleekly writhe,

Through the tangle bramble vine.

For do not tread beyond your cradle,

Or barn owl and weasel will take you to your maker.

But in this world unseen,

A woven home will suit you better,

And see the light as a gift to enjoy,

Time may be short, but by thy whiskers,

Run and wonder, nibble, slumber.

As the train departed Oakham station, the afternoon light through the window beamed intensely, yet was already beginning to haze into a vaguely melancholy shimmer as the day started yawning. Plugging my headphones into my ears, the first song to greet them was ‘Love will tear us apart’ by Joy Division. Very appropriate for the end of Birdfair, I thought.

OK, maybe not. Or at all. I’m fairly sure Ian Curtis had failed romances in mind rather than optics stands and the bird brain of Britain, but when compared to the Birdfair blues, it does indeed feel like you’ve suddenly been ripped away from a fleeting love – the love of course being the mass love for nature amplified thousand-fold, for one weekend a year in a few fields by a nature reserve in Rutland.

Because although Birdfair may (currently) be an event more or less for the converted rather than the masses, to at least feel all this passion in one place brings something very restorative to the soul. With the exception of the odd soddy grump or ego-ridden boasting photographer, the majority of naturalists hold a positive energy of enthusiasm that’s enough to colour any everyday situation when they’re on their own (that’s as long as you can get them talking about wildlife, of course). Now imagine an entire festival of them, and you get some idea of the buzz I’m struggling to accurately describe.

But a strange change is beginning to take hold at Birdfair. It appears, from capture-mark-recapture studies carried out by the University of Metaphors (through a standard methodology of ringing and hair clips), the average age of the attending population across all three days of the event is beginning to decrease. Individuals are being recruited at a younger age than ever before. The beards, anoraks and budgets that might be able to afford a birding trip to Portugal are being diluted by attempts at beards, stylish shirts & braids and budgets that might be able to afford a coffee and bacon bap from the catering tent (just).

Because this year was the year A Focus on Nature, and the Next Generation Birders, took over Birdfair. Alright, maybe the beards and bins did still outnumber the ‘yoof’. It’s still a long way off feeling like Glastonbury despite oft being compared to it. But there were enough of us to turn heads in the beer tent, and even give the security guards something to look at when we were gathered outside it following the barn dance, planning our journey to the Oakham wetherspoons with enough military precision to make a veteran general nod his moustache approvingly.

But before you shoot us down for simply having a knees up (like 99% of people our age), our greatest achievement for being at Birdfair this year was the same thing the event gives to nearly everyone who attends – hope.

Hope that in this time of conservationists cowering under the false pretences of politicians, planting flowers while the garden is being bulldozed, hope when everyone moans about their being no one under 40 into wildlife, hope when species are still going extinct faster than ever before.

The hope stemmed from the small(ish) deeds we did that, in the grand scheme of things, actually mean so much. There was AFON’s kids art mural, once again lead to great success by Beth Aucott and her team of helpers – James Rhodes, Charli Sams, Imogen Mansfield & Thea Powell. Our children’s passport, which I co-ordinated the contacts for but in the end was the masterpiece work of Matt Lissimore and Stephen Le Quesne, gave children the confidence to speak to the stall-holders and discover more about nature and conservation under their own steam. The NGBirders, right at the forefront of the RSPB’s stand, were promoting the future of ornithology right among the tops of Britain’s biggest conservation NGO.

Those are only a few of the names of the many young naturalists I had the pleasure to meet again, or for the first time – friends old and new, whom I greatly look forward to working alongside as we take conservation to the next step in our futures, and get it out of its current mess.

Hope is the lasting legacy of Birdfair, and this year even more so. As any Joy Division fan will tell you, the chord sequence of ‘Love will tear us apart’ is strangely upbeat for its mellow lyrics. So perhaps it really does fit the Birdfair blues. Sad that it was so fleeting. But just as the guitars and synthesisers lift your feelings up to that awesomely catchy tune, you leave with an absolute goldmine of optimism for the future.