This week we were out in our leafy grounds with Steph West of the Museum’s Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity. She talked to host David Urry about the wildlife in your gardens, from millipedes to stag beetles, and pond life to log life.
Steph will also be featuring in a BBC TV programme in the near future and we’ll have more news on that soon.
If you’re enjoying our this series of events, please leave us a review on iTunes or join us live on Facebook or Twitter to ask your own questions to our scientists.
In the latest update from our Identification Trainers for the Future project, Sally Hyslop continues the story of the work our five trainees have performed thus far.
Trainee life in the Museum is often focused through a microscope and so, after many months of study, it was brilliant to refresh our zeal for the natural world this month with a field trip to the Dorset coast. We spent three days exploring dramatic cliffs and coastal heathlands: by day, putting our developing botany skills into practise, and by night, spotting bats and catching moths.
The trainees in the field in Dorset
The Museum’s Fred Rumsey and Mark Spencer led us through heath and bog on a hunt for the elusive bog orchid, Hammarbya paludosa. By the end of the day we found 109 spikes of these miniscule and delicate, rare, green flowers. On top of this, we encountered blankets of dainty white beaked sedge, flowering bog asphodel and all three UK species of sticky, carnivorous sundews along with their two hybrids.
