Jennifer Jones Ecology

Chequered Skipper history  The UK's population of  Chequered Skipper butterfly  ( Carterocephalus palaemon ) has always been scarce. The only extant native populations are in ten core areas of West Scotland which seem to be stable. The English population, focussed around the East Midlands sadly declined until it went extinct in 1976. However, the Chequered Skipper conservation and reintroduction is another major success story in invertebrate conservation just like the Large Blue reintroduction . In May 2022, I was lucky enough to visit Fineshade Wood (Northamptonshire) to see the success of the Chequered Skipper reintroduction project. This is the only English population of Chequered Skippers after 40 years of being extinct.  Chequered Skipper male butterfly (Bob Eade) Ecology The Scottish Chequered Skipper has different ecological requirements, including different caterpillar host plants and habitat types. Scottish specimens are located on open damp grassland, domin...

Confused? So was I when asked to help with December butterfly surveys. But, these weren't normal butterfly surveys. No, we were searching for butterfly eggs!  Although for most butterflies the most obvious way to search for them is in the spring and summer months as adults, for Brown Hairstreaks ( Thecla betulae ), egg searches are the most effective way to record this species and even to uncover a colony. The sites I surveyed have risen from 36 eggs to 186 eggs across only a year or two!  Winter hedge habitat for egg searches (Jen Jones) Butterfly lifecycles There are a few habitat specialists which are surveyed in a different way to standard butterfly transects (example recording forms  and methods  are on the UKBMS webpage). These include the Brown and White-letter Hairstreak egg counts, but also Duke of Burgundy , and Large Blue egg counts and Marsh and Glanville Fritillary larval web counts. Interestingly, the Green Hairstreak is the only UK Hairstreak speci...

Why bother? Invertebrates are excellent indicators of ecosystem health and make up most of life on Earth (97%). In the UK, we have more than 32,000 terrestrial and freshwater and 7,000 marine invertebrate species. Many of these are declining or endangered. Like the diversity of invertebrates, there are many survey techniques depending on the species you want to survey for (target taxa), habitats present, life stage, and whether you are proving presence/absence or calculating populations. What shall I survey? If I had the time I would survey everything but as much as I would love to, this just isn't achievable. So what are the main survey priorities? An excellent starting point is looking at the habitats present as this can inform which groups we might find more of and suggest how invertebrates use the site. It is useful to map habitats and features first, then choose the survey methods to use. This includes habitat type (broad and/or specific), size, connectivity, substrate type, w...

Now, a tad late but here is the recording of my FSC presentation on the Long Mynd Bilberry Bumblebee project.  There are more FSC BioLinks videos from these two playlists: Natural History Live and FSC Virtual Meet Ups . Please give it a watch to learn about this species and the great work of the volunteers.  I also have a post here  with some more detail on the project and bilberry bumblebees .

Slightly more creatures are finally emerging.  The winter honeysuckle ( Lonicera fragrantissima ) in our garden was positively buzzing with bees this month.  We had buff-tailed bumblebees ( Bombus terrestris ) and early bumblebees ( B. pratorum ) on the flowers and I managed to catch this honeybee ( Apis mellifera ) really filling up with honeysuckle pollen.  It was fascinating to watch the honeybee combing the pollen into neat little balls to bring back to the hive for the larvae to eat. Buff-tailed bumblebee ( Bombus terrestris)  on honeysuckle 26th February 2021 Honeybee ( Apis mellifera ) on honeysuckle 26th February 2021 As bumblebees and honeybees are both social bee species they have worker bees which go out to forage for the hive/colony and maintain the nest.  Honeybee colonies are alive all year but workers won't be seen out in winter and they will instead use the food resources like honey they produced during the warmer months.   In...