Category Archives: Events

Inter-Island Environment Meeting – Alderney, October 2015

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AWT 2015

 

 

 

The organisers of this year’s Inter-Island Environment Meeting (IIEM) cordially invite you to Alderney. This year’s event will be hosted by the States of Alderney (SoA) and the Alderney Wildlife Trust (AWT) and held 1st – 2nd October 2015.

Insurance Corporation logoOnce again the IIEM is generously supported by Insurance Corporation.

Location: Ann French Room, The States of Alderney, Island Hall, Alderney.

Theme: Mind the Gap: The importance of ecological research and its use as a mechanism for environmental management within the Islands.

Key Note Speaker: Aubrey Manning, OBE, FRSE, FIBiol, distinguished English zoologist, broadcaster and President of the British Wildlife Trusts from 2005-2010.

Aim and objectives:  The general aim of the IIEM is give Government bodies, NGOs, environmental managers and relevant individuals the opportunity to discuss the status of the island’s environments.

The 2015 IIEM comprises of three objectives, for delegates to:

  • present a range of environmental topics relevant to their organisation and island. This can include environmental tourism and public outreach programmes.
  • discuss current or future island projects which effectively link ecological research with environmental management. This is due to the AWT aiming to develop existing and new projects which effectively link ecology research with management practices on island and beyond.
  • discuss the potential for joint field-based ecological training across the Channel Islands.

Les Etac GannetryIntended audience: The IIEM is relevant to ecological, conservation, environmental management bodies (government/NGO) and individuals from the Channel Islands and other regions, such as the Isle of Man and UK.

For further details on the event please contact Dr Mel Broadhurst at marine@alderneywildlife.org

Travel: Travelling to Alderney can be either through air or boat travel. AWT are currently sourcing travel discounts from Guernsey and Jersey, and if you are interested in coming but cost is the defining issue, please contact Mel Broadhurst and we’ll do our best to distribute support to help with transport where possible.

Air travel:

From the UK, Aurigny Air Services fly direct from Southampton. Flights from other UK/French airports require transfer via Guernsey.

From the Channel Islands, Aurigny Air Services fly to Alderney from Guernsey and from Jersey via Guernsey.

From France and inter-island, the private service called Ma Compagnie are available for charter.

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Boat travel:

Scheduled sea links to Alderney available from Guernsey:

From Guernsey, Bumblebee Boat Cruises offers regular crossings between Guernsey and Alderney.

Scheduled sea links to Alderney available from France:

Lady Maris II offers crossings to and from Cherbourg every Wednesday and Saturday, and every Thursday to and from Guernsey, Sark and Herm. Bookings with Alderney Gift Box.

ALDERNEY FROM THE SEA

Accommodation: There are a variety of accommodation on Alderney, including hotels, guest houses and a campsite. For further information please see Visit Alderney’s website for details.

Reduced accommodation costs is available with some hotels and guest houses, please contact Mel Broadhurst for further information.

For further details of the event and booking visit AWT here

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Birds On The Edge on Open Country

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helencliffsmileyOn 29th July, Birds On The Edge was again in the spotlight when the team from the BBC’s long-running radio programme Open Country interviewed Harriet and Glyn with the choughs at Sorel. Producer Alasdair Cross and presenter Helen Mark caught up with the team and the chough flock on a beautifully sunny and calm morning.

The Open Country team learned all about Birds On The Edge and its work with local farmers and helping birds through the winter, and the project to bring back the red-billed chough. All 16 free-flying choughs were present and performed perfectly for their starring role. Harriet was even able to point out Dusty’s voice in the flock amid the general chough chatter.

During their stay in the Island, Alasdair and Helen also interviewed BOTE stalwarts, Mike Stentiford and Bob Tompkins as well as people in other walks of life in the countryside including archaeologist Matt Pope.

Open Country will be broadcast on Thursday13th August at 3pm on BBC Radio Four and repeated at 6am on Saturday 15th August. The episode recorded in Jersey, and others in the series, can be heard again on iPlayer here.

Alasdair’s recording of the chough calls at Sorel can be heard on the Sounds Of Our Shores website.

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Jersey’s Rangers come together to celebrate World Ranger Day

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NE-IM-World Ranger Day 2015 Photo 30.07.2015World Ranger Day 2015

Rangers from both the National Trust for Jersey and the States of Jersey will be getting together on 31st July to remember rangers from around the world who have put their lives on the line to protect the planet’s natural environment and the wildlife that lives there.

World Ranger Day was set up by the International Ranger Federation in 2007 and promoted by their partners, the Thin Green Line Foundation, to celebrate the work rangers do to protect the world’s natural and cultural treasures and commemorate rangers killed or injured in the line of duty.

Rangers in Jersey don’t face the same dangers that some of their counterparts do around the world, but the dedicated rangers from the States of Jersey and the National Trust for Jersey provide a valuable and sometimes forgotten service in keeping Jersey’s countryside beautiful and protecting the Island’s wildlife. So, if you think that the natural places in Jersey, or elsewhere in the world, are looking good, remember the hard-working people who make sure they do so.

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Listen to Birds On The Edge on Talking Naturally discussing the project and Dusty the chough

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Dusty with parents. Sorel, Jersey 9-7-2015. Photo by Cris Sellares (7)

IMG_1119This week Liz and Glyn talked to Charlie Moores about Birds On The Edge and the excitement of Dusty joining the chough population at Sorel. Charlie, who hosts Talking Naturally, has long been a keen supporter of Birds On The Edge and recorded our conversation for a podcast which you can listen to as well.

IMG_1117Talking Naturally podcasts can be accessed on the Rare Bird Alert website and you can see that Birds On The Edge is in some pretty illustrious company there. You can listen to the interview directly through the RBA website here, through SoundCloud here or download the podcast through iTunes here. We will add the full interview to our own audio section soon.

Please listen to the full interview, Liz and Glyn are the third conversation on the podcast after the RSPB’s Senior Investigations Officer, Mark Thomas, talks about what goes into protecting some of Britain’s rarest birds from disturbance and wildlife criminals such as egg collectors and Tim Mackrill, Reserve Officer for the Lincolnshire & Rutland Wildlife Trust, talks about the Osprey Project which recently celebrated the hatching of its 100th chick.

Listen to the interview here

 

 

Sorel, choughs and sheep on Countryfile

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IMG_1104Last week, particularly on Friday 15th May, we at Birds On The Edge were very honoured to spend time with the BBC’s Countryfile team while they were in the Channel Islands filming an episode for this long running, and very high profile, television programme. After a week setting up the background and discussing just what was possible, and who might perform for the cameras, we were joined by presenter Matt Baker for the choughs and the sheep to make their nationwide bows.

Screen capture Gianna feeding chickOn Friday morning, Harriet introduced Matt to Gianna and her foster baby, known so far just as K. Gianna let Matt feed her and see her baby in their nest. In the afternoon Matt and Harriet joined the team at Sorel to call in the flock of choughs and give them their afternoon feed. The birds waited patiently around the aviary while the best angles for filming were discussed and all came in on cue. They even came back for more mealworms and a re-shoot. After feeding, the birds provided some perfect crowd shots as they flew around, calling.

While the choughs were being filmed, Aaron, Euan, Mist the Dog and the Manx loaghtans waited patiently behind the cameras. They then got their turn for stardom as Aaron introduced Matt to the sheep flock and even caught one unsuspecting ewe for closer inspection. Mist watched on closely.IMG_1095

The filming ended as Matt’s co-presenter Ellie Harrison joined everyone at Sorel, coming from Plémont where she had been with the National Trust team looking at the land restoration underway at the old holiday camp site (see the NTJ Facebook site). Matt and Ellie signed off the show in front of the stunning backdrop of the Island’s north coast and Sorel Point in the sunlight. All the while watched by the choughs and the sheep.

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Please watch the show on Sunday 31st May at 19.00 and again on iPlayer. In writing this we don’t know exactly which shots will be used in the final show but I’m quite sure it’ll all be good. Many thanks to the BBC’s Emily Vaughan Williams and Nick Denning and Durrell’s Rick Jones for working hard to set up our day in the spotlight and to all the Countryfile team for giving the choughs and the sheep their star turns.

GannetCam up and running

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- 004alderney-wildlife-trustIn March we outlined opportunities to watch Channel Islands seabirds remotely through web cameras. We included tantalising details of future access to Alderney’s gannet colonies and even some video from previous seasons. Well, now Alderney Wildlife Trust and LIVE are pleased to update everyone as the camera on Ortac has gone live!

LIVE. Teaching Through NatureThe camera is still a very new instillation and next year we will be able to take full advantage of the supper Falsystems pan/tilt/zoom camera array.  However for 2015, AWT very much hope that GannetCam, when it is officially launched in early to mid-June alongside the Track A Gannet (TAG) project, will provide school students, teachers and the general public an unrivalled view into the world of the this spectacular seabird.

Alderney’s two northern gannet colonies (Les Etacs and Ortac) are, together, the second most southerly colonies in the world and support over 2% of the species’ population. With seven offshore wind farm sites proposed within the English Channel and tidal turbines likely to be deployed in Alderney’s waters, it is more important than ever for us to understand as much about these magnificent birds as possible.

You may notice a plastic bag has caught underneath the camera. Gannets when creating their nest will collect floating debris on the ocean. This originally would only be plant and seaweed material but with the growing problems of plastic pollution in the world’s seas we now find a lot more fishing line and plastic is being used in the nests. The plastic bag you see on camera is an example of this pollution. For more information about marine litter and AWT’s campaign against it visit their website

So please do drop in to GannetCam. There is never a dull moment in a gannet colony when the birds are at home!

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Jersey Bat Day 2015 – 25th April

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Date: 25th April 2015Jersey Bat Group

Times: 09.30-22.00

Venue: Société Jersiaise, Pier Road, St Helier

The Jersey Bat Day event is a collaboration between the Department of the Environment and the Jersey Bat Group. The themes of this year’s day are ‘Bats and woodlands and bats and sound’.

Bats are an ideal indicator of the health of Jersey’s biodiversity as they are extremely long lived for their tiny size and slow to reproduce. This makes them vulnerable to a wide range of environmental impacts including those from building development which can affect the places they roost. They are also exposed to environmental pollutants both directly and through the food they eat, most local species feed mainly on airborne insects.

Speakers in the morning session will include:Bat 4 VR

Bob Cornes, Bedfordshire Bat Group and Trustee, Bat Conservation Trust

Annika Binet, Jersey Bat Group and Ecologist, Annika Binet Ecology

Nicky Brown, Chair, Jersey Bat Group

In the afternoon and evening there will be site visits:

14.30-16.30 at Val de la Mare to learn about how bats use woodland and the woodland bat box project with Miranda Collett, Jersey Bat Group and Trustee, Collett Trust for Endangered Species and Bob Cornes.

19.30-22.00 there will be a roost emergence survey at a property in Trinity (details to be confirmed at lunch) with Annika Binet and Bob Cornes.

A full programme of the event can be downloaded here

To book a place, please contact Henry Glynn by telephone: 441618 or by email h.glynn@gov.je

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Jersey Butterfly Monitoring Scheme conference and training event, 14th March 2015

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JBMSThe current state of Jersey’s butterfly species and how the Island can continue to conserve them to honour its international environmental agreements will be presented at the annual Jersey Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (JBMS) conference next week.

Common blue (f)3 cropThe Jersey Butterfly Monitoring Scheme is a Department of the Environment initiative set up in 2004 to provide information at a local level on changes in the abundance of butterfly species. Approximately 20 volunteers make a weekly count of butterflies at thirty-five locations across the Island. Butterflies are an indicator of the general health of the countryside so this information helps the department monitor the Island’s ecosystems.

Speakers at this year’s free event include:

UKBMSDavid Roy (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology). As head of the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme David will be talking about the success of butterfly recording in the UK since 1976 and what this can tell us about the health of the wider natural environment.

Susan Clarke (Wessex Environment Associates) is a self-employed zoologist, specialising in butterflies. She will be demonstrating how anyone can have fun with their own butterfly mark-release-recapture project and the sort of information you can collect in your back garden.

Paul Chambers (States of Jersey, Department of the Environment) about the state of Jersey’s butterflies based on a full ten-year analysis of the JBMS data between 2004 and 2013.

Gatekeeper10Other speakers will include other JBMS members who will be talking about their work and results during the 2014 monitoring season.

This year’s meeting is timed to coincide with the release of a major report by the Department of the Environment called The State of Butterflies in Jersey. This report is based on an analysis of the results of the JBMS’s first ten years of monitoring and provides detailed information on the conservation status of all Jersey’s butterflies and their habitats. More information about this report will be released in due course.

The event takes place on Saturday 14th March 2015, between 10 am and 3.15 pm at the Durrell Conservation Academy in Trinity. It’s FREE and open to anyone with an interest in local natural history, whatever their level of expertise. If you would like to attend please contact Paul Chambers on (01534) 441630 or email p.chambers@gov.je for more details or to reserve a place.

Further information on the Jersey Butterfly Monitoring Scheme can be found here

JARG Day 2015: Habitat Conservation for Amphibians and Reptiles

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Grass snake in Jersey. Photo by Rob WardThis year’s Jersey Amphibian and Reptile Group (JARG) Day will be held on 14th February from 09:30 – 15:30 at the Frances Le Sueur Centre, St Ouen.

jargThis year the theme is Habitat Conservation for Amphibians and Reptiles and there will be talks from local and UK experts, followed by workshops and field work sessions about local amphibian and reptile identification and survey methods and protocols.

arc-logoThis annual event is open to everyone whether you are interested in learning more about local biodiversity; you are an existing volunteer recorder for JNARRS (Jersey National Amphibian and Reptile Recording Scheme) or would like to learn about becoming a recorder for the first time.

JBP logoThis event is free to attend, however, booking is essential as places are limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis.

This year’s agenda

09.30 –10.00 Arrive (tea/coffee)

10.00 -10.30 Dr John Wilkinson, Amphibian & Reptile Conservation (ARC): Introduction.

10.30 – 11.00 Peter Hill (ARC): Herpetofauna habitat management, how we do it in Wales.

11.00 – 11.30 Sally Dalman, Countryside Ranger, National Trust for Jersey: Relocation, relocation, relocation – How I became a lizard stalker for the summer.

11.30 – 12.00 John Buckley (ARC): Natterjack toad conservation – the long view plus An update on pool frog reintroduction programme.

12.00 – 12.30 Lunch

12.30 –13.00 Nina Cornish, States of Jersey: Jersey National Amphibian & Reptile Recording Scheme (JNARRS) 1st cycle results.

13.00 – 15.30 Dr John Wilkinson (ARC) will lead the workshops.

Workshops
                    Training in amphibian and reptile identification, habitat assessment,
survey methods, survey protocols, recording, health & safety etc.

For more details or to book a place please contact Julia Meldrum: Telephone: 441665 Email: j.meldrum@gov.je

Please note that the afternoon session will include field work, so please come prepared with suitable clothing and footwear for the weather conditions as we will go ahead come rain or shine!

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Birds On The Edge – autumn bird walk. Saturday 1st November

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Stonechat (3). Photo by Mick DrydenWith Cris Sellarés.

Date: Saturday 1st November.

Time: 10.00 am

Duration: Approximately 2 hours.

Meeting point: Sorel top car park (on the left).

Bring: Binoculars and suitable outdoor clothing.

To celebrate the arrival of many migrant and wintering birds, we would like to invite you to a birdwatching promenade by the conservation fields near Sorel.

We hope to see and admire the many species that have been arriving on the Island and are flocking to the bird crops. We have planted these crops to provide food for the birds over the winter and at the moment they are attracting a wealth of migrant and wintering birds. Join us in this walk to find them and participate in a discussion about the conservation efforts being carried out to save birds and other wildlife in Jersey.

Featuring: A variety of species such as meadow pipit, linnet, chaffinch, greenfinch, goldfinch, song thrush, and even some elusive ones such as stonechat, skylark and Dartford warbler.

Guest appearance by the red-billed choughs.

Chaffinch 3. Photo by Mick Dryden