On Saturday evening 30 Big Wild Sleepouters arrived at Pagham Harbour for a night of adventure. Having erected tents and enjoyed picnics in the early evening sunshine, we started our evenings activities with pond dipping, bug hunting and Animal-Olympics!
Let the dipping and bug hunting commence!
A bug hunter at work!
Water beetles, dragonfly and damselfly nymphs, water boatmen, newts and much more were all discovered in the depths of our pond, while lots of bugs n mini-beasts were hunted down including damsel, dock and plant bugs, centipedes, harvestmen, beetles, crickets, and froghoppers!
Devil's coach horse beetle.
Newt with ramshorn snap in background.
Meanwhile the Animal-Olympics were defining which animal we were, based on the speed with which we could run and distance we could jump!
Is this a kangaroo rat?!
With the sun sinking in the sky, it was time to set mammal traps and put out footprint tunnels to see if we could find out who might snuffling around us later in the night.
Baiting the mammal traps.
Preparing footprint tunnels.
As the night drew in our Big Wild Sleepouters were armed with bat-detectors and we went for a walk in the twilight. It wasn’t long before we were hearing the audible clicks of several bats, some of which we managed to catch a glimpse of, flittering about in the gloom. Along our route we found Ian our local astronomer waiting for us in the darkness. He proceeded to show us some of the more easily recognisable constellations and taught us how use these to navigate our way across the night sky. We even witnessed a couple of meteors (shooting stars). On the horizon a red moon rose slowly into the starlight. This was our cue to make our way back, picking up more bats on the detectors as we went. Returning to our Discovery Area, Ivan our Warden set up the moth trap we would leave running during the night, before everyone enjoyed a well deserved cup of hot chocolate. Midnight approaching, we made our way back to our tents to spend the night under the stars.
During the night a little owl called near-by, although some of our Big Wild Sleepouters slept through that one!
Our Big Wild Sleepouters were up bright and early, keen to see what we had caught overnight in our mammal traps. Having set 20 traps, we were hoping for one or two to have been successful. So when we found 50% of them occupied, it more than made up for a lack of footprints in our tunnels! Common shrews, bank voles, wood mice and a yellow necked mouse had all been all been tucking into the food we had baited the traps with, just metres from where we had slept.
A close encounter of the furry kind.
A very adorable bank vole.
As each delightful furry find was discovered Ivan told us a little bit about them, before releasing them back into the undergrowth.
To end our overnight adventure Ivan opened up our moth trap as breakfast was prepared and with 115 species caught, there were some stunners amongst them.
Drinker moth.
Scalloped oak.
Elephant hawkmoth.
Pagham Harbour and Medmerry are rich with wildlife, but it was great to discover and learn about some of our nocturnal inhabitants. Roll on Big Wild Sleepout 2017!