Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2018 i BBC Wildlife Magazine

RED FOX CALL OF THE WILD It’s 350-odd years since wild wolves were heard in Britain, and the screams of female foxes on winter nights serve as a spine-tingling reminder of what we lost. Foxes typically breed between December and February, or perhaps later in the northern half of the country. Vixens utter blood-curdling cries to attract dog foxes, while both sexes use quieter, throaty ‘wow-wow-wow’ barks to stay in touch. If you spot two foxes together at this time, it’s probably a dog fox sticking close to his mate to try to guard her from rivals. FIND OUT MORE www.thefoxwebsite.net DEVIL’S MATCHSTICKS LICHEN TROOPS This fabulous lichen sprouts dense clusters of tiny fingers up to 2cm high, which resemble old-fashioned red-tipped matches. With a bit of imagination, they also…

The earth vibrates with the thundering of millions of hooves as heaving herds of wildebeest, zebra and gazelles fill the plains, chasing the rains in the epic annual struggle for survival known as The Great Migration. It’s a natural spectacle like no other, and a life-changing experience to witness. The wildebeest follow an age-old route across the plains of the Masai Mara in Kenya, south into Tanzania, through the Serengeti and almost all the way to the Ngorongoro Crater. The route remains unchanged, but the timing can vary from year to year. Thankfully, Asilia Africa makes it easy to stay close to the action whenever it occurs. Its three mobile migration camps move location up to three times a year to ensure they are located in the best possible position…

For grey seals, breeding is stressful. Leaving the sanctuary of the water, females haul out for a month, giving birth and raising their pups as quickly as they can, before mating with the big, boisterous males that chance their luck through the whole season. The resulting pups will be born a year later. Now, as seal watching becomes more popular in the UK, a team from Durham University and the University of St Andrews’ Sea Mammal Research Unit is investigating whether human disturbance adds to the seals’ stress. Their study site is the Isle of May, a craggy outcrop in the Firth of Forth, home to the largest breeding colony of grey seals on Scotland’s east coast. The team is noting stress responses in female seals to both natural stimuli,…

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“SMALL RISES IN TEMPERATURE FOR A FEW WEEKS AT A TIME IS ENOUGH TO CAUSE CORAL BLEACHING.” WHAT IS CORAL? It may look like a plant but it is an animal, related to sea anemones. A tiny, soft-bodied creature called a ‘polyp’, it lives with thousands of other polyps to form a colony. So-called hard coral polyps extract calcium carbonate from the seawater and use it to build exoskeletons to protect themselves. They build on the exoskeletons of their ancestors and, as the centuries pass, the coral reef slowly grows. together cover an area no bigger than France. WHY ARE THEY UNDER THREAT? Coral reefs are fragile ecosystems. Major threats include pollution, fishing with cyanide and dynamite, overfishing, coastal development, collection for the pet and curio trades, coral mining for…

They may not be pretty but they most definitely are beautiful in their own uncompromising way. There is nothing quite like watching the coming together of hundreds of these majestic giants at a recently deceased corpse. With piranha-like efficiency, they can tear hundreds of kilograms of flesh from an elephant seal carcass in hours, with powerful tube-nosed bills strong enough to crack open a seal skull. Plunging deep into the remains, the heads and necks of these usually exquisitely preened birds quickly become coated with bright red blood and gore. It’s not a sight for the squeamish! Equally striking is the competition for the optimal place at the feast. The birds posture with wings spread and tails fanned, moving their heads from side to side while emitting their best war…

On the face of it, kob appear to be a fairly typical African antelope – elegant, horned, agile – but one thing sets them apart from many of their cousins: they gather to lek. Usually associated with grouse, waders and other birds, lekking is a territorial mating strategy where males gather in a particular area to impress females. The kob assemble in clusters of circular territories, each 10–15m in diameter, within a larger breeding area. Those at the centre are prime real estate and the bucks jostle for these best positions, displaying their fitness with parallel walks and head shaking. Then, if challenged by another male for the territory, they will test their horns against the intruder in an effort to establish superiority. If two males are equally matched these…

 NEIL MCINTYRE is a wildlife and landscape photographer based in Cairngorms National Park, where he runs wildlife photography tours. His book The Red Squirrel: A Future in the Forest (£25) is available via www.scotlandbigpicture.com. See more of his images at www.neilmcintyre.com.…

“WE SEE THEIR WORLDS THROUGH THEIR EYES, GAINING NEW INSIGHTS.” Animals with Cameras TV BBC One Due to air 1 February No matter how brave, patient and persistant wildlife film-makers are, there will always be places that they can’t go and creatures that they can’t follow. In these cases, why not pass the filming buck on to the animals themselves? Presented by Gordon Buchanan, this new three-parter does exactly that, kitting out nine species both on land and in water and sending them on their way. Attaching teeny-tiny cameras to animals is nothing new, but the devices used in this series – many of which were developed by miniature camera expert Chris Watts – are designed to function for longer, offering extended, spy-on-the-wall views that we would never otherwise have…

Winterwatch TV BBC TWO Due to air 29 January–1 February It’s that time – to curl up and enjoy the best of Britain’s winter wildlife from the warmth and comfort of your sofa. HQ for this year’s seasonal spectacular is Sherborne Park Estate in Gloucester, and wild treats in store include cranes and other winter waders at West Sedgemoor on the Somerset Levels; a snow diary of the Cairngorms as temperatures plummet around these famous Highland peaks; new research on grey seal behaviour (see p36); hedgehogs stalking dark urban streets for a home; red deer and a trio of kingfishers squabbling over hunting territory – and not your average leafy riverbank, but the seaweedy surroundings of Ramsgate Harbour, on the East coast. “Winter is the hardest time of year for…

 Since 1985, family owned Tarangire Safari Lodge has catered to wildlife enthusiasts and those seeking rest and relaxation among one of Tanzania’s most popular national parks. Perched at the edge of a natural bluff, Tarangire Safari Lodge is renowned for its panoramic views of the savannah and Tarangire River below, “providing one of the best views in Africa.” At the edge of a natural bluff... Providing one of the best views in Africa Carving out the landscape below the lodge is Tarangire River, a favorite watering place, which attracts impressive numbers of wildlife from the surrounding ecosystems that come together in large numbers to drink, just below our wide-stretched terrace. A variety of ecosystems exist within the park boundary, with 94 species of mammals and over 500 bird species recorded.…

EVENT SPOTLIGHT Whales of the world Dive in and discover one of the planet’s most compelling evolutionary journeys in this new cetacean exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum. More than 100 specimens from the museum’s collection will be on display for the first time, including parts of a blue whale and a harbour porpoise. Visitors to this family-friendly event can get up close to the ‘Thames whale’ (a northern bottlenose whale that swam into the River Thames), listen to a whale jukebox and see what lies inside a sperm whale’s stomach. • Until 28 February, Natural History Museum, London, adult £12.50, child £8.50, www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/exhibitions/whales.html Go green Gary Prescott, also known as the Biking Birder, will present a talk on Green Birding to the RSPB Basingstoke local group. In 2016 Gary…

As a rule BBC One’s The One Show doesn’t do long wildlife film shoots – the luxury of being able to spend weeks filming carefully crafted sequences is usually confined to landmark series such as Blue Planet II. So when we were offered four berths on a scientific voyage taking in a huge chunk of the Atlantic Ocean, we decided to go for it. Just this once we wanted to, as it were, push the boat out. Our home for three weeks would be the Celtic Explorer, a research vessel owned by the Irish government and run by the Marine Institute, based in Galway on Ireland’s west coast. Designed to enable scientists to monitor everything from fisheries stocks to climate change, she is a 65m-long floating laboratory with state-of-the-art equipment.…

Calls for one of the world’s largest ‘no-take zones’ to be created around the South Sandwich Islands – one of 14 of the UK’s Overseas Territories (OTs) – have gained significant impetus following the conclusion of Blue Planet II at the end of last year. A coalition of conservation and environmental groups, under the banner of the Great British Oceans (GBO), says the legacy of the BBC series could be even greater than that. It is pressing the British Government to protect some 4m km2 of ocean – an area larger than all of India – in territories including Ascension Island, St Helena and Tristan da Cunha, all in the South Atlantic. But the South Sandwich Islands are regarded as the jewel in the crown because they are still a…

“ADDER HABITAT DETERIORATES WHERE IT IS UNMANAGED IT BECOMES TOO SHADED.” Though adders appear to be widespread across Great Britain and are found from Cornwall to northeast Scotland, the truth is they are rare or absent in many areas of the country, and have disappeared entirely from whole counties, including Hertfordshire, Nottinghamshire and Warwickshire. Globally, they have a huge range, and are found right across Europe and Asia, as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far east as Russia’s Pacific coast. They live in a variety of habitats, including heathland, acid and chalk grassland, open woodland, moorland, mire and coastal areas. South-west Scotland and coastal South Wales have large areas of good adder habitat. They require open areas receiving sunlight for basking, vegetation that provides shelter overnight and…

“THERE CANNOT BE A CLEARER WARNING OF THE DAMAGE LYNX COULD DO IF RELEASED INTO THE WILD.” When a young female lynx escaped from Borth Wild Animal Kingdom in Mid Wales in late October, nobody could have foreseen the scale of the outrage that was unleashed. First, it was the turn of local farmers when the carcasses of seven sheep were found in a field, suggesting Lillith had used her new-found freedom to practise her hunting skills. Post mortems revealed the sheep had been killed by a single bite to the neck. Two had been partially eaten, but the other five were otherwise untouched, all suggesting a lynx – rather than feral dogs, as had also been mooted – was the culprit, claims the National Sheep Association (NSA). “There cannot…

Giant petrels belong to an order of seabirds known as Procellariiformes. The common name that encompasses these birds is ‘tubenose’, reflecting their prominent nostrils that sit on the upper bill. These nasal appendages give the birds an extremely sensitive sense of smell, enabling them to locate food sources and breeding colonies across large distances. The bills of giant petrels are made up of horny plates, like the maxillary unguis at the tip, that helps hold slippery food. The northern giant petrels of South Georgia are distinguished by the reddish hue of this maxillary unguis, while the southern species (pictured) has a greenish tinge.…

Kidepo Valley National Park is home to 500 bird species and 86 mammals (28 of which can be found nowhere else in Uganda, including the cheetah, caracal, lesser kudu, mountain reedbuck and Guenther’s dik-dik). Together with the largest buffalo population of any park in Africa, there’s an estimated 700 elephants and about 120 lions. Kidepo has been the scene of several successful relocation efforts. Three Endangered Rothschild’s giraffes were relocated here in 2015, bringing the total herd in the park to 35; 11 eland were brought here from Lake Mburu in 2004, since when the herd has swelled to almost 50-strong; and, most recently, the 112 Ugandan kob arrived. Now there are even discussions about relocating black rhino from Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary.…

The Wolf By Nate Blakeslee One World £20 On a snow-clad December day in 2012 a hunter in Wyoming, US, shot the most famous wolf in the world. O-Six was the star of the Yellowstone National Park wolf recovery project. Thousands of park visitors had watched her catching elk. So celebrated was she that The New Yorker gave her an obituary. This wonderful book is about the human lives she touched and the controversies that led to her death. We meet committed rangers like Rick McIntyre who has notched up 85,000 wolf sightings; and Doug Smith, who leads the Yellowstone wolf studies. And we also meet the ranchers and hunters who see the reintroduced wolves as a deadly threat to their livelihoods and to their elk herds. Best of all,…

On a recent visit to Sri Lanka I was lucky enough to see some of the planet’s most charismatic animals, including a blue whale. While on a boat trip off the coast of Mirissa, the colossal cetacean appeared in the distance. Every dive brought the marine mammal closer to the vessel, until I could count the remoras clinging to its skin. The whole holiday was surreal. My head spun with sightings of technicolour feathers and formidable talons, and hearing babbling calls, but the highlight occurred during a safari. We spent 12 fruitless hours searching for leopards in Lunugamvehera National Park, near Hambantota. The following day we returned to the park and were rewarded with the sight of a leopard lazing in a tree. It stirred and disappeared from view before…

1 FROLICKING IN THE MIST In November I went for a walk near my home to enjoy the morning mist. Not long after sunrise I saw roe deer on the brow of a hill overlooking Salisbury Cathedral. They spotted me first before running off towards the woods. I took a few pictures, managing to focus on the ungulates and not the misty background, and even captured a couple of mid-jump shots. I wasn’t sure if they would be in focus, but I was delighted with the result. Martin Cook, Salisbury, UK 2 UNDER ATTACK I’ve been coming to the Hesserghatta grasslands in the outskirts of Bangalore, India, for about seven years. We see a lot of short-toed snake eagles hunting here, but this time I managed to capture a truly…

“BEAVERS COULD BE NATURAL ALLIES AS WE TRY TO TURN THE TIDE ON MAN-MADE PROBLEMS.” Keeping up with farmer Chris Jones proves to be trickier than I thought it would be when we set out. He’s still in shorts despite the late autumn chill, and thanks to his trusty walking stick one of his friends suggests that he bears more than a passing resemblance to Christopher Robin from Winnie-the-Pooh . A charming thought, but this Christopher has a surprising turn of speed that forces me to shape up, as we pick and squelch our way through ankle-deep mud. Autumn is well underway and in the crisp mid-morning light I’m not expecting to see the animals I’ve come here to learn about – they’re nocturnal after all – but there are…

At first it was quiet. In the heart of the Australian outback, the waterhole lay silent and still; an undisturbed oasis in the vast expanse of scorched, terracotta earth. All around it the unforgiving desert stretched as far as the eye could see, peppered only with the occasional parched shrub or straggly coolabah tree. Then, as the sun began to rise, it appeared as if from nowhere. In the distance, cutting through the early morning haze like a twisting gymnastics ribbon, a strange cloud rose and fell, twisted and turned, casting a series of sinuous silhouettes against the cloudless sky. Ever-changing, never still, the bizarre shape-shifter danced its way out of the distance towards the waterhole. As it came closer, the blue sky turned green, and the amorphous mass resolved…

Monitoring of 23 rivers in the UK has revealed massive contamination of our freshwater systems with the pesticides known as neonicotinoids. The data was obtained by Buglife but not released by the Environment Agency, which carried out the work, or the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), which is responsible for policy. Nearly 90 per cent of sites in Britain were contaminated with neonicotinoids, with eight rivers exceeding recommended levels. The Waveney, on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, and the Wensum in Norfolk were the two most polluted rivers, probably because of the use of neonicotinoids on sugar beet, Buglife says. “We have known there’s been a problem with neonicotinoids in our rivers since 2009,” says Buglife’s Matt Shardlow. According to Shardlow, the use of these pesticides in arable fields…

Freak weather conditions and strange seasonal episodes contributed to some bizarre wildlife events in 2017, the National Trust has said. On the plus side, the autumnal crop of berries, nuts and seeds (and a correspondingly poor return in mainland Europe) saw a huge influx of hawfinches to Britain, with flocks as large as 50 reported in some areas. Bluefin tuna were spotted off Cornwall, drawn back to UK shores after an absence of more than 50 years by returning herring and mackerel, while purple emperors were discovered at the Trust’s Sheringham Park, the first time they’ve been seen in Norfolk in 40 years. On the minus side, a dry winter led to a lack of breeding pools for natterjack toads at Sandscale Haws, and autumnal storms contributed to a high…

The Dinaric Alps region of Slovenia is one of Europe’s great wilderness areas that has remained largely unchanged for 50 years. This exclusive BBC Wildlife four-day reader holiday takes you to view the area’s thriving European brown bear population from specially designed hides, just a short distance from where you will be staying. Throughout the trip you will be accompanied by specialist guides and a member of the BBC Wildlife staff. There will be great opportunities to search in the forests for impressive Ural owls and an exciting range of woodpeckers (three-toed, black, grey-headed and middle spotted) with help from bird expert Domen Stanic. After spending afternoons and evenings bear and bird watching you will stay in a traditional guesthouse on the forest’s edge run by local naturalist Miha Mlakar,…

BORTH ZOO Lillith the lynx was on the run for 12 days after getting out. Attempts to recapture her failed, and she was shot for public safety reasons. DARTMOOR ZOO A male lynx spent three weeks in the wild and killed four sheep in 2016, but was recaptured after being lured into a trap with a piece of veal. COLCHESTER ZOO Five timber wolves escaped from Colchester Zoo in November 2013, and three of them were shot later that day. One returned to its enclosure, the other was darted. COTSWOLD WILDLIFE PARK A female wolf got out one morning in July 2017. Park staff said she was out of range to tranquilise, so she was shot later that day.…

As we watch a mixed herd of defassa waterbuck and newly arrived Ugandan kob grazing near a waterhole, Corrie Brits, manager at Apoka Safari Lodge, comments drily: “It seems that kob are not yet on the menu as far as the lions are concerned.” The rock outcrop at Apoka was once a meeting place for the ancient Ik tribe, who roamed these valleys long before the nearby borders of Kenya and South Sudan were even imagined, and who now live in the nearby mountains. Even farther back in time, before the Ik arrived, this rock was a prime lookout point for local lion prides, and so it persists today. Neither the presence of tribesmen nor of tourists seems to worry the cats unduly. As I stepped out of my stilted…

Tell us about your volunteers Our group comes from all over Leeds. Many are retired, but we also have students, people between jobs, stay-at-home parents and self-employed workers who can sneak in a day of volunteering every two weeks. They all have different motivations: giving something back to their local area, a love of wildlife, socialising with like-minded people or gaining experience in the conservation sector. What sort of tasks do you do? We work at council-owned nature sites in and around the city. Much of what we do involves protecting locally important sites – for example removing rhododendron and Himalayan balsam from Breary Marsh Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), or taking out scrub from Adel Moor, one of only two sites in Leeds that is home to common…

The 13 Local Patch Reporters who won BBC Wildlife’s Blogger of the Month competition throughout 2017 made up our Blogger of the Year Awards 2017 shortlist. The judging panel of four natural history TV presenters – Gillian Burke, Lizzie Daly, Ben Garrod and Miranda Krestovnikoff – had the tricky task of picking an overall winner. The 13 Local Patch blogs they read covered a range of wildlife topics, from tracking the seasonal changes in a garden to visiting UK nature reserves. Here we announce the overall winner and the five runners-up. To see the full list of winning entries visit www.discoverwildlife.com/news/blogger-awards-2017 YOU CAN BE A LOCAL PATCH BLOGGER TOO! Post your blog updates on our forum: www.discoverwildlife.com/forum…

“RANGERS ARE NOT ALWAYS CONSIDERED THE GOOD GUYS. CONFLICT BETWEEN NATIONAL PARKS AND COMMUNITIES IS RIFE.” Driving along the pot-holed road, past bush fires and the occasional buffalo, it was difficult to imagine what was ahead. “It’s going to be a circus!” one of my fellow volunteers joked. It was late July and I was in western Uganda with volunteers from the Queen Elizabeth Parks Project. We were gathering for World Ranger Day, an international event that celebrates the work that rangers do and remembers those who have been injured or lost their lives in the line of duty. Such an event hadn’t been held in Uganda before, but with some international encouragement officials had formed a committee and drawn up a schedule of events. And we were to be…