Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Bugs, Bees and Beavers

Another typical day for me today. We had a group visit us on Cuerden for "Exploring Habitats." This means comparing two sorts of habitat, woodland and grassland to find out what lives there. We search or an animal, identify it, and then see if we can tell which job they do. Then look for different plants and do the same with them. They could be population controllers - beetles; transporters - bees; oxygen makers - all plants;stone crumblers - lichens; or carbon dioxide makers. We found a very tiny toad, a similarly tiny frog, several butterflies, centipedes. millipedes, woodlice, goose grass, balsam and red campion.
 After lunch I went to Brockholes to meet my colleagues from A Rocha UK, who were conducting an hymenoptera survey. We had  bombus lucorum, bombus terrestris, bombus pascuorum   and tree bee.We seemed to see honey bees all over the place as well as azure and  blue tailed damselfly. Botanywise, I saw lots of meadow cranesbill, meadow sweet, lady's bedstraw and hogweed.
The Beavers we saw on Brockholes, were of the juvenile homo sapiens variety. Lots of noise and enthusiasm, but great fun as well. They discovered the diffrence between dragonfly and damselfly, saw a buzzard, looked at a high rise sparrow tenement, learned a flower called " bee's bum" and found out how reedbeds clean up waste liquid.  Rain had threatened throughout the evening but thankfully no precipitation.

No comments:

Post a Comment