Peter Shallcross will be leading a river walk from Wylye to Fisherton de la Mere this coming Thursday, starting at 7pm. The distance along the footpath beside the river is around a mile each way, pretty flat and sound along its length, so not particularly onerous.

Members don't need to register but if you'd like to come as a guest please let us know via the contact form. 

To share car spaces and conserve fuel, meet at the Nadder Centre car park at 6:30PM or alternatively make your own way to Wylye for 7:00PM.

The rendezvous point is a layby immediately after the river bridge on the main road north of Wylye, after passing the Bell pub on your right: see https://goo.gl/maps/9jAP7xYZqvhWn3Qp6
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And you may care to bring with you a picnic to enjoy in the churchyard before heading home again.

The following request has been submitted by Jessica Perry of the RSPB Volunteer Monitoring Farm Wildlife project.

"The RSPB Volunteer Monitoring Farm Wildlife (VMFW) project aims to provide a match up service for volunteer surveyors and farmers.  The project objectives are to provide a wildlife surveying service to farms, offer opportunities for people to get out into nature and use the collected data to create useful outputs that will help farmers to adapt to nature friendly farming practices.  

This is currently a pilot project so many aspects are in development.  The taxa surveys taking place in Wiltshire this year are pollinators, butterflies, and bumblebees.  We hope to take up more taxa in future years, such as birds and plants.  The surveying methods are all citizen science based, so are easy to learn and conduct, but with practice can become a valuable skill.  

We try to match volunteer surveyors to farms within a reasonable travelling distance.  We may be able to reimburse some travel expenses.  Once a match is agreed we send the surveyor the contact details to get in touch with the farmer.  

First there is a 'Meet & Greet' session where you agree with the farmer where and what to survey and do a risk assessment.  Then surveys are conducted throughout the spring and summer.  Results are submitted online by the surveyor.  At the end of the year, we will turn those results into useful outputs for the farmers.

It is completely up to you, which taxa to survey, although sometimes a farm might express an interest in a specific type.  You can do more than one taxa if you wish and you can do more than one farm if you wish.  We cannot always guarantee that a farm is nearby, however we do occasionally run training sessions and encourage our volunteers without farms to practice their skills at their local green space.  

The surveys differ a little in how often they are done, bumblebees can be monthly or 3 surveys throughout the surveying season (now until Oct), pollinators are monthly (now until Sept) and butterflies are fortnightly (now until Sept).  

Bumblebee transects are 1-2km.  For butterflies you select up to 5 areas to survey and pace evenly through that area for 15 minutes recording species.  For pollinator surveys the surveyor observes an area of target flowers e.g. clover, for 10 minutes, recording the pollinating insects that visit the flowers. 

We currently have several farms in south Wiltshire who need volunteer surveyors.  There are two farms in the Tisbury area, one in the Semley area and one east of Gillingham.  If anyone is interested in being involved in the project or to help us cover these farms please contact me at farmsurveys.wilts@rspb.org.uk"

This striking photograph of a Dark-edged Bee-fly was taken recently by Dick Budden, as it rested on a clothes peg of his washing line. The Dark-edged Bee-fly is the most common of the bee-fly species and can be seen mainly in April and May as it feeds with its long straight proboscis on the nectar from spring flowers in gardens and hedgerows.

It is parasitic in behaviour. The female deposits her eggs into mining bee nesting areas by hovering a few inches above, then giving a sharp twist of her body as she flicks her eggs out with a covering of dust that she’s collected specially for the eggs’ protection. Upon hatching, her larvae will then burrow down and lie in wait to feed on the host bee’s larvae when they mature.

You can contribute to Bee-fly Watch on the Dipterists Forum of the Biological Records Centre, where they would welcome accounts of your sightings. 

Mid-March into early April is the time of a “blackthorn winter”: a cold spell when the blackthorn is in bloom. This is perhaps because the combination of different strains of the species and the varied micro-climates of their growing locations mean that you can find blackthorn in flower somewhere for more than a month, during which it is likely that there will be at least one cold spell. Or perhaps it is that blackthorn scrub, with its clouds of flowers at their peak, look like the bushes have been covered with snow.

The small white flowers bloom on short stalks from buds along the spines and do so before the leaves appear. En masse, the bloom provides a welcome early source of nectar for insects. These pollinate the flowers, which then develop the distinctive blue-black sloes.

The tree grows naturally in scrub, copses, and woodland, and is commonly used to form a cattle-proof hedge. It favours sunny positions, and when left uncut can develop into considerable thickets, such as those in the Oddbrook valley. Mature trees can grow to a height of around 6–7m and live for up to 100 years. The deep brown bark is smooth, and twigs form distinctive, straight, side shoots which develop into thorns. Its trunk and stems form a dense wood which is good for burning and straight stems have been used for walking sticks, including the Irish shillelagh.

The foliage provides food for the caterpillars of several moths. The dense thickets provide sheltered nesting sites for birds, which then feast on these caterpillars, and later on the sloes.

The scarce brown hairstreak butterfly lays its eggs on blackthorn. This is the largest and brightest of the hairstreak butterflies, the female looking a gorgeous golden colour in flight. However, in common with other hairstreaks, it is quite a small butterfly and notoriously easy to overlook. They spend most of their adult lives perched in the tops of trees, out of sight, lapping honeydew from the leaves. If you are lucky, you might see a female when she descends to lay eggs, nearly always on blackthorn twigs in hedges or bits of sheltered scrub.

Our knowledge of the local distribution of this butterfly is improving all the time, due to the efforts of a small number of lepidopterists who tirelessly search suitable locations for these tiny eggs. Correctly identified, these are a reliable indicator of presence, although not necessarily breeding success, but gets around the difficulties of spotting an adult on the wing. The population appears to be spreading westwards from the area north-east of Salisbury. As eggs have been found in the vicinity of Grovely Wood, who knows, they may be present hereabouts without being recorded. Eyes peeled this August/September.

by Andrew Graham

Slugs and snails have a true champion in Imogen Cavadino, an entomologist who is carrying out research for the RHS. We were treated to a wealth of information with up-close-and-personal photography of these oft-maligned creatures.

Slugs evolved from snails as they simplified their coiled shells and diverged into different families. There’s even such a thing as a semi-slug, one that can’t retract into the shell it carries on top. Some slug species still have a visible pale mantle under the surface, marking their vestigial shell which serves as storage for calcium salts.
  
The majority of snails have shells which coil to the right, developing asymmetrically via torsion, so that both their respiratory pore and anus end up on the right side of their heads. They are so dependent on moisture that if deprived, they can create an epiphragm to seal themselves in and succumb to a dormant state. Quick to revive if the conditions improve, Imogen told us that a snail was once stuck on a postcard as an exhibit in the British Museum (before they knew about their dormancy behaviour) and stunned everyone by making an escape.

For a researcher, the slime colour can be useful for identifying the species. Slugs produce two types of mucus for defence and movement. We heard that the netted field slug (deroceras reticulatum - above on the left) is the most harmful to our agricultural activities, making a feast of root vegetables in the autumn, but the cellar slugs (Limacus sp. - on the right) feed on rotting material, fungi, lichens and algae and are therefore blameless.

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has been campaigning, with Imogen heavily involved with their media activity, to dispel the myths that all slugs are enemies of the gardener. The last big slug survey was done in the 1940s and the RHS’ recent research has been aided by a formal survey conducted by 60 chosen participants around the country, who performed scheduled slug counts, with the glorious total of 21,000 slugs collected and identified in one year.

They discovered that non-native species were becoming more dominant, no doubt hitching rides on plants from other countries. New varieties are also being discovered, like the ghost slug (Selenochlamys ysbryda - above centre) with no eyes, first identified in Wales in 2014. 

Finally, that all important question – how do you euthanise a slug? Obviously, only the types which are eating your veg – please identify them first! The most ethical way is to put them in a sealed container and place in the freezer. Or if you are wanting to maintain their colours for identification purposes, you can drown them in carbonated spring water.

On a more positive note, the RHS welcomes recordings from anyone who wants to get involved. You will find information from Imogen on our Wildlife Recording page, about helping to record slug and snail activity.

Dr Tristan Bantock is presenting a talk for the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust on Hemiptera (true bugs) for which he is a national expert.
 
Michael New, the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust's Ecological Officer,
has previously been to a couple of Tristan’s presentations and he says that they really get you enthusiastic about this interesting group. Tristan also runs the recording scheme.
 
The meeting is on March 22nd and starts at 7pm. Please can you let Michael know if you are interested in attending and he will send out Zoom meeting details for you. michaeln@wiltshirewildlife.org

​Andrew Graham's report for September's Tisbury Focus concludes with the above advice for us on how to live with the growing number of these birds that we are seeing overhead.  He writes:

'The red kite is a magnificent bird of prey becoming increasingly common in this part of Wiltshire. It is unmistakeable with its rufous brown body and distinctive forked tail which it twists to use as a rudder in flight. In the 1930’s the UK population declined to two pairs which clung on mid Wales, but the species was saved from national extinction by a major protection programme. Since then, birds from Spain and Sweden have been successfully re-introduced to England and Scotland. Red Kites now breed over an expanding area of the UK and non-breeding and wintering birds may be seen across most of the country.

'The birds we will see are almost certainly part of the expanding reintroduced population rather than from the surviving native population in Wales. Males and females are essentially similar but in bright sunshine their strongly marked plumage is striking. The white primary feathers of the wing contrast with black wingtips, the yellow beak and eye stand out against the grey head while, in the right light, the tail may look positively orange. Its call is like but distinct from that of the buzzard – less mewling and more quavering - and will often be heard when several birds are together. Indeed, as numbers of birds in an area starts to grow, they may gather in communal woodland roosts where they can be seen dropping in from the surrounding countryside at dusk.

​'They were common birds of the town in Shakespearean times where they lived on carrion and offal and served an important role in clearing up human waste. When birdwatching in Europe, rubbish dumps were often a good place to find them. Their diet remains mostly carrion, roadkill and worms which they can often be seen collecting in recently ploughed fields. As scavengers, they are particularly prone to poisoning from illegal poisoned baits and pesticides. They will occasionally take small mammals given the chance and will gather around harvesting operations on the lookout for a meal.
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'Red kites nest in woodland in a scruffy nest often on top of an old crow’s nest. They hunt widely over mixed countryside, wooded valleys, and pasture, will stray over towns and can be see flying over Tisbury on occasion. Urban areas near the successful reintroduction in the Chilterns now regularly see numerous (double figures) kites overhead. This is partly because people took to putting out scraps to attract this impressive bird to close quarters. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a developing problem akin to that of herring gulls at seaside resorts where emboldened birds, used to being fed, start to pinch food from humans. This can be very alarming for children, so such feeding is not recommended. Nothing like that has been reported hereabouts so hopefully we can enjoy more views of this handsome bird in years to come without encouraging them to become a pest. Then our summer lunches won’t be subject to the warning: “red kite in the morning; put out the awning”.

Kingston Lacy Estate, The National Trust
Organiser: Peter Shallcross

Our Chairman led an evening walk on Holt Heath Nature Reserve (roughly 5 miles north-east of Wimborne Minster) for an hour or so as dusk came down, in search of glow-worms and nightjars. 

In a welcome innovation, we joined Peter for supper at the Cross ​Keys Inn, Holt Rd, Wimborne BH21 7JZ before setting out.  

If you'd like to go yourself, plan to get there at sunset.  Holt Heath is unhelpfully on two different OS maps - OS 118 (Shaftesbury & Cranborne Chase) and OL22 (New Forest) but you can also find it on Dorset Explorer - search for Holt Heath.

​Head for the pub and then continue westward along the road onto the Heath and look out for a parking area on the road on the left - on the map, its the more westerly of the bridle tracks that cross the road, at SU 051 045. There's an information board (sadly illegible) by the track that you can follow down to a 'cross roads'.  Don't forget to take a torch as the ground is quite rough and it will, of course, be dark.