The first in our Sunday Survey Sessions took place at Logan’s Meadow at the weekend. The subject was Amphibians and we were lucky to see Smooth Newts doing their characteristic ‘hang’ in the water plus lots and even more lots of tadpoles! Joined by CPARG’s Mario Shimbov, https://groups.arguk.org/cparg a group of interested locals got a full explanation of how our native amphibians and reptiles carry out their life cycles and how best to help them and spot them. We didn’t even get rained on! The survey sessions run monthly…

The conservation volunteers created nothing short of a work of art this week at Wenvoe Meadow in Cherry Hinton. As well as beautiful, the ‘Bee bank’ they built is a useful addition to any wild space; containing a range of nesting substrates to suit a multitude of native solitary bee requirements. There were sand/cement layers, sand/cement/soil layers all with differing ratios of each material to hopefully give the perfect conditions for our mining bee species. There was also clay and straw layers which will crack and give satisfying…

As part of the City Council’s Chalk stream initiative, https://www.cambridge.gov.uk/chalk-streams a fish survey was carried out last Thursday at Vicar’s Brook, which is the stream which runs down the side of Coe Fen nature reserve. Electro fishing is the name of the technique used, it’s basically the process of putting an electric current through the water which temporarily and painlessly stuns the fish thereby making it far easier to find them and record them. This was in advance of the stream improvements planned for the brook this year….