Q&A – Page 15 – Hoopoe

Author interview with Dean R. Lomax: Locked in Time

Dean Lomax digging up dinosaurs at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center.

Dean R. Lomax is an internationally recognized palaeontologist, author, television presenter, and science communicator. He is currently a visiting scientist at the University of Manchester and is a leading authority on ichthyosaurs. He is due to publish a remarkable popular science book, Locked in Time, that looks at what the fossil record can tell us about behaviours of extinct animals by way of fifty remarkable examples. Leading up to publication, we reached out to Dean and asked him some questions.

Could you tell us a little about your background and where the motivation for this book came from?

My passion for palaeontology stems from my childhood fascination with everything dinosaur. In high school, I was not very gifted academically and my grades were not good enough to attend university so at the age of 18 I ended up selling my possessions – including my cherished Star Wars collection(!) – to help fund a trip to excavate dinosaurs at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in the USA. That trip changed my life and formed the backbone of my career. Not only did it provide me with the necessary experience I needed to help build a career in palaeontology, but it is where the idea for Locked in Time originated. Whilst looking at the museum displays, one particularly outstanding fossil caught my eye. A trackway with its maker preserved at the very end – an animal that had literally been caught dead in its tracks. I had never seen anything like this fossil before, in books, in museums or in documentaries. This prehistoric story was preserved in time for all to see. I was hooked. It gave me that spark to discover more about prehistoric animals and their behaviours and I even ended up describing this particular fossil in the scientific literature.

In your introduction, you mention the field of palaeoethology (the study of fossils to infer behaviour). How big of a subfield is this in palaeontology? Are there specialised palaeoethologists, or is it more a case of palaeontologists contributing to this field whenever someone finds something?

Palaeoethology is a fascinating subject that allows us to explore the study of behaviours of extinct species through the evidence preserved in fossils. It is a small subfield of palaeontology, due mostly to the rarity of fossils with direct and reliable evidence of behaviours preserved. There aren’t necessarily any specialised palaeoethologists, but rather those palaeontologists who contribute to the field when something is found and described; however, palaeontologists may often be entirely unaware that they are actively contributing to the field because the idea of ethology/behaviour in the fossil record can easily be overlooked. Having said that, there are some palaeontologists that could easily add ‘palaeoethologist’ to their CVs, most notably those who work with amber which often preserve snapshots of behaviours in action. A real pioneer in the field of palaeoethology was Dr Arthur Boucot. He spent years searching for evidence of behaviours in prehistoric animals, writing numerous papers and academic monographs, and even introduced the term “frozen behaviour” for those instances where an extinct organism was preserved in the midst of some type of behaviour. Delving into his history and research was genuinely inspiring. As I have researched and published on multiple specimens and have written this book, I guess this probably qualifies me as a palaeoethologist too.

Ideas about behaviour are important to those who produce artwork depicting prehistoric lifeforms, i.e. palaeoartists. Do you find there is much of an exchange between palaeontologists and palaeoartists to try and depict behaviour in artwork according to the latest science?

The field of palaeoart has grown immensely over the last twenty years. In fact, several palaeoartists have become excellent scientists in their own right, including Bob Nicholls (the artist for this book), who has co-authored multiple scientific studies. Good palaeoartists stay informed of the latest scientific research and discoveries, with several often working very closely with palaeontologists to ensure their reconstructions are scientifically accurate. Subsequently, when based on the latest science, thoroughly researched palaeoart reconstructions are anatomically plausible. However, that said, practically all aspects of behaviour depicted in palaeoart are not based on direct evidence but assumptions. Usually, the best a palaeoartist can do is look at an extinct animal’s anatomy and environment and speculate about its lifestyle and behaviours. This is why fossilised evidence of behaviours, like those contained inside this book, are so precious and important to study and understand. These remarkable fossils tell us that prehistoric creatures were not movie monsters (prehistoric life, especially dinosaurs, are too often portrayed as roaring monsters!) but real animals that behaved in a variety of familiar and surprising ways.

What have technological advancements contributed to this line of inquiry? Are palaeontologists going back to old fossil material to reexamine them with new tools and finding new evidence of fossilised behaviour?

The use of flashy, high-tech computers, scanners and the like have helped to unlock an entirely new world of information contained in fossils. As a result, not only are newly discovered fossils subjected to this technology but much older fossil discoveries, where none of these technologies were previously available, can now be reanalysed with a fresh approach, breathing new life into old fossils as it were. This has led to some exciting discoveries of fossilised behaviours in specimens that have otherwise been deemed as having little to no research value.

Whether dinosaurs or early mammals, prehistoric organisms were faced with many of the same basic challenges as animals alive today. Has the fossil record revealed any examples of behaviours that were unique and now effectively extinct?

These types of questions are what get me excited about unravelling the mysteries of prehistoric behaviour. In many cases, “the present is the key to the past”, as geologist Charles Lyell famously introduced in the 1800s, and this definitely holds true with understanding behaviour. For example, on a basic level, we know that some groups of mammals live in herds today and that some extinct mammals also lived in herds millions of years ago (we have good fossil evidence for this). However, the natural world is filled with so many incredible acts of behaviour that you might expect the fossil record would reveal something unique. As such, perhaps one of the most unusual and apparently unique behaviours was recorded in an ancient roughly 430 million-year-old arthropod nicknamed the ‘kite runner’. The young of this arthropod were literally tethered to the parents via long spines. It appears to be the only known occurrence of this type of brooding behaviour known among fossil or living arthropods.

Rather than body fossils, past behaviour is often deduced from so-called trace fossils or ichnofossils. Nests, fossilised footprints, and trackways must be fairly easy to recognize. But what about the harder-to-identify traces? Do palaeontologists frequently encounter suspected ichnofossils where they don’t know who made them, how they were made, or perhaps even what they represent?

Yes, palaeontologists (or palaeoichnologists) frequently encounter mysterious trace fossils that are difficult or near impossible to identify or decipher. By their very definition, trace fossils represent evidence of behaviour, so we can say with confidence that an ancient animal made a nest, left its tracks or created a burrow, but they generally do not provide all of the tell-tale signs that allow us to identify what organism made it, how it was made or even what the trace might really represent. To find definite answers, we have to go a step further. In much rarer circumstances some trace fossils provide more than a ‘simple’ track or burrow and may be directly related with its maker, such that the body fossil is present inside the burrow or at the end of the track. In other examples, a track might show where the animal walked, stopped, sat down and then walked away, or a burrow might preserve evidence of scratch marks that could indicate how the burrow may have been constructed and by whom. These types of fossils provide much more information about specific moments (and behaviours) in deep time.

Were there any examples of fossilised behaviour that did not make the cut for this book but that you would have loved to include, or any noteworthy recent discoveries?

Having spent a substantial amount of time combing through hundreds of scientific papers and books, and examining specimens in museum collections, my initial plan was to tell the story of prehistoric behaviour through 100 fossils, rather than 50. It was incredibly tough selecting 100 fossils, so cutting this in half was much harder! I had to rank each of the fossils against one another, in terms of the type of behaviour, type of animal and so forth. This meant some really unusual specimens, like the aforementioned ‘kite runner’, did not make the final cut. One fossil that I would have really liked to include, and which has received worldwide media attention recently, is the so-called ‘Dueling Dinosaurs’ fossil, which appears to preserve a Tyrannosaurs and Triceratops locked in combat. I opted not to include the specimen as it has yet to be formally described, although I do make some subtle references to it. I’m very excited to see what research is revealed from this fossil, especially as only one fighting dinosaur fossil has been described, which inspired the book’s cover.

Finally, what are some of the biggest unanswered questions when it comes to fossilised behaviour? What would you love to find?

There are so many ancient groups and species that it would be easy for me to rattle off a list of some of the biggest unanswered questions about fossilised behaviour, but the reality is that we have only really scratched the surface. We have so much to learn when it comes to fossilised behaviour. After all, inferring and attempting to understand behaviour in long-extinct organisms is incredibly hard and is made even more challenging when evidence of behaviours are not preserved. It is also vitally important to remember that, by its very nature, the process of fossilisation is already an incredibly rare event, so to have any form of evidence for ancient fossilised behaviour preserved is genuinely astonishing.

Ooh, what would I love to find! I’m torn between several imaginary fossils, but if I was forced to choose one then it would have to be finding a dinosaur dead in its tracks. The thrill of following in the footsteps of a dinosaur only to find its skeleton lying at the very end of the track would be the ultimate dinosaur detective story.

Locked in Time: Animal Behavior Unearthed in 50 Extraordinary Fossils
By: Dean R. Lomax
Hardback | May 2021

Author Interview: Clive Chatters, Heathland

Heathlands are so much more than simply purple carpets of heather. They are ancient landscapes found throughout Britain that support a complex network of inter-related species and an immense diversity of habitats. They also possess a unique human history defined by the struggle between pastoralism and the competing demands of those who seek exclusive use of the land.

Clive Chatters, signing bookplates for Heathland — Photo by Catherine Chatters

In this latest addition to the British Wildlife Collection, Clive Chatters introduces us to Britain’s heathlands and has kindly taken some time to answer some questions concerning this important habitat.

Heathland might mean different things to different people; how did you go about defining ‘heathland’?

Heathlands defy ready definition. The diverse places that we call heaths are cultural landscapes which are overlain with the language of ecology. It is unnecessary to reconcile these different perspectives as both traditions offer a path to understanding what makes our heathlands special.

Heathlands are one of a handful of British landscapes that have been recognised by English- speaking people for as long as we have had a written history. Sadly, many of the places that early ecologists were describing had already been depleted of much of their diversity and wonder.

This book seeks to challenge those narrow definitions and to promote an understanding of heathland that would be familiar to our forebears, as well as respecting the experience of modern people whose livelihoods are bound up with the heath.

Literature and historical accounts have addressed heaths: these landscapes can also be found in literary works, in poems and romanticised histories. When did their ecological value start to be recognised?

There is a remarkable body of literature surviving from medieval England, with many references to heathlands. Narrative poems that pre-date the Norman conquest give us an indication of how heaths were viewed by Anglo-Scandinavian story-tellers.

Heathlands at the end of the Tudor period were places where people could gather on the margins of settled society and by the seventeenth century there are the beginnings of natural histories that go beyond the enumeration of commonable livestock or illusory wild beasts. The antiquarian John Aubrey gives an account of a lichen heath in his Natural History of Wiltshire. Herbalist, Thomas Johnson published two accounts of the flora of Hampstead Heath, which include over 120 flowering plants. By tabulating a sample of these records, and ordering them by habitat association, we can gain an insight into the character of a Southern Heath in the early seventeenth century.

Throughout history there has been people who have valued heaths as a source of their livelihood. It was not until the early twentieth century that ecologists started to describe heaths and then it took many more decades before their importance to nature conservation has been expressed by conservationists. In the meantime, we have lost so much of the diversity and wonder in British heaths. What my book sets out to do is explore those riches and consider what has sustained them, where they persist.

What are your primary hopes and fears for the long-term future of Britain’s Heathland?

It is not inevitable that the catastrophic losses of the recent past are the destiny of our remaining heaths. Whilst there are still significant challenges to overcome, we know enough about these habitats to secure their place in the countryside of the future, as an integral part of British culture and home to a wealth of species that occupy ecosystems of immense richness.

If we are to rejuvenate heathland as a commonplace element in the British countryside, then we need to be comfortable with knowing what successful rehabilitation looks like. The wildlife of our richest heaths is the fortuitous by-product of millennia of pastoral farming. Over the span of human history, it has been pastoralism that has provided continuity for ecological processes pre-dating agriculture and reaching back into evolutionary time.

If we are to have working heathland landscapes, with all the advantages they bring, then the pastoralists will need to be properly funded and rewarded.

A successful heathland needs to have scale. Heathlands are landscapes that can be remarkably robust in delivering the multiple objectives that we ask of them, but they must be measured in multiples of square kilometres rather than in tens of hectares. We need not be shy about seeking to create a new generation of heaths that are large enough to serve the needs of nature alongside the ambitions of the modern age.

Heathlands are so much more than ‘just’ heathers: could you summarise their importance for a diverse range of fauna and flora?

Heathlands are a great deal more than just carpets of heathers. A heathland landscape can embrace habitats as diverse as rocks and lakes and bogs, even temporary stands of arable and wartime concrete. The component habitats of a large functioning heathland are naturally dynamic, with species dependant on all sorts of habitat formations, from bare ground to the decaying of cowpats. The great antiquity of heathland ecosystems is reflected in the network of interdependent species, many of which are associated with large herbivores, fire and occasional gross disturbance of the soil. Whilst charismatic birds and reptiles have traditionally claimed the limelight, the biological wealth of the heath is better expressed through its invertebrates, lichen and wildflowers.

Until recently, the State implemented conservation initiatives; this is no longer the case and the withdrawal of central government from practical conservation management has placed greater demands on the work of local government. Has this had a significant impact for heathland?

Heathlands are not capable of sustaining ever-intensifying levels of recreational use, no matter how benignly intended. There are numerous examples of habitats that have been degraded and species that have been lost through the complex interactions of wildlife and informal recreation. Our affection for heathlands is no safeguard against them being loved to death.

Dogs, for example, are ecological proxies to natural predators but are present at much higher densities than would occur in the wild. And large heathland ponds are frequently developed for recreation with dire consequence for wildlife.

It is reasonable for people to expect a choice as to where they can go in the countryside; regrettably, in some heathland regions, the heaths are not used for recreation as a matter of choice but because they are the only greenspaces that are available.

This is your second book in the excellent British Wildlife Collection series; the other being Saltmarsh. After all the work researching and writing that and now Heathland what is next for you? Are there plans for further books, or maybe a well-earned rest?

There are germs of ideas for future writing which I hope will take shape in the next few years. Books are daunting ventures; ‘Heathland’ summarises forty years of study and took three years to write, maybe next time I’ll look at something a little simpler.

Heathland
By: Clive Chatters
Hardback | March 2021 | £27.99 ~~£34.99~~

In this latest addition to the British Wildlife Collection, Clive Chatters introduces us to Britain’s heathlands and their anatomy.

Most of our heaths are pale shadows of their former selves. However, Chatters argues, it is not inevitable that the catastrophic losses of the recent past are the destiny of our remaining heaths. Should we wish, their place in the countryside as an integral part of British culture can be secured.

All prices correct at the time of this article’s publication.

Author Interview with Jeff Ollerton: Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society

Professor Jeff Ollerton is a researcher, educator, consultant and author, specialising in mutualistic ecological relationships – in particular, those between plants and their pollinators. Now one of the world’s leading experts on pollinators and pollination, he has conducted field research in the UK, Australia, Africa, and Tenerife, and published a huge body of ground-breaking research which is highly-cited and used at both national and international levels to inform conservation efforts. Jeff currently holds Visiting Professor positions at the University of Northampton in the UK and Kunming Institute of Botany in China.

His recent book, Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society, provides a hugely informative yet accessible look at the ecology and evolution of pollinators around the globe, and discusses their conservation in a world that seems to be stacked against them.

In this article we chat with Jeff about his background, the book and the future of pollinators in an increasingly changing climate.

Firstly, could you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to write Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society?

Where to begin? Like lots of ecologists my interest started with natural history as a kid: poking around in rock pools, looking under stones, keeping tadpoles in jars, collecting fossils, the usual stuff that most people grow out of. I was born in Sunderland, close to the shipyards and coal mines that provided employment for most of my family. The grasslands and scrubby areas that developed on bombsites and after slum clearance were where I ranged free: my wildlife playground was the result of industrial development and decline. I also learned a lot from my dad who was a keen gardener, and plants have always been a passion. At school I didn’t do well – “easily distracted” said my reports – and only passed one A level (Biology). That was enough to get me into an HND in Applied Biology at Sunderland Polytechnic, then onto the second year of a BSc Environmental Biology degree at Oxford Polytechnic. My dissertation supervisor was Andrew Lack and he convinced me that I should apply for a PhD with him, looking at the pollination ecology, flowering phenology, and reproductive output of grassland plants in colonising and established grasslands. That was completed in 1993 (by which time the institution was Oxford Brookes University) and I went off to do some travelling and field work in Australia, funded by some small grants. When I got back I applied for numerous postdoctoral positions but the first job I was offered was a lectureship at Nene College of Higher Education in Northampton. At the time it was predominantly a teaching institution but they were keen to develop their ecological research. I originally planned to be there for a couple of years and ended up staying for 25! By that time it had transitioned into the University of Northampton. Throughout all of this the main focus of my research has been the ecology, evolution and conservation of plant-pollinator interactions, with field work in the UK, Africa, South America, and Asia. That’s a huge field of study, ranging in scope from molecular ecology to animal behaviour to agriculture and government environmental policy. A few years ago it struck me that there was a need to bring together these different strands into a single, coherent book that presented a state of the art account of why all of this was important, how the different topics fitted together, what we had learned so far after a couple of hundred years of research, and where the gaps and scientific disagreements lay. The result was Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society.

While it’s evident that habitat destruction and fragmentation have a huge role to play in the decline of pollinator species, you also state that rising temperatures may be a more significant factor, particularly for species such as bumblebees. Given the continual, and some may say unstoppable, rise in global temperatures, are you hopeful in any way for the future of pollinators?

Well, first of all, I certainly don’t think that climate change is unstoppable. We know what needs to be done and we know how to do it, though it’s not easy of course. But, yes, we are already seeing the effects of climate change on pollinators, particularly in relation to range shifts as insects move northwards in the northern hemisphere. Bumblebees are a particular concern because on the whole they are adapted to colder temperatures. However most other bees are adapted to warmer, drier conditions, and they may benefit from moderate climate change. The problem is that we simply don’t know enough about the natural histories of most of the 20,000 or so species of bees to say. Our knowledge of most of the hundreds of thousands of other species of pollinators is even less well developed. But I do have some optimism that pollination services to most plant species will be maintained under moderate climate change because we know from experimental work that we’ve carried out that the majority of interactions are relatively generalised and interchangeable: a range of pollinators can pollinate most plants, and vice versa. It’s the more specialised interactions that are likely to be less robust to climate change, especially in places like South Africa where I have been fortunate to work. The key to conserving pollinators, as it is for all biodiversity, is creation, restoration, linking-up, and protection, of natural habitats. As I argue in the book, we have to go far beyond “planting for pollinators” and putting up a few bee hotels if we are serious about conserving pollinators in our rapidly changing world.

While professional scientific research, alongside informed policy change, will obviously be key in directing the future of pollinators around the world, you also mention the importance of amateur naturalists and citizen scientists in collecting data and providing some of the legwork behind sustained long-term studies. What advice would you give to a non-professional individual who wishes to get involved with pollinator conservation? (eg. volunteering, donating to charities/organisations, lobbying for policy change etc.)

Yes, all of what you list there is important, and I would add that individuals can do a lot by thinking carefully about what they plant in their gardens and how they manage them (i.e. not using pesticides) and lobbying local councils about how parks and road verges are managed. They could also get involved in initiatives such as the UK Pollinators Monitoring Scheme. Similar schemes have been set up in other countries. Adding observations to iRecord is also important.

When hearing about the decline of pollinators, many people (fuelled by frequent media stories) will immediately be fearful about the future and security of our food production. Is there a valid reason for concern, and are there any precautionary steps that you believe the agricultural industry should be taking to deal with a potential collapse in pollinators?

First of all, I don’t think that pollinators are going to disappear from agricultural landscapes completely, that’s hugely unlikely. But there are a couple of things that should concern farmers and governments. There’s growing evidence that the yields of some crops, in some places, are limited by availability of pollinators, and that’s likely to get worse if pollinator populations decline. We also know that there are crops which, although they can self-pollinate, produce a higher quality of fruit or seeds if they are outcrossed by pollinators. So there’s a clear financial benefit for farmers to take pollinator declines seriously. Globally, most of the staple crops are either wind pollinated grasses (rice, wheat, etc.) or are propagated by tubers (potatoes, yams) so food security in terms of populations starving is unlikely to be a consequence of pollinator decline. However most of the fruit and vegetables that provide the essential vitamins and minerals in our diets need pollinators either for the consumed crop or, as in the case of onions, for the seeds that produce the crop. So food security in the sense of having a healthy diet is definitely something that we should take seriously. Things that farmers and the agricultural industry should be doing include the obvious such as restoring and creating natural habitat on their farms, not over-managing grasslands and hedgerows, and reducing the amount of biocides that they are using.

I discovered lots of interesting things from your book that I previously didn’t know – such as the fact that there are pollinating lizards! In all of your years of study, what is the most fascinating fact that you have learned about pollinators?

Oh, wow, that’s a tough one! Every research project that I’ve undertaken has turned up new information and observations that have intrigued and excited me, and even blown my mind. That’s one of the reasons why I do what I do, there’s so much still to discover. I estimate that we’ve got some kind of information about the pollinators of only about 10% of the 352,000 species of flowering plants that there are in the world. Even in Britain and Ireland the reproductive ecologies of most of the plants have hardly been studied. So there are always new things to discover. Citing a single fascinating fact is difficult, but if I had to choose one it would be the calculation that I made for a review article in 2017 when I worked out that as many as 1 in 10 insect and vertebrate species may visit flowers as pollinators. That did astound me and I had to double check my maths!

2020 was a year that was largely dominated by the Covid-19 crisis, a fact that you touch on briefly in your book. How has the pandemic affected your working life and, as a researcher who relies on time spent in the field, how have you dealt with the challenges of lockdown and restricted movement?

Ughh, yes, it’s been difficult. I was supposed to take a group of students to Tenerife in April for our annual field course and that had to be cancelled. It’s the first year since 2003 that I’ve not made the trip and it curtailed some long-term data collection that I’ve been undertaking. Perhaps the universe is telling me that it’s time to publish the data….? But on the plus side, once we knew that we’d be in lockdown for some months, I sent out an email to my network of pollination ecologists to suggest that we use the time to collect data on flower-pollinator interactions in our gardens. The response was phenomenal! It’s generated over 20,000 observations from all over the world. We’re writing up a paper describing the data set at the moment and we will make it freely available to PhD and early career researchers who were not able to collect data last year and whose funding and time are limited.

Finally, what are you working on currently, and do you have plans for further books?

So back in October I stepped down from my full-time professorship to work independently as a consultant ecological scientist and author – my new website has just gone live in fact: www.jeffollerton.co.uk. Although I will miss teaching students, I really needed some new challenges and wanted to work more closely at the conservation and advisory end of the field, and start to make more of a difference on the ground. I still have a Visiting Professorship at Northampton where I’m completing some externally funded projects and supervising a couple of PhD researchers. And I’ve recently been appointed Visiting Professor at the Kunming Institute of Botany in China where, vaccines willing, I will be spending part of the summer on a climate change and pollinators project. As for further books, yes, there are another three that I want to complete in the next few years. I’m talking with Pelagic at the moment about the next one and they are interested, but I’d like to keep the topic hush-hush for now – I’m referring to it as “Project B”! But it does deal with pollination, I can tell you that.

Species Recovery Trust: Q&A with Dominic Price

The Species Recovery Trust is devoted to preventing the loss of some of the rarest plant, insect and animal species in the UK, with their primary aim being to remove 50 species from the edge of extinction by 2050. With a team of highly skilled conservationists and passionate volunteers, the Species Recovery Trust has been doing targeted recovery work for the past 10 years, and many species are now showing an increase in their population numbers for the first time in decades.

We spoke to Dominic Price at the Species Recovery Trust about how the trust is working to save some of the most endangered species in the UK, some of their success stories, the challenges they face as a charity with COVID-19 and how you can get involved and support their work.

Could you introduce the Species Recovery Trust to us and summarise your main goals as a charity?

The Species Recovery Trust was founded in 2012 with the goal of saving some of the UK’s most endangered species. We cover a small number of species but base our work on a 30-year workplan, allowing us to plan work decades ahead, and start these species on the long and often slow road to full recovery. Our broader goal has been to develop the most cost effective way of doing this long term work, generating as much of our funds as possible through our own commercial activities (training and consultancy) which would allow us to de-couple from the larger funding streams and sustain the work, however bleak the funding climate may become.

One of your main aims is to remove 50 species from the edge of extinction in the UK by the year 2050. How did you choose which of the 900+ UK species that are currently under threat were the most critical to focus on?

With some difficulty! In essence we started with the IUCN red list and worked our way down from the top. It soon became clear that with certain species, like Atlantic Halibut, we were unlikely to be able to do much from our bases in the English countryside, so we started to focus in on terrestrial species with a limited distribution, and by researching the ecology for those we could see which species were likely to respond well to the sort of onsite habitat restoration work we specialise in. There was obviously a fairly significant political element, in not wanting to tread on any toes of people who were already carrying out established work. So there was much dialogue with other small NGOs and from there discovering the main species that have fallen through the gaps of others work. We currently work on 22 species and have three in development, so still have vacancies for another 25!

There were times when it can be deeply depressing looking at the Red List, with the sheer amount on there, but we knew we would always be a small player and it was just a case of picking a handful and then making sure we did the best possible job to save them, while trying not to feel too despondent about the current mass extinction and the number of species likely to be caught up in that.

What key environmental policy changes do you think would have the biggest impact on preventing species extinctions in the UK?

After 20 years of working in the sector I’m not the biggest fan on policy changes. When I started, the Biodiversity Action Plan (UKBAP) was the big driver. Borne out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit it was an ambitious and hugely exciting bit of work to be involved in. It then started to become clear that the vast majority of targets would be missed, but instead of examining why this happened and putting more resources into it, it was left to quietly die a death, and over the years has been replaced by a whole new raft of policies and goals. I know there’s people doing amazing work in Whitehall to keep lobbying and campaigning for better policies, but I feel for us as a charity the most meaningful work we do tends to be out in the field, with either a quadrat or a pair of loppers. It’s important to keep your eye on the bigger picture, but sometimes the best place to be is very much on the coalface in the exact location where these species are dying out. This has been also been a personal decision for the members of the team, as we all feel we’re at our best doing fieldwork and not stuck behind a computer!

The work of the Species Recovery Trust is obviously ongoing, but what would you consider to be your biggest success story so far?

When we started working on Starved Wood-sedge there were just 32 plants at two sites left in the wild. I had previously been involved with this species through Plantlife’s Back from the Brink programme and knew how perilously close we were to losing this plant from the UK (it went extinct in Ireland in the 1990s and is not faring too well in Europe). After eight years we now have four sites, and over 330 plants – it is still not ‘saved’ but it’s well away from the brink of extinction. Another great moment was when we took on the management of the last known site in Hampshire for Heath Lobelia. We spent three days with work groups clearing scrub off the site, thinking the most likely scenario was to repair the habitat with a view of one day re-introducing plants, and the following summer 660 plants came up where the seedbank had been regenerated. Sadly, following this disturbance the population has dropped back down to 40, reminding us that a species conservationist’s work is rarely done!

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected individuals, communities and organisations in a myriad of unforeseen ways. How have you been challenged this year and how have you coped with these challenges?

One of our strengths as a charity has been that we draw over half our funding from running training courses. It’s the best money as we can spend it on what we want when we want with no deadlines or funding reports, and if you book onto one of our courses your booking fee could be put to use within a week hiring contractors to manage a site, or paying the mileage for a volunteer to monitor a network of sites. We did have a contingency fund in case one year we couldn’t run as many courses, but never predicated a scenario where we had to cancel every single one of them, so this has obviously hit us hard. However, we are extremely lucky in that when we set the charity up we always tried to keep our running costs to virtually zero; we already all work from home and all of us do other jobs alongside our work for the trust, so in 2020 we were able to effectively batten down the hatches and with the additional help of the amazing furlough scheme we have managed to stay afloat. We’ve also had some incredible support from charitable trusts like the Halpin Trust and Hennock Law Trust, which has been a lifeline in these difficult times. But at this time no one is sure if training courses will be able to happen in 2021, and there are now so many charities desperately competing for the remaining funding sources, so uncertain times lie ahead.

Are there different ways that people can get involved with and support the Species Recovery Trust? (e.g. options for those with spare money but little time and vice versa).

We are always looking for species monitors – people who take on a site, preferably close to where they live or go on holiday and can do species counts for us each year, and lots of people gain a huge amount of satisfaction of being the person to keep these sites going. If you purchase a copy of the Field Guide to Grasses, Sedges and Rushes (and the hopefully forthcoming Field Guide to Bryophytes) 100% of the profit goes directly to our work. Alternatively, if you’re feeling generous you can sign up as a paid supporter (there’s a free option too) and you’ll get updates of all our work, as well as knowing your money is going straight to saving some of our rarest plants and animals.

You can find out more about the Species Recovery Trust from their website and by following them on Facebook and Twitter.

Author interview with William Eberhard: Spider Webs

Behavioural ecologist and entomologist William Eberhard is an emeritus scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and emeritus professor at the Universidad de Costa Rica. His research interests include sexual selection, evolution, and animal behaviour, and one group of organisms he has worked on in particular is spiders. Based on half a century of study, Spider Webs is an unprecedented and very large book on their biology, evolution, and diversity. Leading up to publication, we dipped into the book and asked him some questions.

As I was reading your book, it seemed all the spiders in my garden were out to build webs and I found myself barred from reaching my laundry one morning. How bad should I feel for accidentally destroying a web?

Out of consideration for my fellow inhabitants of the Earth, I always walk around webs rather than through them. But that is my own idiosyncrasy. Many spiders make a new web every day, so having a web knocked down is not a big disaster. Some move away from sites where their webs have been destroyed, so you might decide where to walk, depending on whether you do or do not want the spider to stay at the same site.

Spider webs are marvellous contraptions, even more so when you realise how they are made. You explain how spiders are virtually blind to their own web lines and that webs are often built at night. This implies an important role for tactile senses. Yet, construction starts by floating so-called bridge lines to distant objects, suggesting a role for vision. How good is spider eyesight and how much do we know about their visual acuity?

Eyesight has little and probably nothing to do with their floating bridge lines. Casting those lines down the wind constitutes a blind bet that maybe there is some object there that they will snag on.

You point out that the majority of published behavioural observations have been of mature females. What do we know about males and immature spiders? Is web construction specifically a female activity? Or have we just not looked hard enough?

In most spider families, mature males dedicate themselves nearly strictly to sex –finding receptive females is probably a tough job. They stop making prey capture webs and lose the glands that made the sticky silk in these webs. They also stop eating, except, in a few species, in which males occasionally temporarily appropriate a web from a smaller, immature individual. Immature individuals, both male and female, make webs.

A web is built from various different kinds of silk, and different parts have different functions, from structural support to prey capture. How do spiders control what kind of silk they release, especially given that some species can build a complete web in as little as half an hour?

Presumably valves in the ducts of different types of silk glands open or close to control which types of silk are extruded from the corresponding spigots. Even in a given orb, the kinds of silk that are used to cement lines together are turned on and turned off hundreds of times in an extremely precise manner during the construction of a single web.

You mention that orb webs are neither the pinnacle of web evolution nor necessarily the optimally designed structures that they are often claimed to be. Most organismal traits are a product of history and contingency as much as natural and sexual selection. I might be asking you to speculate here, but, in your opinion, are there any particular evolutionary thresholds that spiders have not been able to cross that would make a big difference for web construction?

There is a small section in the book (Section 9.8) where I discuss web designs that are possible but that have not arisen in spiders. In general, they have used radial rather than rectangular arrangements of lines; I do not know whether the widespread adoption of and ensuing variations on rectangular arrangements would have made a big difference or not.

Do you find that technological advances have changed the way arachnologists work and the sorts of questions they ask?

Yes, very much so. Important techniques that have begun to be used and that have produced new kinds of data during my lifetime include electron microscopy (especially scanning electron microscopy), molecular comparisons to produce phylogenies, digital movies, virtual sections (“micro-CT scans”), and large scale, computerized data analysis. At the same time, fads for using these techniques have led to less frequent use of simpler but powerful types of observations such as study of the details of behaviour.

Producing a book of this scope must have been a tremendous job, and you remark that a thorough, book-length review of spider webs had yet to be written, despite more than a century of research on spiders. With the benefit of hindsight, would you embark on such an undertaking again?

I seriously underestimated how difficult it would be. I had written two books previously, both largely concerned with ideas, rather than being attempts to review previous work as was the case in this book. My previous experience did not prepare me for the challenges of reviewing and evaluating – and in some cases arguing against (hopefully sympathetically and constructively) – conclusions from previous work.

You mention this book’s coverage is inevitably idiosyncratic. What lacunae remain in our knowledge that future authors could fill with further work?

My major deficiencies are in the chemical and mechanical aspects of silk – a field that is currently very active and that will undoubtedly eventually (perhaps soon) result in book-length treatments. A second major blank space that I hope will be filled with future work is linking web construction behaviour to the slowly emerging but very important field of animal cognition. The many advantages of orb webs for studying the details such as errors and other difficult questions in the behaviour in animals whose behaviour has a major innate component (and probably little in the way of learning) have yet to be exploited.

Spider Webs: Behavior, Function, and Evolution
By: William Eberhard
Hardback | November 2020 | £59.99

All prices correct at the time of this article’s publication.

Buglife Q&A with Paul Hetherington

Buglife is the only organisation in Europe devoted to the conservation of all invertebrates. Invertebrates are currently facing an extinction crisis.
Today, thousands of invertebrate species are declining and many are heading towards extinction. Worldwide 150,000 species could be gone by 2050 if we do nothing. We spoke to Paul Hetherington at Buglife about the work they are doing to stop the extinction of invertebrates.

Can you tell us a little bit about the history of Buglife and what you consider to be your main goals?

The conservation movement grew during the 1990s, but there was no organisation specialising in invertebrates. This was brought sharply into focus by the creation of the UK Biodiversity Action Plan in 1994, when no organisation existed to fly the flag for invertebrates – to make sure their conservation needs were being looked after. A Feasibility Committee was established to look at the details of setting up an invertebrate conservation body, and ‘A Statement of Need for a New Organisation’ was produced. Twenty of the leading conservation organisations (including the RSPB and Wildlife Trusts) acknowledged that the conservation movement lacked a major spokesman for invertebrate conservation, and welcomed the establishment of one. The result was the foundation of Buglife in 2000, the only organisation in Europe devoted to the conservation of all invertebrates.

Buglife’s aim is to halt the extinction of invertebrate species and to achieve sustainable populations of invertebrates.

We are working hard to achieve this through:

– Promoting the environmental importance of invertebrates and raising awareness about the challenges to their survival.

– Assisting in the development of legislation and policy that will ensure the conservation of invertebrates.

– Developing and disseminating knowledge about how to conserve invertebrates.

– Encouraging and supporting invertebrate conservation initiatives by other organisations in the UK, Europe and worldwide.

– Undertaking practical conservation projects that will contribute to achieving our aim.

In an ideal world where funding for conservation was limitless, what would be your top priorities for ensuring the survival of invertebrates and rectifying the damage that has been done to their populations and habitats?

Putting connectivity back into the landscape. Invertebrates are suffering from a plethora of issues: habitat loss, pesticides and herbicides, climate change, isolation of habitat. Connecting up the remaining good habitat is the single most important change for invertebrates as they can escape natural or human made disaster where they live and can migrate to avoid extreme climate change. This is the principle behind Buglife’s B-Lines project that has plotted a route for connectivity between the best remaining invertebrate habitats across the UK.

On your website you feature the famous quote by David Attenborough that concludes with the terrifying line: “…if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world’s ecosystems would collapse.” Do you think that in general we still place too much emphasis on saving what is often referred to as the ‘charismatic megafauna’ and do not value the smaller animals and plants that are the backbone and life support of our world?

A look at how money is invested in saving species reveals that larger mammals are by far the biggest beneficiaries at over £60 per species whilst invertebrates the worst funded at under 6 pence per species. A sad reflection on how humans fail to understand that if we don’t look after the small creatures the big ones will disappear too, bottom-up conservation has far more likelihood of long term sustainability. Yes, tigers and similar have cute cuddly eyes but without invertebrates the food chains that they depend on would collapse and with them the megafauna would go too. Too often we take the invertebrates for granted as something that is just there, small and ‘insignificant’ forgetting that in reality they are small but irreplaceable foundations for the whole web of life that supports the megafauna and people too.

2020 has been an extremely challenging year for most individuals and organisations. How has the pandemic affected Buglife and the work that you are doing?

The Covid pandemic has had a massive impact upon all of us and Buglife have had to be extremely careful with project organisation and financial controls, to ensure that vital conservation work has been delivered safely and that our staff resource has been retained in gainful employment. Ways of working have changed with the closure of offices and a shift to home working for all made possible through recent investment in new IT systems. Most engagement activities have shifted from face to face to online platforms as have meetings to influence policy and media. Some of these enforced changes are likely to have a long term beneficial outcome in reducing our organisational carbon footprint and finding new ways of delivering training and engagement that can reach larger audiences. A few of the impacts have meant works being delayed a year such as surveys for specific invertebrates that are only around for short periods. It should also be recognised that new ways of working can place extra burden on staffing resources as meetings flow on without breaks so we have also looked to bring in external supports for staff when needed. The biggest negative impact has been the closure of most project funders to new applications over the pandemic, making it impossible to establish all the new projects hoped for in 2021.

What would you consider to be your greatest success as a charity?

This is a really tough question as over the last 20 years Buglife has achieved saving many sites for invertebrates from developments, banning extremely harmful chemicals, persuading governments to adopt pollinator strategies, but for sheer scale, B-Lines mapping completed across the entire UK has got to be the number one achievement, as there is now a route map for future interventions to ensure the long term survival of the small things that run the planet.

Finally, for anyone inspired to get involved in invertebrate conservation, how would you recommend that they do this?

Practical experience of conservation work is as important as qualifications, a sound knowledge of a few groups of invertebrates is a great extra to have but equally important is experience of public engagement, volunteer leadership and above all else an ability to multitask.

You can find out more about Buglife and the work they do from their website and by following them on Facebook and on Twitter

Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust Friends’ Day 2020

British Wildlife’s Assistant Editor Catherine Mitson joins the supporters of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust (ARC) for their annual Friends’ Day. With exclusive site visits and Q&A sessions on the agenda, this year’s Friends’ Day was set to be a great event. Here, Catherine shares with us some of the highlights.

Thankfully, with the existence of Zoom, the ARC Friends’ Day 2020 could go ahead, albeit not its usual format. The Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust planned a jam-packed Saturday afternoon to give their supporters the opportunity to see what ARC has been up to and to learn more about Britain’s native reptile and amphibian species.

Woolmer Forest is one of the most extensive and diverse lowland heathlands in Hampshire and home to 12 out of our 13 native reptile and amphibian species, including the rare Smooth Snake and Sand Lizard. Excitingly Blackmoor Heath, a 20ha site in Woolmer Forest, has become ARC’s newest nature reserve after a year-long fundraising appeal. Once introduced to the ARC team (most of whom were sporting fun animal-themed virtual backgrounds) the first video began, and we were taken on a virtual tour of the new reserve.

A priority at Blackmoor Heath is to reintroduce the Natterjack Toad, extending its range in Hampshire. Reducing tree cover and creating ponds are a few examples of the work being undertaken here to support a reintroduced population of Natterjacks. Not only is this vital management for Natterjacks and many other heathland species, this has also led to the exposure of bronze age barrows, or burial mounds – Blackmoor Heath is not only important for wildlife, but historically too.

Blackmoor – by the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust

Next, Field Officers Ralph and Bryony took us to Crooksbury Common in Surrey, an important breeding site for Natterjack Toads. Bordered by a pine plantation, one of the major tasks here is to prevent the encroachment of pine trees, which if left unmanaged, would soon smother valuable heathland habitat. In the hope to restore good numbers of Natterjack Toads, the ARC team are also busy creating and maintaining large shallow ponds, critical for Natterjack breeding and egg-laying, as well as providing shelter for Natterjack adults during the cold winter months. We were also shown key Natterjack identification features, such as the distinctive yellow stripe that runs down the middle of their back.

Moving away from heathlands, we suddenly found ourselves on the dunes of Aberdovey, Wales to discover all about the Connecting the Dragons project. ARC staff and volunteers have been working hard to create exposed sand patches on the dunes here (socially distanced of course) to provide the reintroduced population of Sand Lizards with basking spots and egg-laying sites, as well as making next year’s surveying much easier!

Perhaps not common knowledge to many, there are actually two races of Sand Lizard: the Northern dune race and the Southern heathland race. The morphological differences between the two races were described, highlighting the distinctive identification features. For instance, the males of the Northern dune race tend to be much lighter when they first emerge from hibernation compared to those of the Southern heathland race.

Image by the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust

The final site visit video took us to Dorset. Designated as a Special Area for Conservation and a SSSI, Great Ovens, an ARC nature reserve in Wareham Forest since 1996, is a truly special site. Similarly to Crooksbury Common, a surrounding pine plantation and the threat of scrub invasion means that a sensitive management programme is necessary to maintain the important mix of wet and dry heathland. This is not only beneficial for the amphibians and reptiles on the site, including Adders, Smooth Snakes and Sand Lizards, but also for other species such as Dartford Warbler, Silver-studded Blue, and Scarce Chaser. This was a common theme – habitat management for reptiles and amphibians will have a positive knock-on effect for other species, particularly in declining heathland habitats.

Great Ovens – by the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust

Finally, Public Engagement Officer Owain took us out to find the rare Smooth Snake. Owain was successful in his search, and was able to show us a male Smooth Snake curled up safely underneath refugia (note that a license is required to monitor or handle this species). Owain went on to describe ARC’s ambitious four-year long Snake in the Heather project. Working in partnership with landowners, site managers and wildlife conservation charities, Snakes in the Heather endeavours to conserve the Smooth Snake across its range in southern England, as well as the lowland heathland habitat on which it, and many other species, depends.

Smooth Snake – by Chris Dresh

Throughout the Friends’ Day there were many opportunities for questions during the Q&A panel sessions; we learnt even more about ongoing ARC projects, the management of ARC’s nature reserves and the ecology of UK reptile and amphibian species. Many of the attendees were keen to know what they could do to help Britain’s reptiles and amphibian species and the ARC team enthusiastically provided us with information on how to get involved.

If you’re interested in becoming an ARC volunteer, or would like to become an ARC Friend to support their fantastic conservation work, you can find out more on their website.

Author Interview with Ian Parsons, A Vulture Landscape: Twelve Months in Extremadura

Vultures are a crucial part of many of the world’s ecosystems, and without these specialist environmental cleansers many ecosystems wouldn’t function. In A Vulture Landscape we share a calendar year in the lives of these gargantuan raptors as they live, breed, feed and fly with effortless ease across the skies of the vulture landscape that is Extremadura in central Spain.

Author, Ian Parsons visited us at NHBS to answer some questions about these often maligned birds and also *signed a limited amount of copies of his new book.

*All signed copies have now sold

Could you tell us a little about your background?

I was born and grew up in Devon in south west England, as I grew up I became more and more interested in the natural world, I can remember becoming fascinated by slow worms when I was around seven years old, although I also remember my mum’s slightly horrified reaction when I happily brought one into the house to show her. I wanted to be a Ranger from an early age and after a countryside management course at college I became one for twenty years. When the time was right for a change, myself and my wife moved to Extremadura in Spain where we set up Griffon Holidays, running specialist bird tours in this amazing region that I had first discovered almost twenty years before.

Why did you chose to write about vultures?

Because they are brilliant! I am a massive natural history fan and geek and I’m passionate about all types of wildlife, I would say that trees and birds are my two main interests and when it comes to birds there is nothing like a vulture. Watching birds with a nigh on three metre wingspan gliding right past you is an amazing experience, they are masters of the air and take flight efficiency to the extreme, they can read the air and its movements and to watch them is mesmerising. In the book I mention several times how my favourite past time is Vulture Gazing, just sitting back and watching them drift across the blue sky above you, it is a great way to declutter your mind, everyone should vulture gaze!

What’s special about Extremadura and its fauna and flora?

Extremadura is a region in western Spain, it is roughly twice the size of Wales, but with only one third of the human population, it is relatively empty of people and full of amazing wildlife. It has long been known as a bit of a destination for birders and rightly so. There are Great and Little Bustards, two species of Sandgrouse, colourful stars such as the Blue Rock Thrush, Roller and Bee-eater, NHBS’s very own Hoopoe is abundant and then there are the birds of prey, five species of eagle, three species of kite, falcons, harriers etc. And of course there are the vultures, the Griffon Vulture, Black Vulture and Egyptian Vulture, the skies always have something interesting in them.

Spending time on the flower rich plains in the spring listening to the wall to wall surround sound song track of abundant larks whilst raptors drift by overhead is one of life’s pleasures.

What were the major challenges you faced while writing your book?

I think the biggest difficulty is knowing when to stop! When you are passionate about something it is very easy to get carried away.

What impact has Covid had and will continue to have on eco-tourism?

It has had a massive impact. I had to cancel the tours for 2020 which were fully booked, personally it is heart breaking to have to tell people that their trip which they had been really looking forward to is off. But everybody knew why the decision had to be made. I always put the clients up in a lovely Spanish town in a local family run hotel, they are lovely people and they are having to endure a really bad situation. As to the future? Who knows, the situation is so unclear at the moment, it is impossible to make any real plans.

Is it fair to say that vultures have a bit of an unfair reputation?

Vultures are associated with death, it’s what they do, they are scavengers and they eat dead things. We humans don’t like the subject of death, we actively avoid it and therefore anything that is associated with it tends to be seen in a negative light. But vultures need to be seen in a positive light, many of the world’s vulture species are critically endangered, the last category before extinction, they are in that position because of us. Vultures do an incredible job, they are nature’s environmental cleansers and they help keep ecosystems healthy and functioning, they can deal with diseases like bovine TB, rabies and even anthrax, they remove these diseases before they can become a threat to us, they help keep people safe. We should celebrate them and most certainly enjoy them, I hope my book will go some way to helping improve the image of these brilliant birds.

Recently a Bearded Vulture has had an extended stay in Britain, is this normal?

It’s not normal, it is only the second time that one of these majestic birds has been recorded in Britain (in 2016 one briefly visited Devon and South Wales). Vultures are not native to Britain, the climate for one thing is not conducive to them and it is noticeable that after an extended stay in the Peak District the bird has started moving south and east again now that the seasons are changing. Their appearance is the result of some fantastic conservation work carried out in the Alps where the bird has been successfully reintroduced after being persecuted to extinction over one hundred years ago. The new population is absolutely booming, and wild born young are being born in good numbers each year, in 2019 39 young successfully fledged. Vultures like the Bearded don’t breed until they are around five years old and after they become independent the young birds like to wander. For a vulture, distance is rather irrelevant, they often fly several hundred kilometres in a day’s foraging, and it is one of these young birds that has turned up in Britain this year, but the bird is just an avian sightseer and hopefully it will return safely to its natural range before very long. Whilst it will remain unusual for these birds to turn up in Britain on their travels, the continued success of the conservation work in the Alps means that there will be a chance that other wandering young will follow in the future.

After a well-earned rest, are there any plans or works-in-progress that you can tell us about?

I am currently involved in a great new project that aims to rewild your inbox! Purple Crow sends out a mixture of great photography and great writing to your inbox throughout the week, the idea is to inspire people with stunning images and inspiring words, see purplecrow.co.uk for more details. Book wise I am working on a book looking at the wildlife of Britain through the seasons.

A Vulture Landscape: Twelve Months in Extremadura
By: Ian Parsons
Paperback | October 2020| £15.99 ~~£17.99~~

Readers can enter the world of the vulture, get to know these amazing birds and learn how they control diseases that threaten us, why some species have bald necks, as well as how they have mastered the art of flying without expending any energy.

All prices correct at the time of this article’s publication.

Froglife: Interview with CEO Kathy Wormald

Kathy Wormald, CEO of Froglife, recently took the time to talk to us about the national charity dedicated to the conservation of amphibians and reptiles. In this insightful and inspiring conversation we talk about some of the threats facing amphibians and reptiles, the ways in which Froglife are addressing these challenges, how Covid-19 is affecting them as a charity, and share simple ways in which you can get involved with amphibian and reptile conservation.

Firstly, can you give us a brief introduction to Froglife and your main goals for amphibian and reptile conservation.

Froglife is a wildlife conservation charity with a specific focus on the UK’s native reptiles and amphibians and their habitats. We are a practical organisation working on the ground improving sites for our species such as creating wetland habitats, improving grasslands and woodlands and monitoring our species and their habitats. Central to our ethos is to ensure that as many people as possible, from all walks of life, are able to contribute to nature conservation. We deliver our work through three work programmes: Transforming Landscapes, Transforming People and Transforming Research.

If your wildest dreams could be realised, what would you wish for amphibian and reptile populations, both in the UK and internationally?

To stop decline of amphibian and reptile populations. Internationally amphibians are declining at a faster rate than birds and mammals. To put as much focus on conserving common species as is put on rare species. The lack of emphasis for common species means that many are no longer common. In the UK I would stop the decline of our iconic common toads, decline rates of 68% over the past 30 years. Froglife does have a big focus on common toad conservation but we need to get the whole country behind us.

One of the main problems faced by amphibians and reptiles is mortality and habitat fragmentation due to roads. Can you tell us about the Wildlife Tunnel Campaign and how it hopes to address this problem?

New property developments require roads and these roads often run through sites that are used by wildlife, if they are protected species then action will be taken to try to help the species, however for non-protected species such as common toads, often no action is required. A lot of wildlife migrate across sites as do common toads. Common toads will migrate to their hereditary breeding pond each year and back to their hibernation sites later in the year. This migration often involves toads having to cross roads, in some cases more than one road intersection. Wildlife Tunnels provide a link between the broken site with wildlife being directed with fencing to cross under the road instead of on the road. We are asking people to sign up to our campaign to ensure that all new developments that will have roads running through wildlife sites must install Wildlife Tunnels (see image at bottom of page for more info). These tunnels need to be monitored and maintained at the cost of the developer.

What would you consider to be Froglife’s greatest success stories so far?

The people we help to get involved in wildlife conservation, often working with very disadvantaged communities who don’t get the chance to help nature and who live in nature deficient neighbourhoods, their actions help to improve lots of green spaces in neighbourhoods. The amount of successful habitat works that we do that benefit nature and people. The Toads on Roads patrols that Froglife co-ordinates. The many innovative initiatives that we have developed such as our Wildlife Tunnel Exhibition and Virtual Reality Experience and the Wildlife Visualiser App. Opening up new revenue streams for the sector by highlighting to donors that nature conservation does have social benefits and should be funded by social donors as well as those focusing on the environment.

The Covid-19 pandemic has created a huge number of unforeseen challenges for everyone this year, charities included. How have you been affected and what measures have you taken to deal with the current situation?

Some of our projects couldn’t deliver activities during Covid-19 which meant that many of our beneficiaries didn’t have the opportunity to get involved. Our finances were impacted by the withdrawal of a lot of grant schemes. We face an uncertain future not knowing of further Covid-19 restrictions and funding opportunities. We took very decisive and quick action to deal with the situation. We developed lots of online content and delivered sessions, workshops and training courses online. We even managed to keep our work with people living with dementia going which meant that at least this group of people were supported during very trying times for them. We successfully secured Covid-19 emergency funding. We have restructured the organisation to ensure that we are harnessing the skill set of all of our staff to help us get through this.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to become more involved with amphibian and reptile conservation in the UK?

There are many different ways in which people can become more involved: volunteering is great experience for the individual but also helps us so much with our work. There are plenty of varied volunteering opportunities, either getting outdoors and involved with physical site works, helping with our education work, research or fundraising for us. People can also attend our training courses, they are widely promoted on our website and via social media.

You can find out more about Froglife from their website and by following them on Facebook and Twitter.

Author Interview with Richard Sale: The Common Kestrel

Once a familiar sight motionless above road verges, the population of kestrels has sharply declined, a decline which continues as the intensification of agriculture and the populations of other raptors increases.

Richard Sales comprehensive new study investigates the decline, after first exploring all aspects of the kestrels’ life, from plumage and diet through breeding to survival.

The book includes data from Richard’s recently completed four-year study in which video cameras were installed to watch breeding behaviour in a barn in southern England.

Richard visited us to sign copies of his new book and answer our questions about how his expertise in physics and engineering have been used to find out more about this illustrious falcon.

Richard Sales and Skua at Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic

Could you tell us a little about your background?

I am from Somerset and have maintained my West Country accent all my life, though I haven’t lived there for many years. I did physics as an undergraduate, then did an MSc in theoretical physics (studying energy loss from general relativistic stars), then a PhD in astrophysics flying a large (50kg) gamma-ray telescope suspended under a 3 million cubic foot balloon filled with hydrogen. The telescope flew at 105,000ft and discovered the first-ever gammar-ray pulsar. I then worked as a glaciologist in Switzerland for a while, and then took a job in the UK power industry.

Kai, the male falconry Kestrel used in the experimental flights.

When did you develop an interest in birds?

My father was bird lover and tailored our family holidays around the breeding season, so we went to Exmoor to watch buzzards and so on, rarely going anywhere near a beach and more often than not learning how to survive in poor weather. Both my brother and myself believe we owe our interest in birds to those trips. My father taught us how to watch birds, not just to learn their names so we could impress other people, but to really watch them. That has stayed with me ever since. I was more academic than my brother (who is a chemist – not a pharmacist, a chemist) and Dad wanted me to study zoology, but I chose physics. I also chose climbing as a primary hobby when I was teenager, first rock faces, then mountains, which is why I finished up in Switzerland when I was offered a post that allowed me to live at the Jungfraujoch and climb every weekend.

We lost our grant money in Switzerland, so I had to find another job. But as the years went by birds became more and more important to me. The dual love of birds, and snow and ice drew me to the Arctic and eventually I took very early retirement – I was only in my 40s – so I could spend more time travelling in the Arctic, supporting myself by starting a physics consultancy and writing books. One of the first Arctic-based books was a Poyser on Gyrfalcons which I co-authored with a Russian friend, Eugene Potapov. For that book I was watching gyrs in the Canadian Arctic. There was breeding pair and I watched the male hunting Arctic Ground Squirrels. He was coming from very high and a long way off and I noticed that he was not travelling in a straight line and couldn’t understand why not since the shortest route is the quickest. That lead me to investigate the eyes of falcons and also to build my own Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) so I could track hunting falconry birds.

Has data from the Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) you have developed been used in your books?

I flew my first generation IMUs on all four UK breeding falcons – each time on falconry birds. The unit I flew used the satellites to give me track position and had a barometer for height data (as height from satellites is only accurate if there are a lot of satellites in view, which is sometimes not the case on Scottish moors where I was flying on peregrines). The IMU also had a tri-axial accelerometer, gyro and magnetometer. All the data was stored on a flash drive on the bird so I crossed my fingers each time I flew one that the bird would come back.
In 2018 I co-authored a monograph on Steller’s Sea Eagles, the world’s largest eagle, with two Russian colleagues, and was lucky enough to find a captive Steller’s in this country which I could fly the unit on. That was a seriously interesting time. Steller’s are huge. I remember seeing them for the first time in the wild – in Kamchatka – which was awesome, but the size only became apparent when I saw them above sea ice over the Sea of Okhotsk when they flew with White-tailed Eagles. The White-tailed Eagles are the biggest raptors we see over here, but they were dwarfed by the Steller’s.

I also flew the unit on Merlins for the book published earlier this year. By then I was flying second generation units. These are much smaller, weighing only 3g, and much faster, tracking at 13Hz and collecting tri-axial data at up 1.6kHz. How much I can reduce the weight is important because every additional gram affects the bird in some way, and so particularly for Merlins getting the weight down is vital. Speed of data acquisition is also important because Hobbies, for instance, are incredibly agile and so the unit has to be fast to follow every twist and turn. Flying on a hunting Merlin was a strange experience. On the first flight we put the IMU on, released the bird and it flew 60m and attacked a Blackbird in a hedge. After a short fight the Blackbird escaped. For the rest of that day and several other days, the Merlin didn’t catch anything.

Why did you choose Kestrels as the subject for your latest book?

The UK is very lucky in the four falcons we have as breeding species. Peregrines are renowned for their high-speed stoops, Merlins for their fast chases and ringing flights, Hobbies for their agile flights after dragonflies and Kestrels for their ‘hovering’ search for mammals. A different hunting technique for each. I was particularly interested in Kestrels as in hovering – the official term for the technique is now ‘flight-hunting’ – the head must be held stationary for successful hunting so the body has to absorb the phenomenal forces caused by gravity, beating wings and the drag of gusting wind. I was anxious to investigate how they did it.

Did you encounter any challenges collecting data for your new book: Kestrel?

It required a lot of very sensitive equipment and some skilled operators. We borrowed two hi-speed cameras insured for £250,000 and set them up head-on and side-on to a flight-hunting falconry male Kestrel which carried the IMU. The cameras were running at 800fps and were filming 4k images, vast amounts of data were being collected and stored. The unit on the bird was collecting tri-axial data at 800Hz. It was also collecting satellite timing data, so to align wing, eye and head position we had to have a special time code generator which took a signal from the same satellites and stamped each frame of the film with a time measured in microseconds. The results are impressive in terms of how stable the head and eye position are. We are now preparing a paper for the scientific literature of body orientation relative to head position. It would have been good to have had that in the book as well, but the maths is so complex it is hard to make it easily accessible.

Your book features a four-year study to observe breeding behaviour; can you tell us anything about the methods and findings?

For four successive years we set up an array of video cameras filming breeding Kestrels in a barn in Hampshire. We had one camera filming the comings and goings of the adults and, later the fledglings, and two cameras in the nest box watching egg laying, incubation, hatching and chick growth. We filmed 24 hours every day, turning on IR lights to film at night. We measured egg laying intervals to the nearest minute, found accurate hatch times and watched every prey delivery. We also set up live traps where we knew the male hunted so we could weigh the local voles and mice and estimate how many kgs of rodent it takes to make 1kg of Kestrel. The filming was interesting – over the years the adults brought in slow worms, lizards, frogs and moths, as well as voles, mice and shrews. One male also brought in a weasel. This has long been suspected, but never-before filmed.

Can you tell us about any projects you are currently working on?

Because of COVID there is less money about, and writing books also takes lots of time and hard work. I have already decided I will not do a Peregrine book as there are already enough on the market (though none of them cover flight dynamics the way I would). I had planned to do a Hobby book because their flight is so fascinating, but if 2021 is another COVID year l might not be able to.

The Common Kestrel
By: Richard Sale
Hardback | September 2020| £49.99

Investigates all aspects of the Kestrels’ life, from plumage and diet through breeding to survival: also includes a four-year study in which video cameras capture breeding behaviour. Further studies also investigated the flight using the modern technology of inertial measurement units allied to excellent photography.

Richard Sale has also authored two other titles with Snowfinch Publishing: The Merlin and Steller’s Sea Eagle (with Vladimir Borisovich Masterov and Michael S Romanov)

You can browse all titles by Richard Sale here