Really Wild Fridays

This summer the Education and Community Team have been let loose in RobinHill every Friday, leading the Really Wild Friday events at Robin Hill. Robin Hill is a very poular tourist attraction set in 88 acres of beautiful Island woodland, and we laid on a host of fun and free activities throughout the day. The most popular activity was a Wilderness Survival session at the gipsy camp in the woods for all budding Ray Mears. We provided tarpaulins and string for family groups to create their own bivouacs using the natural materials found in the woods. Families


threw themselves into this activity with gusto, and over the summer we saw some brilliant and innovative structures being created. After finishing their shelters Danny held a fire lighting workshop, demonstrating different ways of lighting fire without using matches. Each family group was then given a fire lighting kit to try and get their own fire going. Groups with successful fires were rewarded with a round of marshmallows to toast.

We also ran "hands-on with nature" arts and crafts down at the Really Wild Stage, making magic woodland wands, dream catchers and paper kites, using a mixture of natural, recycled and scrap store materials.

Grrrrrrrrrr

Look at this stunning thing:
It's a Jersey Tiger moth. This lovely species is pretty much restricted in UK distribution to the Channel Islands and parts of the south coast . On the mainland it is commonest in south Devon, but colonies have recently appeared in Dorset and here on the Isle of Wight. So this may be a stray continental migrant or home-grown. There is also a thriving population in central London, but who knows if this is a natural expansion of range or perhaps more likely the result of an introduction. It's clunky latin name is Euplagia quadripunctaria and is presumably a reference to the four distinct spots (rather than the two additional blobs) on the bright red underwings.
Sean, our conservation manager, photographed this one while out on his project rounds.

Minibeast Safari at Cowes

Ian and Suzie met pupils from Love Lane Primary School on the Cowes-Newport cyclepath this morning on the hunt for ferocious minibeasts and bugs. A fantastically warm sunny morning - perfect for butterflies and bees feasting on the hedgerow flowers we passed.

Unfortunately we didn't find anything dangerous, but there was certainly a lot of life in them there nettles.

Ian brought the bush-sweeper with him so that we could tap the hedgerows and discover the life within. We found a lot of spiders, beetles, leaf hoppers, ladybirds, earwigs, crickets, caterpillars, a red admiral and a white admiral. Not bad for an hour's work.

Dragons and Damsels

Now that summer's here, lovely high pressure and warm southerlies (now and then) it's good weather for dragonflies and damselflies. What's the difference? Not much really - the big damselflies are about the same size as the small dragonflies, although generally they're slighter and daintier. But there is one very obvious morphological difference between the two groups: damsels' eyes don't touch in the middle of their heads but dragons' do. So there you are. This one is a fabulously beautiful Red-veined Darter Sympetrum fonscolombei photographed by Island odonata maestro Dave Dana. It's quite common in southern Europe but is turning up more and more regularly as a migrant in the UK. It's hard to imagine these little things travelling such huge distances but there is quite a list of regular migrant species that visit us annually and so it's more than mere accident. We monitor dragonflies at all of our major wetland sites as they can be very useful indicators of the general health of the habitats we're working on.