Seasonal Update (January 2025)

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Pretty much the whole of December was grey, gloomy, misty, and broadly mild. - Credit: Marc Baldwin

The year ended on a now-familiar mild-cold-mild-cold cycle, as a succession of low pressure systems passed across the UK. Storm Darragh swept through on the second weekend of December bringing torrential rain and 80 mph winds. A very gloomy and mild Christmas was followed by a series of deep lows battering and soaking Scotland, while the crossover into the New Year saw a large storm bring 60 mph winds and torrential rain to the south coast. January's looking similarly unsettled, after a couple of dry and extremely cold days to kick off 2025.

For the past couple of years (yeah, it really has been years!) I had been picking a "Species of the Month" to write about. Unfortunately, because, as regular visitors to this site will know all too well, I struggle to write concisely about, well, anything, these articles took a pretty sizeable chunk of time to research and prepare, which has hampered progress in updating the existing content and providing new stuff on the site. Consequently, although you can still go back and re-read any of the profiles in the blog archive, the 'SotM' series finished last month, and this year's blog updates will be only a selection of news stories that caught my attention. On top of this, though, I will aim to create a new species Speed Read each month to hopefully provide something equally as interesting as the SotM.

Speed Read of the month

This month, a new profile has gone live covering a non-native, but nonetheless fascinating, species that I first saw encountered during the summer of 2023, despite it having been in the wild since the late 1960s: the Aesculapian snake. The binomial name for this species, Zamenis longissimus, translates roughly to 'long, angry snake' and, while native to the central belt of Europe, Aesculapians are found in only two locations in Britain: one in London and the other in Wales.

The Aesculapian snake (Zamenis longissimus) is the subject of the latest Speed Read, which came online this month. - Credit: Marc Baldwin

Website updates

I've made a few updates to the existing Speed Read sections, including updating, expanding, and clarifying those for the European otter and wild boar. Additionally, a new section of the Chinese water deer article has gone live covering their vocalisations.

News and discoveries

Savage squirrels. Love them or loathe them, it's hard to picture squirrels as being much of a threat to anything more than trees, seeds, and maybe the wiring if they get into your loft. Nonetheless, in the last 30 years or so it has become evident that they do sometimes take bird eggs and can have an impact on nestling birds in some habitats, as well as taking fish, amphibians, and reptiles. New observations from the University of California, Davis suggest that some squirrels may also go after other small mammals. During June and July last year, 12 years into the university's Long-term Behavioral Ecology of California Ground Squirrels Project, conducted at Briones Regional Park in Contra Costa County, researchers noticed the squirrels (Otospermophilus beecheyi) actively hunting California voles (Microtus c. californicus). All ages and genders were observed hunting, eating, and competing over this unexpected prey during the summer explosion in the vole population. Overall, a total of 74 events of vole hunting and/or consumption were recorded over 18 days of fieldwork.

Individual leopards can be identified based on their roars, offering a promising non-invasive addition to the conservation toolkit. - Credit: Marc Baldwin

Cat calling. Leopards are among the most elusive of big cats, and a conservation concern. Indeed, the 2023 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species assessed Panthera pardus as "Vulnerable" under criteria A2cd owing to a declining population in the face of increased urbanisation, logging, mining, livestock farming, civil unrest, and hunting, to name a few threats. In the last three generations, the population has declined by more than 30%, and the species has completely disappeared from regions of North Africa in recent years. Monitoring these solitary, nocturnal creatures remains a significant challenge that hampers conservation efforts. The first large-scale paired camera trap and autonomous recording survey for large African carnivores, conducted by the universities of Exeter and Oxford, have yielded some interesting results, however, suggesting that it's possible to identify individual leopards by their vocalisations. In a paper currently in press with Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation, the researchers present a model that was able to correctly identify 93% of leopards based on roaring bouts.

MAGIC Makeover. Back in 2002, a website called The Multi-Agency Geographic Information for the Countryside, MAGIC for short, was setup to provide geographic information about the Britain's natural environment. Twenty-two years later the website has received an overhaul to make it faster and easier to use. The new version (4) of the website will run alongside the previous version (3) for users to test the two in parallel until later this year. If you're curious about the habitat types, species, and other natural features in your area, the updated MAGIC service is worth a look.

Advancing Arvicola. Water voles (Arvicola amphibius) were once a widely distributed small mammal that was a familiar sight along Britain's canals and riverbanks. Familiar to most who grew up with The Wind in the Willows as the adventurous "Ratty", water voles have sadly suffered a precipitous decline in both number and distribution in recent decades. Indeed, an estimate in 1998 suggested the water vole population in Britain had declined by 78% since the survey conducted only three years before. The Mammal Society's 2018 review reported a continued trend, with numbers having fallen by a further 50% since then. Just before Christmas, however, The Wildlife Trusts published their The National Water Vole Database Project Report, which perhaps gives some cause for positivity. While, overall, the report identifies continued declines in water vole populations, it does also point to some important local populations increasing and identifies 11 new regional key areas. East Anglia, for example, appears to have two new Regional Key areas with thriving populations.

For a round-up of Britain's seasonal wildlife highlights for mid-winter, check out my Wildlife Watching - January blog.

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