August update from the Lederman Trainees
August has been another busy month for us as Lederman Trainees with Sussex Wildlife Trust and we’ve been learning lots of new skills as well as practising existing ones.
With the guidance and expertise of our Line Manager Steve Webster, Rosie and I successfully hung a double-gate to link one of our meadows with the woods at the Leysdown estate. This will improve access for tree management work in future, as well as link the footpaths on the land there. We also hung a new gate at the entrance to our largest meadow, and (despite a few hitches with some old tools) managed to put it up without Steve’s help on-site! It was a very empowering moment to finish it by ourselves and proof of the value of scholarships like the one we’re on.
I’ve also been putting my brush-cutter certificate to good use, practising at lots of reserves around Sussex: Clearing fencelines at Filsham Reedbed and improving the grassland at Brickfield Meadow with Reserves Manager (East) Jamie Parsons, and improving access on the footpaths at Seaford Head with Reserves Site Ranger Sarah Quantrill.
I had the exciting opportunity to ring birds in the evenings this month too, working not just with my regular trainer David King (of Rye Harbour Nature Reserve) but also three other licensed ringers. At Gatwick’s North-west Zone I joined ecologist Rachel Bicker and Aviation Ornithologist Jon Middleton to survey birds beside the Mole River. Later in the month, I worked with David and his colleagues Sue Welsh and Val Bentley to ring scores of Pied and Yellow Wagtails as they gathered to roost. It was a magical experience and definitely a challenge in the darkness!
An exciting project I’ve helped run this month is a pilot monitoring scheme for rare Barbastelle Bats, in partnership with the Bat Conservation Trust (BCT). I helped Reserves Manager Mark Monk-Terry and Reserves Officer Nick Walford deploy bat detectors at 19 locations across the densely forested 166-hectare Mens reserve. In the coming weeks we’ll be sending off the data to the BCT and will know more about how the Barbastelles are doing there. More to come on this in a future blog.
Rosie
Life as a Lederman Trainee is busy as ever, Mark and I have been getting around lots of Sussex this past month! I will start with a very local day though, so local in fact that I didn’t even leave the back garden at Leysdown. David King, Nature Reserve Officer at Rye Harbour, came over to carry out some bird ringing. These ringing sessions typically start at dawn, so at the moment that means a 5am start. It was a great session, I ringed 43 birds. I also began learning the process of extracting the birds from the nets. This is an extremely fiddly job, precision is key in order to remove the birds safely. I’ve been observing David do this process since I started ringing and it felt amazing to do it for myself! I’m starting to get a really good variety of experience with a big range of species and am learning how to age and sex the birds depending on their plumage. There’ll be lots more to learn and I’m very excited about this.
Recently we spent the day with Reserves Manager Jamie Parsons, at Flatropers, way over in the East. The day involved clearing some of the overhanging canopy branches from along a track to open it up. I spent the day chain-sawing low branches and felling some over-stood hazel and willow coppice, whilst Mark joined with a couple of extremely helpful volunteers, using hand tools to cut up the branches and move them off the track. I love getting practice with the chainsaw, as I want to get really confident using them so I can keep the skill up after my traineeship.
As Mark mentioned we have been involved in some Barbastelle Bat monitoring this month. I love bats and it was great fun joining in with this. Mark and I went out to The Mens, over in the West, to collect in the detectors which was a bit of a treasure hunt. We got lost a number of times and some of the detectors were so well camouflaged they were almost impossible to find. After a very long day we eventually got them all in, I’m really excited to hear back about the results and see how the bat life is doing.
We’ve got lots of training coming up, including off-road and tractor driving, which is going to be a lot of fun, there will be updates on how that goes next month.