Innovative mammal conservation
Katherine Morley, Carnivore Conservation Officer, shares an account of her first four months with Vincent Wildlife Trust. Why did you want to work for VWT? At a time where almost one in six species in Britain is threatened with extinction, I was feeling a pull back towards working for a charitable organisation and making a Read More
23rd November 2023
Ben Atkinson, North Dorset Reserves Warden for Dorset Wildlife Trust, explains why Bracketts Coppice Nature Reserve is so special for Bechstein’s bats. Tucked away down the country lanes of northwest Dorset, the 46 hectares of Bracketts Coppice contains ancient woodland, streams, wood pasture and hay meadows. The reserve is a designated Special Area of Conservation Read More
26th October 2023
A day in the life of one of Vincent Wildlife Trust’s volunteer camera trappers, Matthew Davies, who first volunteered during the Pine Marten Recovery Project (PMRP) in Wales from the start. Now he is an experienced camera trapper for VWT and the Woodland Trust. Matthew is skilled and passionate about capturing evidence and records of Read More
10th October 2023
How volunteering helped Andrew Lewis move into a new job My name is Andrew, and I am a volunteer with Vincent Wildlife Trust. Some years ago, I completed a degree in Environmental Studies with the intention of changing career from engineering into the environmental and ecology sector. However, a large element of ‘career inertia’ led Read More
5th April 2023
But we couldn’t let her go without one final blog… What are your first memories of joining VWT? When I joined the Trust, VWT was embarking on a new project to search for evidence of any remaining pine marten populations in England and Wales. I cut my teeth looking for pine marten scats in Read More
28th February 2023
Generally, I quietly work behind the administrative scenes and am known more for my style (as in writing guidelines) than my natural science. However, I was drawn to the work of Vincent Wildlife Trust because of my fondness – call it obsession – for all-things Mustelidae. In January 1977, a second-year (Yr 8) form teacher Read More
22nd September 2022
Having just completed a degree in environmental science, it was important for me to have the experience that would be essential in gaining a career in conservation. Now, I was not your usual early to mid-twenties student fresh out of school and full of ideas; I was approaching 50 and looking to begin a new Read More
30th May 2022
Despite being in my third year of my PhD studying bats, I had yet to see a bat up close in person. I study bat genetics and how they relate to white-nose disease tolerance, and the extent of my contact with bats had been extracting DNA from little scraps of bat skin from the lab Read More
13th May 2022
The Trust owns seven buildings in County Kerry that held just under 2,000 adult lesser horseshoe bats in 2021. We rely on two long-term volunteers, Nora Coffey and Maire O’Connell, to conduct emergence counts at six of these each summer, between the last week of May and the first week of July. Two of these, Read More
15th March 2022
Having never seen a weasel or stoat for more than a few seconds at the most and, also never having captured one with a trail camera, VWT Volunteers’ newsletter about ‘Mostelas’ was very intriguing. Following a quick email exchange with Laura, Volunteering and Community Engagement Officer at VWT, I soon had the plans to make Read More
26th January 2022