Get to know the wildlife of your garden, favourite wildplace or school grounds!
What animals and plants can you find and what can you learn about them? This can be a really fun way to learn about the animals that live on your doorstep - this includes the larger animals (birds, mammals etc) as well as the invertebrates (minibeasts).
Take bugboxes and handlenses out to see what kinds of animals and plants you can find. Animals are very delicate and should be handled with care.
This activity should be carried out quietly and gently without disturbing the habitat more than you have to.
Stones and logs should be turned over carefully and then put back into their original positions.
Don't try to pick up minibeasts between your fingers - you will hurt them.
There are some animals that are just too delicate to catch in bugboxes, so these should be watched and enjoyed but not caught. Butterflies, moths and dragonflies might be damaged but you could try to 'catch' them by photographing them with the school's digital camera. Then you can save your pictures, enlarge them and print them out.
Make a map of your school grounds or local green space
Once you have got to know your wildlife area and examined and sketched the minibeasts you caught there, the next task is to produce a map of the area and to colour onto it the different types of wildlife habitats that you can find there.
Your teacher or parent will help you find a copy of a large-scale map for the area you want to study. Click here for the Teachers' Introduction to this section.
For example, you might find concrete or tarmac areas, buildings, areas of mown lawns or grassy areas which are not cut very often, groups of trees, flowerbeds,orchard and woodland.
Where are you going to find butterflies in your survey area? And which species will you see?
Peacocks are among the commonest butterflies to be found in gardens and school grounds. The females lay their eggs in batches of 50 or more on clumps of stinging nettles. On the right the caterpillars have made themselves a tent like a thick 'cobweb'.
Check on the flight times chart to see which butterfly species you are likely to see at this time of year – which ones are adults at the moment?
Also have a look at
http://www.butterfly-conservation.org/text/853/first_sightings_2009.html
Counting the Butterflies and Dayflying Moths in your school grounds or green space.
Use the map you made to work out a walk route round the area that will take you about 15-20 minutes if you walk slowly, looking at things as you go. Then divide the route into five sections, each section being a different type of habitat if possible. They do not all have to be the same length.
You can download a copy of the survey form here and print it out.
You should choose a warm day for your survey walk - the air temperature in the shade should be above 13 º C as long as the sun is shining, above 17 º C if the sky is cloudy. And it shouldn't be too windy - not above Force 5. There is a list of 'rules' to follow to make sure that your survey is a 'fair' one and that the results can 'count'. Click here to see this list.
When regular surveys are carried out on our butterfly sites, the weekly totals add up to give us clear pictures of how the populations of butterflies in those places have changed over the seasons and the years. In some places, butterflies have been counted for many, many years and we have been able to piece together the complicated ecological jigsaw that will teach us the best way to look after our butterflies in the future.
To find out more about the Surveying and Monitoring studies that Butterfly Conservation carries out across the whole of the UK, click here.
You will need to have a good identification guide to help you. Click here to download an Identification Chart produced by the Cheshire Branch of Butterfly Conservation.
Your butterfly survey results will be valuable!
Unless we know how the numbers of butterflies in different parts of the UK are changing, it is very hard to work out how best to conserve them, so any results you get from your butterfly surveys will be extremely useful. Please send them to your local Butterfly Conservation branch - click on this link to find the Branch contact - even if the records are of the commonest species!
Analysing Butterfly Survey results
Here are two sheets of butterfly records to be analysed. They are in Excel format and show the counts of Butterflies on Alners Gorse Reserve in north Dorset in 2005 and 2006.
Alners Gorse is one of Butterfly Conservation’s newest reserves and is proving to be very rich in butterflies and moths even though it is only 14 hectares (32 acres) in area. To date, 34 species of butterflies and 445 species of moths have been found there.
Click here for further information about this reserve
Download and print out the 2005 and 2006 results, click here.
Have a look at the print-out. We have left some gaps for you to fill in. There are three species for which we have we have left out the total numbers for both 2005 and 2006. These are the Orange-Tip, the White-letter Hairstreak and the White Admiral. Count along the lines for each species and write the year totals at the right end of each line.
Orange-Tip (left) and White-letter Hairstreak (right)
and White Admiral
The survey walks are carried out once a week from April 1st until September 30thas long as the weather is good enough. That makes 26 weeks. You can see that the top line gives you the week number from 1 – 26.A few of the weeks were not surveyed, as you can see from the gaps. The total numbers of butterflies seen in the weeks that were surveyed is given on the bottom line. The totals for week 5 and week 15 have been left out – add up the numbers in those columns to give the totals for those two weeks.
You should now be able to add up all the numbers along the bottom which will give you the total number of butterflies for each of the two years; this number goes in the bottom righthand corner.
Click here for further questions linked to these Butterfly surveys.
Look at this gallery of minibeasts caught on a bughunt
You could use bugboxes and a digital camera to record the minibeasts you can find in your school grounds or local green space. Have a go! Which are the most common minibeasts in the area you looked at? Can you find any of these?
