Mersehead Bioblitz 2016

On the 18th and 19th June we embarked on a weekend long Bioblitz. A bioblitz is when people including experts and local people gather together and record as many flora and funa within a designated area and time. We were very lucky that the Dumfries and Galloway Environmental Resources Centre joined us to help in this event.

Mersehead has never had a Bioblitz and we were excited to see what we would find. So on Saturday morning we started with moth trapping with help from the local moth recorder. We placed four traps out around the reserve, one in the garden, one in the woodland, one on the sand dunes and one on the salt marsh.

After three hours we had emptied all the moth traps and found we had caught over 64 species.

Mapped Winged Swift and green silver line (photo credit Kirsty Griffiths)

The star catch a female fox moth (photo credit Kirsty Griffiths)

The team emptying the moth trap (photo credit Kirsty Griffiths)

During the day other people spotted different animals including birds, insects and spiders. The first fledged song thrush was spotted along with a hare trying to hide in the long grass.

Brown hare and song thrush (photo credit Kirsty Griffiths)

On Saturday afternoon we had Andy Riches Local Mammal recorder come along to do a walk on mammal tracks and signs. He took a group out and along the walk the found evidence of badgers, fox, otter, mole, bank vole, field vole and common shrew. To carry on with mammals we had a bat walk in the evening with the help of the Dumfries and Galloway Bat group.  During the evening we were given bat detectors to help us identify what bats are around.

At the end of the night we had identified four different types of bats which included common pipistrelle, soprano pipistrelle, whiskered bat and noctule bat.

On Sunday we woke up nice and early for the North Solway Ringing Group, for the ringing demonstration. During the morning they caught a variety of birds which included meadow pipit, blackbird, yellowhammer, great tit, goldfinch, chaffinch , sedge warbler, song thrush, dunnock and House sparrow.

Yellowhammer posing and meadow pipit being rung (photo credit Kirsty Griffiths)

Ringing equipment (photo credit Kirsty Griffiths)

So after the weekend the totals are as follow