Here are 9 ideas you can try:

Date A Hedge!
Date Some Shells!
Make a Frog Calendar
New Pond Arrivals
Which Hawthorn?
Make a Hair Library
Wildlife About Town
Colonising Bare Land
Recording Species In A Habitat

Date A Hedge!

Strange though it sounds you can get an idea as to how old a hedge is by just counting the number of different species of tree and shrub in a stretch of hedge of 30 paces. For each species you can add a hundred years – so if a hedge has oak, elm ash, hawthorn, field maple, hazel, blackthorn, rose and spindle it may be 9x100 = 900 years old; an ancient hedge. If it only has hawthorn, blackthorn and ash it may be 300 years old, relatively recent and possibly planted as an enclosure hedge. However, don’t make a final judgement from just one measurement. Take a number of 30 paced lengths (even if they overlap) to gain more confidence in the results. Also try to find documentary evidence, such as early maps, that can confirm the age. Your local library or county archive office may be able to help with that, and your teacher or parents may be able to arrange a visit to the archive.

Date Some Shells!

When you go for a walk on the beach why not date a mollusc! It’s quite easy to work out the age of shellfish from their shells. Both bivalve molluscs such as cockles, and univalve molluscs like whelks reveal their age in their shells. They leave growth lines on their shells, just like trees leave annual growth rings in their trunks, except it is easier to see with shellfish as the lines are on the outside! Although there are many other lines and marks on shells, in the cold water of British winters shell growth slows down and can be seen as a clear dark line in comparison to the faster growth shown by the paler shell. If you examine the empty shells in a shell ridge washed up from the sea, you can work out the ages that different species are reaching offshore. Why not make a histogram to show your findings.

Cockle – Winter slow growth lines

Make a Frog Calendar

If your school or home garden pond has frogs that breed in it each year, why not make a Frog Calendar of your observations of when their key life cycle events take place in your pond. Frogs normally hibernate over winter, but they can suddenly be seen in ponds remarkably early in the year, usually the beginning of March or even the end of February. In southern England they will often begin mating around 8^th – 10^th March, however that will vary in different areas in different years. Watch out for and note:

Make sure any study near a pond is supervised by a responsible adult.

Developing frog spawn

New Pond Arrivals

Why not make a new pond at home with your family or at school with your teachers and classmates. That will be good fun in itself, but afterwards the real work starts. You can all monitor together the arrival of new species. You may have given the system a good start by putting in appropriate plants, or you could just wait to see what happens. If you are buying plants (or getting them as a present from someone’s garden pond), try to use British native plants.

For the edges there are many attractive ones such as water forget-me-not, water mint and yellow flag iris, and oxygenators like water milfoil (rather than Canadian pondweed). If you can create a marshy area plants like purple loostrife, hemp agrimony and marsh marigold are wonderful.

It is incredible how quickly water creatures arrive. Among the first will be the surface insects, pond skaters and whirlygig beetles. You can anticipate water boatmen and diving beetles to be along quite quickly as well. You may get a mass of green strands of algae in the first year, but don’t worry, for as the population of water snails builds up they will begin to control that.

You will be able to see many species just by watching and safely looking into the pond from the edge. However, you will find out about some animals by getting a closer look at them by using a fine mesh net to pond dip. Only do this if it is safe with a responsible adult in charge. Ensure that you do not disturb the pond too much with your net. Tip the contents into a white plastic dish that already contains some water and allow things to settle for a few minutes. Then watch and you will be surprised how many animals there are, from brightly coloured water mites to a water hog louse (looking like an aquatic wood louse). Always put the water and animals carefully back into the pond.

Which Hawthorn?

Virtually every natural hedge has some hawthorn in it. Near you there will be a lot of hawthorn, but which type? In Britain we have two native types of hawthorn. The one that is normally just called ‘hawthorn’ has the Latin name Crataegus monogyna. This naturally grows in good light at woodland edges or in the open and it has deeply indented leaves, with ‘fingers’. The other is called ‘the woodland hawthorn’, or sometimes ‘the midland hawthorn’, and has the Latin name of Crataegus oxyacanthoides. This naturally grows in deep woodland (more in the English midlands).

Hedges planted from hawthorn grown up in nurseries was used in hedging in the planting of enclosure landscapes over the last few hundred years. However, where hedges once had ancient woodland near them there is often some woodland hawthorn in the hedge. Where the two plants have grown near each other they will probably have produced hybrids with leaves part way between the two parents.

How can you find out what you have in a hedge near you? It’s easy. Choose an equal number of mature leaves from each bush in the hedge. Measure the indentations on one side of each leaf, then measure the length and breadth of the leaf and add those together. Then for each leaf divide the total length of indentations of the leaf’s side by the length and breadth combination. This small calculation gives an index that can be plotted as a histogram. If the results are tightly grouped or widely spread they will show whether there is one species or two, or the presence of hybrids, and indicate the possibility of whether the hedge has ancient woodland origins.

Make a Hair Library

Hairs under a light microscope can reveal the species on which they grew. You can become a wildlife detective, as hairs are so distinctive. By focussing your microscope on the outside of the hair you will see the pattern of the outer cuticle. If you focus on the inside of the hair you will find the medulla pattern.

Why not build up a hair library by asking for a couple of hairs from a range of species from your local museum. If you look at hairs from owl pellets or old fox scats you will be able to see what they had eaten. However, do not handle such material directly, and only under the supervision of an experienced naturalist or biology teacher who will ensure sterile conditions and have the correct equipment.

Wildlife About Town

Just because you may live in the heart of a city does not mean that you can’t make your own bird behaviour study. You will find many Feral Pigeons in parks and squares, and probably even around your school. You won’t mistake Feral Pigeons for the Wood Pigeons that are bigger and have pink chests, or the Collard Dove which is a pale bird, or other species of pigeon.

The Feral Pigeon is the average street pigeon, a gone wild form of the wild Rock Dove which has been kept as a domestic bird for at least the last 3 ½ millennia. They have been kept in Britain since Roman times for food and for carrying messages, and for racing. Those that escaped, bred and live wild, and we know they have nested on buildings in London for centuries. They vary in colouring – some mottled blue grey, some grey, some chequered etc. Where they can easily get food, such as city squares and parks, they spend a lot of time snoozing and sunbathing. They will bathe in puddles and preen. There is lots of behaviour you can observe.

Try and note some of the distinctive displays of the males. Pigeons can breed throughout the year, so you can see their courtship behaviour more of the time than most birds. The male inflates his neck to look bigger and ‘coos’. He will stand erect following a female, then while walking spread out his tail. He will bow right down and will also circle.

You will find this display easy to see, as birds will repeatedly carry it out. You will often see a number of pairs engaged in this courtship bowing display on a warm day. Try to make notes on how long each section takes, and sketch or photograph each part of their elaborate behaviour.

You will begin to notice other pigeon displays and behaviour that you could begin to study as well.

Colonising Bare Land

There are plants that have specialised in taking advantage of a new opportunity. Clear a patch of ground back to bare earth and in a short space of time new plants will appear – gardeners call them ‘weeds’! These opportunists are then followed and replaced eventually by others. These changes are called a succession, and if long enough time is allowed, in, for example, southern England, the land will eventually reach the climax community state for the latitude of an oak/beech forest.

However, you don’t have to wait a number of centuries to observe the early stages! Clear an area of ground at least a square metre in size, including digging out most roots. Then on a regular basis check on the appearance of new colonising plants (eg. once a fortnight) and plot their position with a grid quadrat.

Recording Species In A Habitat

To properly understand how a habitat is functioning involves recording data on the species living there. You can then compare changes in different seasons, or over longer times. There are a number of different ways of making the records, which will give you different types of information.

a. Who’s There?
Probably the commonest way of recording is to identify the species you see as you wander about the habitat to make a list from which you can find the total number of species in the habitat that have been recognised. This type of sampling a habitat is called a ‘qualitative method’.

On a county scale and a national scale this "is a species there?" qualitative approach allows the formation of ‘dot maps’. For these the whole of Britain is divided into a huge grid of small squares, and when naturalists record a particular species in a square, it is plotted. Eventually by plotting these across the whole country, distribution maps have been created which show the national pattern of where the species has been found. Look up the dot maps for species you have found in your area and see if they have been found before in that square. You may find they have not yet been recorded there. Some types of species are particularly under-recorded, such as pseudoscorpions.

b. Where?
One of the most useful ways of relating different plant species to different habitat positions is to make a transect across those positions. One of the simplest, practical ways to do this is to take a length of string that is long enough to run across the habitat positions and put marks on it with a felt tip marker in one colour every 1 metre. Then subdivide the distances on the string with another colour marker at regular intervals such as every 10cm depending on the type of vegetation you wish to record.

Then stretch the string between two pegs to span the transect and just record each species you find at each regular interval. Either sketch in an idea of the profile, or measure it by ensuring the string is taut, with not too long a span and is then checked to be horizontal with a spirit level. Then at each point measure down to the ground surface. If the string span is long then take the height measurements from separately pegged sections, all checked for identical horizontal positioning.

c. How Many?
One of the most useful things to find out about a species in an area is its density. That just means how many of the organisms are in a unit area of habitat, and is usually expressed according to the size of the area as a number per m² or a number per hectare. This is a ‘quantitative’ measure. Animals can be monitored by direct observation, or indirectly using radio tracking or trapping. Small mammals like mice are usually sampled with Longworth live traps, then released.

Large single plants such as trees are recordable on maps of an area and their density worked out. The number of small plants such as grasses in a 1m² can be counted by using a grid of that size placed on the ground. The grid is called a quadrat. To gain a better measure the plants are recorded in a number of positions of the quadrat by moving it to random positions.

Text, photo and drawings © Roger Tabor 2000