Lucy Carter's blog

Hello everyone, and a happy new year to you!  Sorry for the cheesy title - but it is relevant to my blog post today.

I've been sorting through all the images that you lovely people have been entering onto the website with your Bugs Count Species Quest records.  Over the next few days and weeks I'll post some of the photos on here for you - there are some really fantastic ones!!  And I must admit a few blurry ones too

I just came across this one and wanted to share it.  At first you focus on the slugs and only when you look carefully do you notice there are also two newts and a beetle in the picture too - I've circled the newts in the second photo to help you see them as they are quite well camouflaged. 

This photo was submitted with a record of leopard slugs, but the slugs you see are actually a different species - Limacus I think, which has a yellowy tinge to it (Leopard slugs are more grey/brown).  However this is still a really useful record as the photo allows our slug experts at the Conchological Society to identfy the species and store it as a biological record - that's why photos are so important!

More piccies to follow soon...

Look at this fantastic video of the Vale Youth Green Action Group carrying out the Bugs Count survey - fantastic job guys!

Wow - yesterday's BBC Online piece has generated lots of interest in the Bugs Count survey, with requests for the survey packs coming in, and also lots of sightings of the Devil's Coach Horse beetle. 

Have you seen one? 

Keep your eyes peeled and if you spot one of these fantastic beetles, please let us know.  Ideally we'd like you to send in a photo of it if you can.  Here's one of the photos sent in today.  A classic Devil's Coach Horse pose with its tail raised like a scorpion.

You can upload photos direct to our website or email them to bugscount [at] opalexplorenature [dot] org.

Thanks to everyone who has submitted a sighting or a photo so far - keep them coming in!

Last Tuesday I was filmed by a lovely lady called Becky from the BBC.  We had a great day out at Silwood Park (the Imperial College campus in Ascot) bug hunting, and Becky filmed me as I went along looking under logs, in the trees and in fallen leaves for all the bugs we could find.

And here's the result - this video went up on the BBC online website this morning...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15197882 

I hope this inspires a few of you to get outdoors and do a bug hunt.  Download the Bugs Count Pocket ID Guide to help you to identify what you find.  Keep an eye out for our six Species Quest bugs too!  The film tells you about one of them - the Devil's Coach Horse beetle.  You can find out what the six Species Quests are and how to find them here.

Over half a million invertebrates have been counted through the Bugs Count now - make sure you add your sightings to keep that figure rising!

Tonight at the Natural History Museum, over 300 scientists will be in the galleries just waiting to discuss their day to day jobs, museum specimens and some of the biggest questions in science with you.  All over a glass of wine or two!  Sound good?  Well come along from 16:00 - 23:00 for a relaxing evening and the chance to meet / question / challenge our scientists.  There are behind the scenes tours, cocktail bars and loads of other displays and activities.  All this is part of Science Uncovered, an EU funded scheme also called Researcher Nights, which give people the chance to meet research scientists and discover how their research is relevant to our everyday lives.

I'll be there with lots of my colleagues running the Natural History Roadshow (think Antiques Roadshow but with wildlife - feel free to bring something in for us to identify!).  Our part of the event is all about explaining why UK wildlife is important and how you can all help us to better understand and protect it.

Also, we have not one but two Leopard Slugs on show for you to touch, hold and gaze at down a  microscope.  Get familiar with these lovely creatures and then get looking for them in your gardens at home!  Here's a sneak preview of our baby Leopard Slug - he's so cute!

Ok, I'm sure lots of you are thinking he's not cute and that 'cute' and 'slug' are not words that go together, but he's only a few cm long.  Hazel, one of the museum's Science Educators brought him in on Wednesday saying she found him amongst a pile of post on her front door mat and he had slimed all over a bright green letter - she thinks he might have come in through the post!  Either way, come down and meet him in person tonight, along with our other various creepies and crawlies.

It's your chance to come and meet some of the OPAL team, so we hope to see you there!

Lucy

We've passed the 3000 mark!  We now have 3007 Bugs Count surveys uploaded.  Thanks for sending your results back in everyone!  John is wrangling with the results database as I type...!!

2995 Bugs Count survey results have been entered so far - who will be the one to get the 3000th record?  We're also nearing half a million individual bugs counted.  Here's how the bug totaliser is looking at the moment...

John's been on holiday for a few weeks so Martin and I have been holding the fort.  One thing we've been working on alongside Chris, the OPAL web editor, is the Bug Zoom gallery which went live yesterday.  It's really cool - hover your mouse over the images to see them magnified.  We're hoping to add more images to this over the next few weeks so keep checking back!

We also attended an event at Greenwich Park in London yesterday and ran the Bugs Count with lots of families - unfortunately it got a bit windy towards the end of the day and our gazebo died a death, ending up in the skip with twisted and snapped metal bars - ooops.  Still, the day overall was successful, and we even got  a bit of sunshine towards the end

More updates to come soon.  In the mean time, happy bug hunting!

We had a great time last week in Martineau Gardens, Birmingham, filming OPAL for the National Lottery Awards, as we've made it to the final as Best Environment Project.

It was an action-packed day, with pond dipping, bug hunting, bubble blowing, digging for earthworms, moth trapping and much more! Two schools, William Shrewsbury school in Staffordshire, and Starbank primary school from Birmingham, came along to join in and to be filmed by our lovely film crew. Everyone had a fun time being TV stars for the day, and saying 'take 2' and 'that's a wrap'!  OPAL turned out in full force, with staff from all over the country, so it was nice to be together and do all the surveys.

Linda, our director, was interviewed, as well as Sarah West and Adam Bates, two of our community scientists, and Faizan, one of our participants from Sheffield. So keep a look out for some familiar faces popping up on your screens in September!

We were really lucky with the weather, it was sunny all day, and Martineau Gardens is a beautiful site (www.martineau-gardens.org.uk), so the crew were really pleased with their footage. They filmed all the different activities, and despite a few unexpected hitches (like the pond having no water in it!) it all went pretty well. You can see a photo gallery of the day in the Event Photos section under Activities.

View Martineau Gardens event gallery

The footage is going to be shown in September to promote us as Best Environment Project on the BBC and ITV, as well as streamed on YouTube and Vimeo. We need as many votes as possible so please get voting! The voting opens on 2nd September and closes on 26th: www.lotterygoodcauses.org.uk/awards.
 

Sorry I haven't written for a while, I've been really busy with events over the past week or so.  Coming up we have filming for the National Lottery Awards - that's taking place in Birmingham tomorrow.  OPAL is through to the finals for Best Environment Project, so make sure you vote for us when the competition opens in September!  The film shot tomorrow will be played on the National Lottery draws in September and at the awards ceremony.

Also this weekend, it's Seashore Day at the Natural History Museum.  On Sunday (7th August), museum visitors will be able to meet the OPAL team and other museum scientists to discover more about the seashore and see some of the museum's collections that aren't normally on dispay.  They'll have the chance to make their own seaweed herbarium specimen, and take home their own copy of the Big Seaweed Search ID Guide.  Come along if you're free this Sunday!

Looking back at events that have already happened, yesterday John and I did a Nature Live talk at the Museum, which had John in the studio doing a live link up to me in the Wildliffe Garden!  It was really good fun and the audience were very keen, all taking Bugs Count survey packs away with them.  It was swelteringly hot in the Wildlife Garden, but the live link up was really good fun and worked well so we'll try that one again some time.  You can see a programme of up-coming Nature Live talks here.

And the activities don't stop...last week I was running Bugs Count with a group of teenagers who were taking part in the pilot of the new National Citizens Service.  It's a government initiative to give teenagers the chance to find out more about volunteering and the different voluntary activities they can get involved with. They then take these ideas away and run a 'social action' project in their local community.  I was there with the OPAL Air Centre team to promote wildlife recording. Here are a few photos of the day.

Doing the Bugs Count - Challenge 1 - looking on soft ground surfaces

Then Challenge 2, looking on human-made hard surfaces

The building was absolutely covered in harvestmen, which are close relatives of spiders.  The difference is that harvestmen have only one, quite rounded body part, whilst spiders have two.

We also got hands on with our 'pet' Leopard Slug which we've been showing people at events so they know what to look out for.  The Leopard Slug is one of the Bugs Count Species Quests.

Excellent news too - some of the lads found a Devil's Coach Horse (another of our Species Quests!).  In fact there were loads of ground beetles - you can see a couple in the pot with the 'Devil'.

And the Devil's Coach Horse is now on the results map - I've zoomed in to the Tonbridge area so you can see the exact spot we found it!

Keep those sightings coming in, especially with photos.  We're also working on a new mobile phone app for Bugs Count which should be ready later this month, so keep an eye out for that too!

I've just been reading an article in BBC Wildlife magazine which says that recent research has shown that artificial bumblebee nest boxes just don't seem to work.  In the study they refer to (from the Journal for Nature Conservation) only 3.1% of the artificial nest boxes studied were occupied by bumblebees.  This isn't the first time that I've read that bumblebee boxes aren't effective.  The Sheffield based BUGS project concluded the same, and also investigated quite a wide range of wildlife friendly gardening techniques. Some were effective, others less so.

With all the effort we put into gardening, how do we know what to do to support our wildlife at the same time, and which activities may be a waste of time and effort?  The BUGS project is a good place to start.  There are also lots of wildlife gardening books and websites around to give you advice - just do a web search for 'wildlife gardening' and a whole host of material is provided.  One book that the museum's Wildlife Garden team used to create our beautiful 'Sensational Butterflies' exhibition garden was Jan Miller-Klein's  'A book on Gardening for Butterflies, Bees and other beneficial insects - a how to guide'.

There really isn't that much research out there to inform us whether particular methods of wildlife gardening are effective or not.  The average garden will already be home to hundreds of species of invertebrate, so we're doing something right!  If you're thinking of improving your garden for wildlife, why not find out just how much is there already by taking part in the OPAL Bugs Count survey - repeating it a year later after you've made improvements for wildlife in your garden might make for an interesting comparison?