Issue 110 of the Newsletter is now Online

Issue 110 of the Newsletter is now Online HERE 

Articles and announcements include :-

Cardiff Naturalists' Society celebrates 150 years with announcements of

• Prestigious Lecture: An Evening with Iolo Williams with a special event for members at the National Museum of Wales 
• An exhibition at The Cardiff Story

Also: -

• Call for pictures for 150th anniversary events; 
• Biosciences Prize 2017 Eve Treadaway; 
• Weather Report for Cardiff 2016; Members’ Evening 2017; 
• Cardiff Birdwatch 2017; 
• Ruperra Castle Preservation Trust

Cardiff Naturalists’ Society marks 150th Anniversary with a series of fascinating events

This year Cardiff Naturalists’ Society www.cardiffnaturalists.org.uk marks its 150th Anniversary with a series of fascinating events, starting with a prestigious lecture and an exhibition.

In addition to its usual programme of wildlife, environmental and natural history events, it is hosting a special event entitled “An evening with Iolo Williams” in the Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre at the Amgueddfa Cymru/National Museum Wales, Cathays Park, Cardiff, at 7 pm on October 5th 2017.

Tickets for the Evening with Iolo Williams will be priced at £12.00 for adults and £6.00 for children, with a special event as part of the evening for members of the society.

Details of how to purchase tickets for the event will follow in the near future.

There will also be an exhibition at the Cardiff Story Museum, The Hayes, Cardiff, entitled Cardiff Naturalists' Society: The first 150 years! showing the rich history of the society and the many things its members have contributed to the city of Cardiff, the wider South Wales area and the whole of the UK.

This will also feature an Audio-Visual presentation showing some of the wonderful wildlife that we learn about in our indoor meetings and then head out to see on our trips to local wildlife sites, and some of the unusual and rare things we have found in recent years. The exhibition will run from Monday September 4th to Sunday November 26th 2017

Entry to the Cardiff Story Museum is free, opening hours are available on http://www.cardiffstory.com/

To keep up to date on these events and for further information about the society please visit our website or via social media on our: -

Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/CardiffNaturalists/
Twitter feed @CardiffNats
Blog http://cardiffnaturalists.blogspot.com/

Biosciences Prize 2017

Last night (27 March), Eve Treadaway was presented with the Biosciences Prize for 2017, awarded in memory of Prof Ursula Henriques and Dr Mary Gillham, at the last indoor meeting of the CNS winter season.

Eve flew back from Copenhagen where she is currently an Erasmus scholar, to talk to the Society about “Project Noise” - her Cardiff University Biosciences Department student project conducted at the Danau Girang Field Centre in Sabah, Borneo. See the previous post for more about the project, which concerns rainforest bioacoustics.

The evening was completed with a talk by Andy Kendall on the volcanic landscapes and wildlife above and below ground in Lanzarote.

Bioscience Prize winner 2017

We congratulate Eve Treadaway for winning this year's Biosciences Prize. This is our annual student bursary, awarded in memory of past member Ursula Henriques, for the best second-year fieldwork project in the Biosciences faculty at Cardiff University.

She will receive the award at the Cardiff Naturalists' Society meeting on Monday 27 March, when she will also give a presentation of her work entitled "The biological and environmental factors that govern the ‘soundtrack’ of the secondary lowland tropical rainforest surrounding Danau Girang Field Centre", or, for short, 'Project Noise'.

Eve Treadaway writes: 

Project Noise set out to develop a new approach to rainforest bioacoustics, using the extensively described botanic plots of Danau Girang Field Centre, Sabah, Borneo as recording sites. Instead of training bioacoustic work on a particular species or taxonomic group, as is standard practice, this project attempted to record and analyse the bioacoustic product of the ecosystem as a whole, termed here ‘ambient rainforest sound’ (ARS). 

There are numerous interrelated factors that, summed together, result in observed ARS. These can be broadly divided into two groups; biological (i.e. the animal species present at a site) and environmental (i.e. weather, botanic diversity*, time). The aim was to investigate potential relationships both between factors of different groups and of factors within the same group. 

Project Noise was a small first step on the road toward assessing rainforest ecosystem biodiversity and functioning, simply by ‘listening’ to the sound produced. The findings were promising, and more extensive application of the methods employed would enable more powerful statistical analysis and preliminary algorithm design (estimating functioning/biodiversity from acoustic data).

I look forward to sharing Project Noise with the Cardiff Naturalists Society on the 27th of March 2017.

Members Evening 2017

We had a fascinating evening of talks last night 


Al Reeve started the evening talking on the Dr Mary Gillham Archive Project which sEWBREC are running on behalf of all of us who knew Mary

After an introduction to Mary and her career he gave us a full update on where the project has got to working through the approximately 150,000 records that she captured during her life.

he outlined the work as

• 150000 wildlife records to mine out of 20 boxes of assorted papers,
• 14000 slides to digitise (and recover records from),
• 2 unpublished manuscripts to make available digitally,
• an oral record of Mary’s life to create,
• a website, social media presence and blog to create,
• plus biodiversity events, school/community group visits and led walks to organise and run…

As part of the talk and very much after the talk we were able to share our memories of Mary with Al and Pat and they explained how they want to meet with us again and capture this on tape for use in the archive

Further details can be found in a plethora of online services

https://marygillhamarchiveproject.com/
https://www.facebook.com/MaryGillhamArchive/
https://twitter.com/gillhamarchives
https://www.flickr.com/people/marygillhamarchiveproject/


Paul Bowden went next with some excellent pictures of the Birds he had spotted during a trip to California and Arizona. Clearly these are excellent places to visit and Paul has I am sure inspired a few holiday ideas


Eirian Edwards came next with an intriguing talk entitled "Mainly Orchids" where she showed us the range of Orchids that she has been able to see at home in Wales, in the wider UK and around the world. As the title suggested that wasn't all of it as we were treated to a selection of other plants and animals from the places she explored, especially her favourite place Kenfig Burrows


I brought up the rear with a rapid run through some of the places I have been visiting with work over the last few years. On some of those trips I found a brief time to take a walk and see some wildlife like the wonderful Koishikawa Korakuen which is a beautiful landscape garden from the early Edo Period in Tokyo.

Surrounded by buildings such as the Tokyo Dome in the background, it is a real haven

The Moon Bridge

A few other things to note .. the cafe is now open at the university before the meetings take place and we would very much recommend to people that coming early and sharing a coffee etc and having a chat with your friends is a great way to enhance the evening meetings,

It is possible that the sEWBREC team will make use of these times to record some of your memories of Mary Gillham they will let us know

The other speaker for the night that the Cardiff Naturalists Bioscience Prize which we give in honour of Dr Mary Gillham and Professor Ursula Henriques will be myself giving a talk about exploring Lanzarote both above and underground. For those who know me there will be a lot of pictures to hopefully enjoy. The programme is updated with that information

Regards
Andy Kendall

Cardiff Birdwatch 2017

Richard Cowie
The traditional New Year Cardiff Birdwatch took place on 8^th January this year.  It got off to a great start compared to last year: for one thing it wasn’t pouring with rain, and for another Rob and Linda had chosen to start in Cardiff Bay which was full of interesting birds. 

Twenty three members of the Cardiff Naturalists’ Society and Cardiff Wildlife Trust Group set out from Channel View Leisure Centre and immediately had great views of three male and two female goosander, some of which were out of the water resting on a concrete plinth. 

We walked anti-clockwise round the bay heading towards Penarth Marina.  We picked up a few common passerines such as blue tit, great tit, robin and blackbird on the vegetation beside the barrage or in the trees of surrounding gardens.  Under the Taff Viaduct we found little grebe and displaying great-crested grebes, as well as some of the commoner gulls. 

Our final destination on this part of the walk was the bay by Prospect Place, and here we found some of the more notable ducks such as a long-tailed duck, and seven scaup, alongside a flock of c50 tufted duck.  The long-tailed duck was very confiding and everyone got good views.  It appeared to be an immature male, beginning to moult into adult plumage. 

After spending quite some time admiring the ducks we began heading back towards the Leisure Centre, when a couple walking in the other direction stopped us with a message from David Rich who had gone on ahead.  He had picked up a glaucous gull in the middle of the bay.  We hurried to join him and again got good views of a 1^st winter juvenile swimming around with assorted herring gulls and lesser black-backs.  It was a large gull with an impressive two-tone bill with a black tip, and no dark markings on either the wings or tail. 

After spending 30 mins watching the gull, we ambled back to the Leisure Centre, very pleased with a good morning’s birding.  At this stage some of the group departed, but the rest of us had lunch in the car park, then had a vote on where to go next.  The two options were to go to Penarth Marina to look for black redstarts, or to head round to the Cardiff Bay Wetland where a bittern had been seen. 

The wetland won the referendum, so we headed round to the board walk, stopping to look at the inlets around Hamadryas Park.  We picked up a few more species on the way such as goldfinch, chaffinch and mistle thrush but there was nothing much in the inlets.  The wetland board walk was more interesting with a large flock of tufted duck and coots, within which there were scattered a few pochard and grebes. 

We also got further good views of the glaucous gull and heard a water rail.  From there we walked around to St David’s Hotel where we scoured the area for signs of the bittern.  However, a few chiff-chaffs that were flitting around in the bushes distracted us.  Some of these were clearly common chiff-chaffs, but there was also one bird that was much greyer-brown, and paler in appearance than the others and which we thought was possibly a Siberian chiff-chaff (one had been seen in the previous week).  Unfortunately, it didn’t call, so we can’t be sure. 

We got so absorbed in trying to sort out our chiff-chaffs that we actually missed the bittern, which was seen flying across the reedbed by another birdwatcher.  Oh well, you can’t win them all! 

We walked back to the Leisure Centre and a great day was finished off by a flock of 13 long-tailed tits that were moving through the bushes in the car park just as we got back. 

Thanks Rob and Linda for leading a thoroughly enjoyable days birding!

List of Birds Seen (more or less in the order we came across them).

Goosander

Cormorant

Coot

Mute swan

Grey heron

Black-headed gull

Blackbird

Blue tit

Great tit

Robin

Woodpigeon

Goldcrest

Great-crested grebe

Little grebe

Starling

Carrion crow

Herring Gull

Magpie

House sparrow

Greenfinch

Grey wagtail

Chaffinch

Lesser black-backed gull

Tufted duck

Moorhen

Long-tailed duck (imm. male)

Scaup (four male, three female)

Pied wagtail

Mallard

Glaucous gull (1^st winter)

Goldfinch

Chaffinch

Mistle Thrush

Pochard

Water rail (heard)

Chiff-chaff

Siberian chiff-chaff (possibly)

Dunnock

Long-tailed tit

Richard Cowie

January 2017

Accompanying photos taken by Linda Nottage (birdwatchers, long-tailed duck, goosander pair):

Otters as sentinels for environmental health

On Wednesday 23 November 2016, Dr Elizabeth Chadwick talked to the Society about the work of the Cardiff University Otter Project, which she has managed for twelve years. The talk emphasised the otter’s importance as an indicator species for the general health of river ecosystems, and as a charismatic umbrella species that provides a focus for education and freshwater habitat conservation.

The Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra), one of 13 otter species worldwide, has an extensive range extending across continental Europe, Russia, China, and parts of north Africa; though in modern times its populations have become fragmented. In the UK, populations dramatically declined between the 1950 and 1970s, with chemicals in the environment (e.g. PCBs and organochlorine pesticides) mainly to blame. However, this protected species has recovered in the UK, and its once-isolated UK populations are again interacting. Nevertheless, by nature it is non-sociable and lives at low densities, so it can be hard to spot in the countryside.

Dr Chadwick explained the different methods used to monitor otters. The main methods used by the Cardiff University Otter Project are the monitoring of spraint (faeces and scent gland secretions) and the post-mortem of dead otters (mainly roadkill reported by the public).

A study of the spraint otters deposit at prominent locations around their territories is revealing interesting information. The spraint contains 432 volatile chemicals, and its smell is unique to an individual. The components of the spraint marking also change with age, enabling adults and juveniles to be identified.

The Cardiff University Otter Project started collecting samples from dead otters in the 1990s, when it would process around 10 otters/year (this figure is now around 200/year due to the otter’s recovery). This large sample bank now amounts to 3,000 specimens that can be used retrospectively for a wide range of interdisciplinary studies. Dr Chadwick described some of the studies that Cardiff University and its collaborators have done with these samples. These include studies on the presence of chemical contaminants over time and the effectiveness of legislation (e.g. bans on pesticides and lead), parasites infecting otters, dietary studies from stomach contents (83% fish), and genetic studies over time as a more contiguous UK population re-established. New areas of study include looking for the presence of micro-plastics and a new wave of emerging pollutants (e.g. pharmaceuticals).

For further information, visit the project’s website: www.otterproject.cf.ac.uk

Report by Stephen Nottingham