NATURE EVENTS

 NATURE EVENTS

Despite my new role keeping me incredibly busy (hence the complete lack of blog posts lately 😖) and giving me a whole host of new tasks, I've thankfully still been able to do all of my usual nature events that I've been doing at the lighthouse for years. In fact I'm actually doing more as I'm now doing events at Whitelea Farm as well. I'm not going to lie I absolutely love doing them, not just because I'm getting paid to look for wildlife (literally the dream!) but I genuinely love bringing people closer to nature and giving them a chance to see things close up that they might not usually get the chance to see. And that's particularly the case with kids. I love kids coming to the events, it's the perfect chance to get them interested in not just wildlife but the outdoors in general. And honestly, there's no better feeling than seeing that look of amazement when you show them something that blows their mind!!!

Some of the recent events we've done.......

BUTTERFLY WALKS

For the past few weeks I've been leading a butterfly walk on Fridays at the Farm. I mean, I say butterfly walks but to be honest we look for anything wildlifey! For the first two walks we were joined by Dave Wainwright from the Butterfly Conservation Trust, and apart from general butterfly sightings he put together a little list of target species that he would like us to look for when we're out. Two were day flying moths, the Least Minor and the Cistus Forester. The Minor was found in the first week, and the second week a Forester species was seen very briefly but as there are more than one type of Forester we couldn't officially say it was the target, despite it being highly likely. We also got a bit of a bonus species, a Chalk Carpet moth. This is another scarce, declining species in our region, and a species that Dave has surveyed for in the past, so he was delighted with the find. As for butterflies, he had four targets. Three of them, Northern Brown (Durham) Argus, Dingy Skipper and Dark Green Fritillary were again found in the first two weeks. The only one we have yet to find is the Grayling. It's really really scarce in County Durham, but there's still a chance as it's on the wing for another couple of weeks so we'll certainly give it a go! We've also had 15 commoner species of butterflies so they've certainly been quite a success.

Durham Argus 

Chalk Carpet 

Least Minor 

Souter Events 

Storm Petrel ringing 

Last weekend we had a bumper weekend of nature events at the lighthouse. We started on the Saturday with a dual event of Storm Petrel ringing and Moth trapping. We got off to a cracking start as a pod of dolphins ambled past as we were putting up the mist nets. Then, just as the night was getting dark the bats started to emerge. Pipistrelles are quite a common sight when we are Stormying, and we even occasionally get one in the nets, but they're not around for too long as they eventually head off to feed in the Coastal Park. As for the birds, thankfully we didn't have too long to wait to get the first one in the net. Its always a nervous night when we are doing these events, as sometimes we have a really long wait before we start to catch, and some nights we don't catch at all, which is a nightmare when you've got an expectant audience waiting patiently. So any time you get an early bird it's a huge collective sigh of relief. In total we only got three birds before the rain came in, but that was absolutely fine because everyone that came to see a Petrel saw a Petrel, and all went home happy. 

Moth Night 

It was a particularly busy night for me, as not only was I at the Storm Petrel event I was also in the Nature Reserve running a moth night. I'll do a full blog post another time about our very active moth team but for now I'll just stick to this event. We had two moth traps running simultaneously in the Reserve, one that we manned permanently and another we left until the end of the event, checking only occasionally. From the moment we turned the lights on we knew it would be a good night, as we were instantly swamped with moths. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of moths everywhere, all night, and the extremely large crowd were amazed at the spectacle. I love these events, as its a perfect opportunity to show people the huge variety of species there are, and more importantly, moths are not always boring brown jobbies. We had moths of all shapes, sizes and colours and it was truly fantastic to show them all off. I had a great night!

Elephant Hawkmoth 

Checking the trap 

Poplar Hawkmoth 

Young Toad

Rockpool Ramble 

The next morning we were up bright and early getting ready for our last event of the weekend. Rockpooling has always been our most popular event at the lighthouse and we usually do quite a lot throughout the year. This day was our fourth, and again was extremely well attended. The species we find doesn't tend to change much throughout the year, only the amounts we catch, so we usually have a good idea of what we're going to find. We always start the event by checking the lobster pots that we put out the day before. We pretty much always catch at least one lobster, and they're always the species that people are most excited to see. We always average around five different types of crab, Edible, Shore and Velvet Swimming crabs being the most common. We also catch a few species of fish, but the other most sought after critters are Starfish. This year for some reason Starfish have been very hard to come by though, and have only been found on one of our events. But rockpooling is always an absolute treat to do, and I never tire of doing them, they will always be a highlight of my year. 

Before I end the post, I just want to say a huge thank you to my friends who are always there to help me run my many events. Whether it's Rockpooling, Moth Trapping, Bird Ringing or all of the above, I couldn't do it without the assistance of these people. So John, Andrew, Nick, Neil and Chappers (and anyone else that tags along), THANK YOU