Staff at Vincent Wildlife Trust have produced a range of free, downloadable resources on the work to conserve threatened mammals in Britain, Ireland and mainland Europe. Some have written books that can be bought online through NHBS.
This report presents an analysis of The Vincent Wildlife Trust’s Irish bat box project and results of an online survey and was possible due to a grant from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.
The Mostela consists of a wooden box containing a plastic tunnel and a camera trap within to record any animal that enters. It has successfully detected stoats in the Netherlands and the UK. The Irish stoat is a subspecies endemic to Ireland and the Isle of Man and, despite being widespread in Ireland, no information exists on its population status due to the difficulty of detecting it. We conducted a twelve-week study from May to July 2019 at twelve locations in Mayo and Galway to test the efficacy of the Mostela to detect the species. A second camera trap was placed outside to record any stoats that did not enter. The results of this study are outlined in the poster below.
This project set out to build new and permanent structures in County Limerick in the vicinity of the Mulkear River to function as suitable roosting sites for the lesser horseshoe bat. This is the first time that funding under an agri-environment scheme was solely targeted to benefit this bat species.
The Our Beacon for Bats project aimed to contribute to the long-term conservation of lesser horseshoe bats in the upper Usk Valley through working with local people to raise awareness, add to our knowledge of how bats use the area and undertake habitat enhancements.
The aim of this document is to set out a strategic, long-term recovery plan for pine martens in Britain. It follows on from a previous strategy produced in 2011 (Jordan, 2011), which outlined the practical work and research needed to restore and secure the future of pine marten populations in England and Wales up until 2020. We present a summary of what has been achieved so far and set out a continuing recovery plan for pine martens across Britain that maintains this strategic approach, while emphasising the importance of conserving recovering populations in Scotland.
Since 2015, VWT has been involved in pine marten translocations from Scotland for population restoration in Wales and, more recently, Gloucestershire. A primary consideration in these translocations has been to minimise the potential for negative impacts on recovering donor populations in Scotland. To this end, surveys and monitoring have been carried out to collect further data to inform the way in which current and future sustainable harvesting models are applied. Based on precautionary principles, VWT adopted a highly conservative approach to trapping and removals in the first instance. Data on indices of marten activity at donor sites to date suggest that this has proved effective, and population estimates derived from genetic analysis of non-invasively collected samples support the suggestion that only a relatively small proportion of resident animals have been removed. However, the sampling strategy could be improved to refine population estimates further and better inform the way in which donor populations are managed and conserved in the face of higher demand from other organisations in future.
