From badgers to otters, from foxes to frogs, wildlife is not just confined to the countryside. The Wild Places project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, has enabled North East residents to see exactly what’s hiding in their gardens. Local people have been setting up cameras to create their own footage of the creatures rustling their dustbins. Jennifer Appleton reports.
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Jennifer Appleton: A new initiative by the Wildlife Trust has begun in the North East promoting awareness of urban wildlife ranging from foxes to otters.
Kenneth Crooks: The Wild Places project is a project designed to raise people’s awareness of animals, mainly mammals, and largely animals that are in an urban surrounding. The way the country is at the moment, and it’s becoming increasingly so, is that animals are more and more relying on urban areas and are adapting to live in those areas.
One of the animals that have surprised a lot of people to be found in these areas are otters. The video cameras that we’ve set up along urban becks have filmed quite a lot of otter activity, which have been valuable in gaining records, building up a picture of where the otters are and numbers.
We have a little drawback with otters in that unless the camera is very close to the otter, the infrared motion sensor isn’t actually triggering. I have theorised on this that this is because the otter’s coming out of a very cold environment, i.e. a stream or a beck, and therefore they don’t have much of a heat signature. And also they’re very well insulated so unless the otter is very close to the camera, we’ve found evidence that the otters are there in tracks or spraints, but sometimes there’s been no video evidence. So when we are setting them up looking for otters, we’ll have to set them as close to the area in which we think the otters will actually be as possible.
Jennifer Appleton: Enthusiasts can volunteer to have a camera in their garden. The cameras are also set up in farmland like Sir Plants-a-Lot Nursery in Billingham.
Kenneth Crooks: The cameras have a lens, passive infrared motion detection, and an LED infrared flash. The idea is, I’ve got it positioned over a rabbit hole, so when a rabbit comes in or out, or anything else – hopefully a fox in this instance, we’re hoping to catch a fox coming to the mouth of the hole – once the camera detects movement it will start to record. If it’s daytime, it will be in colour, and if it’s night time the infrared flash will come on and record anything that’s in there. Once the animal goes away, it’ll record for 60 seconds and then go off until it detects movement again.
Jennifer Appleton: A wide variety of species has been captured on camera, including weasels, stoats, thrushes, foxes, and owls. To get involved, visit www.urbanwildplaces.co.uk
Crook, A., Baddeley, R., & Osorio, D. (2002). Identifying the structure in cuttlefish visual signals Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 357 (1427), 1617-1624 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2002.1070
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