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Keeping it Wild trainee Rianna with another post! I recently visited Crane Park Island for the first time to help with a school session and discovered what a beautiful oasis it was! The reserve is surrounded by the River Crane, so the peaceful sound of flowing water fills the air and on a sunny day, there are dragonflies and damselflies everywhere you look! There is even a river dipping platform, where the school group had fun splashing around and searching for aquatic minibeasts. The site also has an interesting history- it was once the site of the Hounslow Gunpowder Mills and the shot tower, formerly used for lead manufacture, still towers imposingly over the reserve. The combination of industrial history and amazing wildlife makes it a reserve unlike any other that I’ve visited so far on my traineeship and it is definitely one of my favourites!

Jamie the KIW trainee here again, earlier in the traineeship while helping assist in a community engagement school session we were lucky enough to discover a female stag beetle hiding beneath a large log at the Centre for Wildlife & Gardening. While It was one of the children who made the discovery, I made sure to have a good look at this rare beetle! The stag beetle is Britain's largest beetle with males reaching almost 8cm in length, although the beetle pictured here is in fact a female - this is given away by it's lack of large antler shaped jaws (which males would use to wrestle other males while searching for a mate). While this is a rare beetle which is unfortunately declining across Europe, London remains a strong hold for this fearsome beetle - particularly around south London thanks to the great North wood.

Jamie the KIW trainee here again, during our time at Walthamstow Wetlands we helped round up over 200 Canadian Geese In order to help the ringing procedure - a process we were lucky enough to observe! The rings are very carefully attached on their legs just above their feet, and have a unique number printed on them - sometimes they're also coloured with a shorter number to help them be read from afar with binoculars. We learnt about the importance of ringing birds, and how it helps to monitor different populations and inform future management decisions.

Keeping it Wild trainee Rianna again! The other day when we were at Hutchinson’s Bank for the Brilliant Butterflies festival, we spotted a mating pair of chalkhill blues. The blue males are seen most often, flying around searching for the brown females who are much more secretive, so to see a pair together was a very exciting find! Like its name suggests, the species is confined to chalk grassland in southern England. Chalkhill blues also have an interesting lifecycle- the caterpillars have a mutually beneficial relationship with ants. The caterpillars exude honeydew which is ‘milked’ by the ants, who can receive over a quarter of their total energy needs this way! In return, the ants protect the caterpillars and even build earthen cells to protect the chrysalises!

I'm Jamie, one of the KIW trainees at the London Wildlife Trust. During a practical work day at Sydenham Hill Woods we learnt about one of the negative impacts of increased footfall during the pandemic - the trampling of ground vegitation. While new visitors are always encouraged to vist their local nature reserves, people had started wandering off the usual paths onto vegitation - effectively widening the path and destroying large portions of the ground vegetation. Therefore, to try and help encourage visitors stick to the path while allowing the ground vegetation to recover, we installed some new path edging to highlight the path boundary. To do this we used suitably shaped logs recovered from fallen trees, along with hand made stakes to keep them in place made from the branches from other fallen trees (using an axe to do so). This was done with the help of some fantastic volunteers!

Hello, Keeping it Wild trainee Rianna here! Recently, we had the opportunity to observe a bird ringing session at Walthamstow Wetlands. We took the power boat out to the floating rafts where common terns build their nests to ring the young chicks. A metal ring was attached to each chick’s leg by bird ringing expert Paul. The ring has a unique code, which will be used to monitor the population and distribution of common tern. In total 12 chicks were ringed- we even found one chick which still had its egg tooth, a sharp projection at the end of the beak that helps the chick break through the egg!

KIW Trainee Deepak here. Spending the day at Old Lodge Farm, we carried our ragwort pulling whilst learning about the Downlands Partnership. The Partnership runs extensive conservational grazing programmes in a range of habitats where there is a need for countryside management. The farm uses sheep and cattle on site to rotationally graze the land as part of the long-term management programme.

KIW Trainee Deepak here. Working in Frays Farm Meadows, I've been assisting the Trust's senior ecologist, Tony Wileman, in carrying out grassland surveying, assessing the health and quality of our nature reserves. With the use of a 1m squared quadrat, we record the percentage of neutral grassland species we encounter and later relay this information to the Trust's Reserves manager, who works with our ecologist team to ensure our reserves are supporting wildlife to their best potential. On the farm, we also encounter cattle and horses who help maintain the meadow through conservational grazing; enhancing the diversity of the land.