Infinity Foods Co-operative Ltd

Infinity helps out The Sussex Wildlife Trust

24/06/10

 Wild Science at Stanmer Park Brighton

By Dave Barker, ecologist and volunteer with the Education Department at Sussex Wildlife Trust

One of the biggest challenges for organisations engaged in nature conservation is trying to understand public attitudes and perceptions towards the natural world, how best to promote a better understanding of conservation issues and fostering a duty of care for our environment. Wild Science is an experimental initiative that is being trialled independently in conjunction with existing Forest School and youth engagement programmes run by the Sussex Wildlife Trust to help address this concern.

Direct engagement with wildlife is proven to fundamentally enhance a person’s perspective of their natural environment, their understanding of it, as well as enlightening them on the responsibility that we all have as stewards for our natural world.

The underlying theme of all Wild Science projects is the advocacy of connecting science with society for the benefit of both wildlife and people. Utilising applied ecological techniques alongside more holistic teaching practices participants can be immersed into nature and experience our wonderful flora and fauna in a more immediate and personal level. All data gathered during Wild Science projects can be used to produce robust scientific reports that help increase our understanding and knowledge of local wildlife populations as well as providing data on UK biodiversity.

For this initial trial project Wild Science delved into the world of badgers on the Stanmer Estate close to Brighton. The project objective was to map territory sizes of three badger families or clans on the estate and try to further our understanding of the lifestyle dynamics between these highly social animals.

A series of task days were facilitated to tutor participants in badger ecology and conservation as well as survey techniques required to undertake this research activity! The estate was then surveyed to find badger sett locations and their latrine sites. Badgers habitually move about their landscape utilising well used pathways that interconnect their territories. As a mammal that lives in a world dominated mostly by smell, they aggressively scent mark these territory boundaries at latrine sites. This actually works in our favour as we can feed the study groups a harmless mix of peanuts, syrup and tiny colour coded pellets to find out which family groups use which latrine in the landscape. From the coloured pellets found at known latrine sites a map of clan territories can be easily produced. Finding the sett and latrine locations have proven to be both fun and informative as participants have developed both tracking skills and an improved perception of our living landscape through signs of badger activity.

Additional enjoyment was had mixing the marked feeds that understandably lead to many sticky and finger licking moments for the teams. On top of all this, there was also many jokes and laughter about poking through poo to find the marker pellets and just having the chance to explore their local environment and immerse themselves in a wild animal’s world has proven to be inspiring beyond expectations!

From our findings we were able to interpret that the badgers on the estate seem to be focusing their main activity in their immediate sett locations with some movement out into neighbouring family group’s areas.

Wild Science now hopes to undertake a series of badger watches at a secret sett location over the next few weeks to show participants these amazing animals up close in their natural environment.  

This trail project has only been possible with the kind provision of equipment and logistics by the following individuals and project partners:

·      Katie Riley, Mike Murphy, Milly Hawkins, Renzo Spano and Steve Niner of Sussex Wildlife Trust for their time, energy, advice and enthusiasm for this trial project.

·      David Larkin of Brighton City Council (City Parks Department - Countryside Rangers) for site logistics, advice and support.

·      Robin FitzGibbon of Infinity Foods (Wholesale Dept) who provided both the Syrup and Peanuts (organic of course) free of charge.

·      Bill Newman of Greyland Plastics Ltd, Worcestershire who supplied the marker pellets free of charge.

·      Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre for enthusiastic support and advice.

Special thanks go to all the participants from the Trusts Forest School and Youth Ranger teams that have helped to make this project such a fun and inspirational activity for all.