Lucy Carter

Hello everyone,

Sorry I haven't written for a while - winter is a quieter season for OPAL, so there weren't so many interesting things to tell you about.  After the OPAL Conference (my last blog post) my time was taken up writing end of year reports - each year we report back to the Big Lottery Fund who support OPAL to show them all the work we've done and how it has benefitted lots of people as well as the wildlife.  So that took us until Christmas, and since then we have been planning our year ahead.

A really exciting opportunity has come up for us here at the museum - a 6th OPAL survey that the Natural History Museum will develop.  Originally it was planned that OPAL would run five national surveys, but now we have the chance to do an extra one!  It's very early days so we are only just planning it, but we hope it's going to be a nation-wide bug hunt.  We want thousands of people to go outside and explore their 'patch' whether that's their garden, school grounds, local park or an area close to where they work.  We want to get people out searching for the invertebrates that we share our living spaces with.  The rough plan at the moment is that the survey will launch this June, so keep an eye out for that one.  More details to follow shortly as we develop the survey over the next few months...

I usually like to include a photo in my blog posts of something interesting I've seen or done, but this one was sent to me from the Teme Valley Wildlife Group - a group that received an OPAL Grant last year.  A bird called a Bittern (Botaurus stellaris) recently spent some time on the River Teme and Dave Barnes got some absolutely amazing photos of it catching and desperately trying to swallow a humongous trout!  You have to take a look at the full series of shots showing the battle between bird and fish! I've included a small piccie to whet your appetite...