Rachel Bates

Naxos – October 2017

10 November 2017 By Rachel Bates

Naxos was a very diverse island, from fertile little pockets of soil around the coast, to rocky mountains and deciduous woodland. As we stayed with a local who knew the island well and who was more than happy to come out with us each day, we covered a lot of ground including several abandoned villages and some old emery mines. And, for the very first time we went on a fishing boat to explore sea caves!

We again came across my favourite bat, the Balkan Long-eared, who obliged us by being very quiet in the hand so we could take a range of measurements. Below the species list are some photos from the trip with some of the species observed in the hand. Just click on the photos below to enlarge them.

Our species list for Naxos, from both trapping and sound recordings, included:

Common Name:	Latin Name:
Greater Horseshoe	Rhinolophus ferrumequinum
Lesser Horseshoe	Rhinolophus hipposideros
Blasius’ Horseshoe	Rhinolophus blasii
Common Pipistrelle	Pipistrellus pipistrellus
Kuhl’s Pipistrelle	Pipistrellus kuhlii
Savi’s Pipistrelle	Hypsugo savii
Greater Mouse-eared	Myotis myotis
Whiskered bat	Myotis mystacinus
Geoffroy’s bat	Myotis emarginatus
Long-fingered bat	Myotis capaccinii
European Free-tail	Tadarida teniotis
Balkan Long-eared	Plecotus kolombatovici

Lesvos – June 2017

10 November 2017 By Rachel Bates

Lesvos is the third biggest Greek island, so on our second trip here we concentrated on the southern and eastern parts of the island. There was such a contrast between the two halves of the island! Forests were much more common, mostly of pine and oak, and the landscape was much more vegetated. This also meant that finding some of the cave locations was challenging as there was often a lot of spikey vegetation between us and it…

We had a curiosity on this trip in the form of a Myotis species that seemed to have characteristic features from two different species, so we are looking forward to receiving the DNA analysis results from the wing punches taken. And after five trips of catching fragments of Mehely’s horseshoe’s echolocating, we finally caught some that were roosting in a cave with several other species of bat.

Our species list for Lesvos, from both trapping and sound recordings, included:

Common pipistrelle	Pipistrellus pipistrellus
Kuhl’s pipistrelle	Pipistrellus kuhlii
Savi’s pipistrelle	Hypsugo savii
Greater mouse-eared	Myotis myotis
Long-fingered bat	Myotis capaccinii
Whiskered	Myotis mystacinus sp.
Greater horseshoe	Rhinolophus ferrumequinum
Mehely’s horseshoe	Rhinolophus mehelyi
Lesser horseshoe	Rhinolophus hipposideros
Blasius’ horseshoe	Rhinolophus blasii
Geoffroy’s bat	Myotis emarginatus
Leisler’s	Nycatlus leisleri

Mehely’s Horseshoe

Another Survey Season

4 April 2017 By Rachel Bates

Before you know it, another survey season is suddenly here! As Castle Hill Ecology is entering its third year I thought it was a good time to have a company logo designed. Daniel Gould, a freelance graphic designer based in Cambridge, has done an amazing job in creating a design for me that encompasses the story behind the name with the work that I do.

In other news, the last few months have been spent catching up on odd jobs, concentrating on CPD, and gaining a few new qualifications and licences – I am now a qualified Emergency First Aider at Work and am registered to use the Class 4 bat licence from Natural England to enable me to use harp traps and acoustic lures. I’m hoping a project comes in this summer where I might be able to catch and hand ID some bats as part of survey effort.

Learning About Hedgehogs

9 January 2017 By Rachel Bates

A few weeks before Christmas I attended a Hedgehog Ecology and Conservation course, run by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) at their offices in Battersea, London. As well as being an educational day we ventured into Battersea Park for a practical session and got to know other hedgehog enthusiasts in the process.

Hedgehog populations have declined alarmingly over the last few decades and the PTES are working with the British Hedgehog Preservation Society to promote awareness of their plight and to encourage people to step up and help conserve them. Whether it is joining their ‘Hedgehog Street’ project and allowing hedgehogs access to your garden, sending in records of sightings or helping with research, there are a number of ways you can get involved.

What I found particularly fascinating was that while hedgehogs aren’t very territorial, they can travel up to 2km in a single night and radio tracking studies in urban areas have shown that their home ranges can cover up to 20 hectares, meaning that connecting our gardens to one another is more important than we may think!

Lesvos – October 2016

22 November 2016 By Rachel Bates

Lesvos is the third biggest Greek island, so on this trip we concentrated on the north and west parts of the island. It was challenging to find potential roost locations and likely trapping sites due to the volcanic geology in this barren-looking region; there were no caves as such, old mines were either blocked up or impossible to find (as were some of the caves), streams and rivers sank underground, and there was little in the way of forests.

Despite this however, we had some interesting evenings trapping by the west coast and we caught a bat that we had recorded on the last few trips but never seen…. the long-fingered bat. And in a tunnel up in the mountains we caught another new species, the Mediterranean horseshoe. We ended up with a good species list for the island as well as a puzzle to be solved in the form of very small adult pipistrelles.

Our species list for Lesvos, from both trapping and sound recordings, included:

Common pipistrelle	Pipistrellus pipistrellus
Kuhl’s pipistrelle	Pipistrellus kuhlii
Lesser mouse-eared	Myotis blythii
Greater mouse-eared	Myotis myotis
Long-fingered bat	Myotis capaccinii
Greater horseshoe	Rhinolophus ferrumequinum
Lesser horseshoe	Rhinolophus hipposideros
Mediterranean horseshoe	Rhinolophus euryale
Blasius’ horseshoe	Rhinolophus blasii

Andros – June 2016

31 July 2016 By Rachel Bates

Andros was a wonderful island with a lot of old mines, one of which extended for about 1km before coming out the other side of the hill, with numerous side passages and vertical shafts. Numerous streams running down from the mountains towards the sea made for good netting locations, although some sites were a challenge to net due to vegetation and wind!

We found a good range of species of Andros including my favourite, the Balkan Long-eared, and I also saw a baby Greater Horseshoe for the first time. Below the species list are some photos from the trip with some of the species observed in the hand. Just click on each photo to enlarge it if you wish!

Our species list for Andros, from both trapping and sound recordings, included:

Common Pipistrelle	Pipistrellus pipistrellus
Kuhl’s Pipistrelle	Pipistrellus kuhlii
Savi’s Pipistrelle	Hypsugo savii
European Free-tail	Tadarida teniotis
Blasius’s Horseshoe	Rhinolophus blasii
Greater Horseshoe	Rhinolophus ferrumequinum
Lesser Horseshoe	Rhinolophus hipposideros
Balkan Long-eared	Plecotus kolombatovici
Geoffroy’s bat	Myotis emarginatus
Lesser Mouse-eared	Myotis blythii
Steppe Whiskered	Myotis aurascens
Long-fingered bat	Myotis capaccinii

Andros

CS38 Tree Climbing and Aerial Rescue

5 March 2016 By Rachel Bates

The last week of February was mostly spent high up in various trees at Bridgwater College in Somerset. The purpose of the week? To become professionally qualified in tree climbing using ropes and performing aerial rescues. I loved it!

Over a period of four days, myself and three other attendees learned about ropes, knots, climbing systems, health and safety, legislation in regards to equipment and working at heights, emergency procedures, actually climbing trees, rescuing people from up in a tree, and doing branch walks, as well as climbing and rescuing from a ‘pole’ using spikes.

It was a very intensive and physically demanding week but we had a wonderful instructor who was very patient and had a good sense of humour. And after a long assessment time on the Saturday, we all came away with a pass. Yay!

The reason for gaining this qualification is so that I along with a second qualified surveyor can climb trees to inspect features that may have potential to support roosting bats, and to climb and inspect trees before any tree works or felling.

And the views from the canopy were lovely too.

Conservation Weekend

4 February 2016 By Rachel Bates

Last weekend, for the third year in a row, I joined a group of like-minded conservation volunteers for a weekend of practical woodland management on the beautiful Isle of Wight.

Briddlesford woodlands are part of a nature reserve owned by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES). I help with hazel dormouse monitoring here during the spring and autumn, leading a group of 3-4 people as part of a much larger group to check the 560 or so dormouse boxes for the presence of these elusive and adorable mammals (my old dormouse trainer tried to ban me from saying ‘adorable’ but it hasn’t worked).

Every January, a group of 30-40 keen volunteers meet up for a weekend of mud, brambles, rain, tea around camp fires, and fajita’s. As well as it being a good social gathering, the weekend is a great chance to learn some new skills and spend some quality time in nature.

There are a number of different groups each with their own task for the weekend. Whether it be coppicing hazel, removing sycamore saplings, clearing woodland rides or felling trees, volunteers can work on various tasks that contribute towards the management of these woodlands.

This year I was part of a group that was clearing a stretch of 200m on either side of the railway line running through the woods. Ivy and bramble were cut to ground level and rakes were used to expose soil under a good layer of leaf litter. The aim of this task was to clear the area for reptile fencing to be installed, as part of PTES’s project looking into designing a successful dormouse bridge.

Dormouse populations are on either side of the railway line and this project aims to see if dormice prefer using an artificial bridge or will travel over ground across the rail tracks. A test run last autumn using camera traps revealed dormice and other mammals, including red squirrel, using the bridge within a matter of days, so it is hoped that a commercial, affordable dormouse bridge design will arise from the project that can be used for mitigation measures within ecological consultancy.

As well as the satisfaction of a job well done, such practical conservation work is a good chance to observe and see interesting bits and pieces, like the wandering trail of a grub eating its way through a bramble leaf or the nationally scarce narrow-leaved lungwort in flower.

And, as ever, there is always time for a catch up.

CSCS Certified

1 February 2016 By Rachel Bates

Up until autumn 2015 I carried out ecological supervision works on construction sites without a CSCS card – I attended site safety inductions, was supervised on site by a registered and competent person, and the works were carried out with no further ado.

However, for a new infrastructure project that I will hopefully be working on during 2016, we were required to be CSCS card registered. I and two other ecologists attended a one day ROLO health and safety course and completed the CSCS health, safety, and environment test for managers and professionals, and duly passed.

As members of CIEEM, our cards are a professionally qualified persons card; grey if you are a full member of CIEEM and a red graduate if you are associate or lower, which is the one I now have. As I will be applying for full CIEEM membership at the end of this year I will then be able to apply for the grey professionally qualified persons card.

Hedgerow Assessments

14 December 2015 By Rachel Bates

From time to time I miss education and learning – after being in education for nearly 20 years it can be quite difficult getting used to life without it! – so to keep my mind ticking over (and to make sure I’m on the ball in the ecology world) I sign up for ecological training courses whenever something takes my interest.

At the end of November, I attended a Hedgerow Assessment and Winter Tree Identification course near the New Forest, which was run through the Charted Institute for Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM). The morning session looked at the legislation and requirements of assessing hedgerows as ‘important’ under the Hedgerows Regulations 1997.

The Hedgerows Regulations protects important hedgerows by controlling their removal through a system of notifications. Hedgerows are classed as important if they meet certain criteria, such as the number of woody species present, old historical features, or old parish boundaries.

After getting through the necessary legislation we spent the afternoon out in the field, where our tutor led us to some nearby hedgerows running alongside a country track. We split up into pairs and proceeded to carry out an ‘assessment’ of our own 30m strips and then relate our findings.

Our particular hedgerow was important based on the number of woody species present alone – a total of 9 different species, including spindle and buckthorn, neither of which I had observed in hedgerows before. As the hedgerows along the track contained so many different species it was also an ideal place to practice our winter tree ID.

And no winter tree ID course would be complete without a quiz at the end!

As the course was within 30 minutes drive of Lyndhurst I stayed there for a few nights, giving me the chance to explore a little bit more of this special place.