Who's scrutinising whom? (image: TCV Scotland / NHMP)
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Welcome to MammalWeb’s April update! We’d hoped to be full of the joys of spring, by this time. However, although it might be a bit warmer out there, it’s no less wet and wild. If you fancy a break from braving waterlogged surrounds, perhaps this newsletter will provide a welcome excuse – at least for 5 minutes! In this update, as well as our usual features, we say a massive thank you for the incredible response following the launch of the National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme. We also have news of the Wild London prize draw competition, we introduce the “Report this sequence” button, Steve Lindsay shares information about how he took another fantastic wildlife photo, and we unveil the “Connecting Schools to Nature” summary report. We hope you find something of interest in here – but, if not, there’s always the lure of knee-deep mud on the footpaths outside …
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National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme - a thank you! |
Many of you will already know that we have teamed up with People’s Trust for Endangered Species, the British Hedgehog Preservation Trust, Durham and Nottingham Trent Universities, the Zoological Society of London, and London Hogwatch, to deliver the NHMP: the first ever national camera trapping survey of hedgehogs. Funded in large part by Natural England, the programme is a pilot of an ambitious approach that will deliver – for the first time – rigorous national density estimates for many mammal species.
You might have seen that the programme received considerable media coverage in the week leading up to Easter. The response has been fantastic! Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed!
Following the media coverage, we have had 10 times the usual activity on the MammalWeb platform, leading to unprecedented numbers of sequences being classified. We’ve also received unprecedented numbers of emails. Incredibly heartening, in times of frequently bleak environmental news, has been hearing from so many people who are so passionate about wildlife and manifestly care deeply about their environment! We aren’t always the fastest correspondents (sorry!) but we do love hearing from you.
All the exceptional activity on the site has led to some performance issues, for which we apologise. Helen (who does a fantastic job with the development work for MammalWeb) has been working on a series of upgrades that should - over the next few months - lead to massive improvements in the speed and reliability of the site. This first year of the NHMP pilot was always likely to expose areas for development in our systems, so this is good news. We look forward to seeing how much better the site performs as we move into year 2 of the pilot. For now, here's a very basic glimpse of what people are seeing in the image sequences from the NHMP. The orange bars are what Spotters have reported, whilst the blue bars depend on a match between Spotters and an AI classifier. Mostly, the agreement is reasonable. However, the AI has not yet been trained to recognise woodpigeons. It also needs some work with distinguishing between deer species, and to get better at discriminating red foxes from domestic pets. It is perhaps inevitable that the most commonly observed species is the pheasant, millions of which are released each year for shooting. However, the most widespread species is actually the red fox, which is seen at over three-quarters of camera placements. Grey squirrels and rabbits have also been seen at well over half the camera placements.
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Relative proportions of sequences thought to contain particular species by contributing Spotters (orange) and by a rule of thumb (blue) that requires agreement between Spotters and an AI classifier
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Thank you again to everyone who has already contributed to the NHMP. If you haven’t yet, use the button below to find out more about the project.
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A hedgehog spotter (image: PAStephens)
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MammalWeb Activity, February and March |
Huge congratulations to all those who made the top-20 over the past 2 months - but, as always, huge thanks, too, to everyone else who has submitted classifications, helping us to monitor our wild mammals. This has been a phenomenal period for contributions and it is currently very hard to get into the top-20. There are many people who have done huge amounts of spotting who don't feature on the list - but we are grateful to you all!
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Wild London prize draw update |
Our competition finished at the end of February and we are very happy to announce our winners. Huge congratulations to Laura in Oxfordshire, who won the first prize of a camera trap; it'll be on its way to you soon. Congratulations, also, to Maria in Cornwall, Balázs in Székesfehérvár, Hungary and Yasmine in Gloucestershire who all contributed massively to the project and won a £50 Amazon gift card each. We are very grateful to everyone who helped us classify the sequences over the last couple of months and we are now at 50% complete; that’s nearly 49,000 sequences! The remaining sequences are mostly those flagged by the AI as empty, or containing humans. If anyone has the patience to look through any of the images deemed devoid of wildlife by the AI, this will be enormously helpful for us to work out the accuracy of that process. Our most common species have remained the same, with over 16,000 dogs, over 16,000 foxes and almost 15,000 grey squirrels classified. We will be using these data to look at activity patterns, how these differ among species, and the differences between the mammal communities found across our 12 study sites in London. Thank you again to everyone who got involved, we couldn’t have done it without you! Watch this space for updates on our findings.
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The tail-end (image: zladders)
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Last January (writes Steve Lindsay), I spent a rain-sodden week in the Cairngorms, photographing wildlife. Whilst there I had a morning photographing red squirrels from a commercial hide. What outrageously cute animals! And extraordinarily agile too. The folk running the hide had a set-up for photographing ‘leaping squirrels’. This enabled skilled photographers to capture red squirrels casually bounding from one branch to the next to feed on nuts put out for them. The trick to get the shot was to focus manually on a point mid-way between the two branches, press the shutter, take a burst of continuous shots and hope that one would be in focus. How easy can that be? Impossible to fail? Well, of course I failed, miserably.
On returning home, I thought it would be fun to try again, but this time photographing the grey squirrels that visit my garden, daily. Here’s the set up I built (below). Basically, there are two goal frames, 43 cm apart. The squirrel wants to get to the peanuts in the white cup on the top right of the goal on the right (slightly hidden from view). It knows there are nuts in the cup because it has seen them from the wall nearby. I saw its tail quivering with excitement. But it can’t climb the goal posts on the right to get the nuts because I have attached two plastic bowls to the top of each post. Its only route is to climb up the posts on the goal on the left and hop from the crossbar on the left, to the one on the right. It took the squirrel less than two hours to solve this conundrum (much quicker than the time I took to design and build the set). I think the score was: clever squirrel 1, dumb photographer 0.
Just for the photographers: the timber I picked up from the floor of the local wood included a nicely rotted log covered with moss, which I used as the landing crossbar. When I’ve finished photographing squirrels, I’ll return the wood to where I found it. Total cost = £2.50 for the bowls, plus the additional expense of peanuts. If you want to make a ‘squirrel jump’, make sure the leaping goal is well secured and doesn’t wobble too much (hence, the extra support on the goal on the left). I started with a 15 cm gap between the goal posts and, gradually, over three weeks, sawed off small sections of wood to increase the gap to 43 cm. This distance is more than sufficient for the photos, and the squirrel readily crosses the gap in one bound.
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Steve's squirrel-leap set-up (image: SWLindsay)
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As for taking the shot, I sat in my hide and focused my lens about 3 cm from the left end of the right crossbar and took multiple shots as soon as I saw the squirrel moving forwards along the crossbar on the left to leap. The leap is too fast for the human eye, but - at 1/3000 of a second - the camera shows the beauty of the animal frozen in mid-air. The shot below took me days to capture. It was only after photographing many leaps that I finally managed this shot with the eyes and front feet perfectly in sharp focus. I love the long tufts of hair radiating from the squirrel’s cuffs. I never noticed them before taking the shot. Just one of the pleasures of photographing wildlife is to see things missed by the human eye. What about the squirrel? It was one of the rare occasions where the models were literally paid peanuts. But they keep coming back for more.
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The final product (image: SWLindsay)
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Do you have comments or questions for Steve? Send us an email and we will pass them on.
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Wherever you deploy a camera trap, whether in your garden, in a nature reserve, or just in the local woods, it's impossible to do so without the possibility of catching passers-by on camera. Previously, we have always had the policy that if any image sequence is classified as containing a human, it will never be shown again. We now do more to avoid showing images of humans in the first place.
Our approach to screening out images of humans relies on the AI model developed by our partners at Conservation AI. Nevertheless, no AI model is infallible, and images of humans will occasionally slip through. If you see these, simply classifying them as containing human will ensure that they aren't shown again. However, if there's anything troubling about the image, such as inappropriate behaviour, please let us know using the "Report this sequence" button pictured below. We then get notification of images that are slipping past the AI and we can use that information to improve the model further.
While piloting the new function, we have noticed that sometimes images devoid of wildlife are reported; these are normal and can be classified as ‘nothing’. Another reason for flagging images has been the presence of dead birds used as bait. In general, these images are from the Scottish Wildcat Action (SWA) surveys of wildcat priority areas. You can identify those images from a faint watermark in the lower left. SWA organised winter camera trapping surveys for many years and part of their protocol was to maximise the chance of predators attending the camera sites by baiting with dead game birds. We are aware of these, so you do not need to flag these images (or to try to classify the bait in them). Finally, if you see an image that you want to draw our attention to because it's interesting or exciting, you can use the "Like" button (next to the "Report this sequence" button). Thanks to Helen for implementing this change, and to everyone for helping us to improve the site by using it!
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Location of the new "Report this sequence" button
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Connecting schools to Nature
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Some of you will remember that we worked with the British Ecological Society and SmashUK to deliver the "Connecting schools to nature" project, funded by the Green Recovery Challenge Fund. Launched in January 2022, the project worked with 72 schools and early-career ecologists across the North-East to help inspire both teachers and pupils to engage with the natural world and transform their school grounds into wildlife-friendly havens. The response from schools and volunteers was fantastic! We reached over 5,000 pupils across the mammals, invertebrates and birds modules, through a combination of outdoor workshops, teacher training events, and the delivery of an exciting new digital platform “BES Encounters”. As part of the project, schools were given a camera trap to monitor their school grounds and took part in different citizen science initiatives including contributing data to MammalWeb and iNaturalist. The project concluded last year but we are still working with the British Ecological Society to make the most of the Encounters platform. If you are interested in what we did, what we found, or the impacts it had on children, you can now read a summary report from the project.
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The "connecting schools to nature" project visits Laurel Avenue school, Durham (image: Gavin Forster photography)
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