Barn-tastic! Vicarage Meadows Barn Repairs

Thanks to the #NatureNetworksFund we have been able to repair the stone Barn on our Wildlife Trust Vicarage Meadows Nature Reserve. The Barn was recently repointed using traditional lime mortar and the roof was also repaired to ensure that it’s weatherproof. This work will maintain the building for many years to come and will also benefit the barn owls that use the barn to nest in.

Grazing is Amazing Preparation! Llyn Fach Nature Reserve

At our Widllife Trust Llyn Fach Nature Reserve contractors have been working through challenging conditions, both terrain and weather, to clear sitka spruce from the cliffs and slopes to prevent seed “rain” onto the important habitats below. And installing fencing and a cattle loading pen in preparation for the introduction of conservation grazing cattle to the heath restoration areas.

Sentinels of the Sea – Marine Update

Thanks to the Nature Networks Fund, our Sentinels of the Sea project has been able to continue with essential monitoring and research work throughout the autumn and early winter. Here’s are some of our marine project highlights…

• Marine mammal boat surveys, survey data entry, auditing and analysis of photographs and acoustics data has continued throughout the autumn and early winter in the Cardigan Bay SAC.

• The data collected during surveys whilst at sea and from the static acoustic recorders will help us to understand the movements of individual dolphins. We have successfully captured dolphin signature whistle and dolphin dorsal fin photographs to enable us to identify individual dolphins visually or acoustically. We are able to understand more about the dolphins social networks from the photo-id and acoustics data, understanding who individuals are associated with also helps us to understand behaviours observed.

• This research has been very successful so far and we are really excited by the data that we have collected as part of this project. We have at least 50 individual bottlenose dolphin signature whistles. We hope to be able to match individual dolphins dorsal fins to signature whistles recorded from data collected during our focal follows so that we can draw on all the photo-id and survey data already collected over the past 20 years.

• One of the best times was taking divers out to try to look for and recover some of our equipment that had been lost in the winter storms in late 2021 – we were so happy when the kit popped up on the surface! And the data collected on this device has been phenomenal!

• We have acoustically recorded the first ever Cardigan Bay bottlenose dolphin bray calls – these calls are associated with dolphin foraging activity.

•Between August and October 18 volunteers contributed and assisted with this work, a massive 201 hours

The Nature Networks £500,000 grant fund is supporting two WTSWW projects, they are ‘Sentinels of the Sea’ marine project and the ‘Connecting the Future’ terrestrial based project until March 2023. The Nature Networks Fund is funded by the Welsh Government and administered by The National Lottery Heritage Fund in Wales.