Guest blog by Calum Urquhart (Staff Naturalist) & Lucy Smith (Academic Placement) – Aigas Field Centre
Our NatureSpy camera traps have been a valuable asset to us over the last 12 months; we’ve put them to use in every corner of the Aigas estate. They’ve been used for everything from monitoring our captive breeding wildcats and generating a pine marten ID catalogue, to keeping track of what time badgers are visiting our wildlife hides and discovering which birds of prey are visiting a deer carcass out on the moor.
Aigas Wildcat breeding programme monitoring
As part of the Scottish wildcat captive breeding programme, we have a number of wildcats here at Aigas. It is important that we keep tabs on them without interfering too much in their day to day lives with our presence; this is crucial when it comes to breeding pairs which can be vulnerable to disturbance. Using camera traps to monitor the behaviour of our 2021 breeding pair (Brora and Fergus), we knew roughly when to expect kittens and keep ranger interaction with the cats to an absolute minimum. Brora raised two kittens last summer, and we hope she will have similar success this year!
Beaver monitoring
The loch at Aigas has played host to a beaver demonstration project for over 15 years. In this time, they’ve drastically changed the appearance of the wetland and woodland areas surrounding the loch. By damming up burns to make new pools and excavating channels, they’ve created a whole new marginal habitat around the loch, in turn allowing them to reach more trees for food and timber. It is important that we keep track of how many beavers are present on the loch so that we know when to move some on to other projects and give our trees a break! Our camera traps have allowed us to do just this by figuring out when new kits have been born before anyone sees them by eye. Trapping and relocating then allows us to keep the balance between beavers and woodland, as they cannot disperse naturally from our enclosed loch.
Pine Marten catalogue and the ‘bib-shot box’
It is important for us to have a clear idea of the number of pine martens on site and where they roam. We found out this information using NatureSpy camera traps to identify individuals based on their unique bib patterns and track where these individuals were going on site. Recently we have even constructed a specialised camera trap box for our pine martens; the ‘bib-shot box’. This rectangular wooden box has a compartment in the middle of the back wall for the camera trap to slot into, with two holes for the camera trap straps to thread through to the back of the box. The larger front section of the box has a shelf about three quarters of the way up where peanuts and honey, favourites of our pine martens, can be placed. When the hungry pine marten comes to eat these treats, it must look up and even stand on its hind legs to reach the shelf, exposing its bib to the camera trap at the back. The bib-shot box has also allowed us to track where these individuals go; the box can be moved around site and, using the camera trap straps, can be strapped securely onto trees in places perfect for pine martens but out of reach for greedy badgers.
We have so far identified 7 individuals at Aigas and have seen that they travel widely, reaching not only our lit hides where guests can enjoy a night-time peek at our wildlife but also hides not used at night, our pine forest around the loch and even the gardens around the House of Aigas. This footage and information has been vital for educating our guests on the morphology and behaviour of pine martens, and for sparking their interests in the hides. We have been able to create an ID catalogue, and place posters with clear bib-shots of our pine martens in our hides, as well as a map showing the areas where each of our pine martens frequent on site. This has allowed our guests to not only identify, but learn more about the territories and movements of the pine martens they see during their visit. We are working now on further improving the bib-shot box to get even clearer ID shots to share with visitors to Aigas.
Badger catalogue
In a similar vein to our pine marten catalogue, we have used our cameras to create ID sheets for the badgers that visit our hides. Identifying individual badgers can be tricky, often requiring a combination of features such as tail and ear shape, shape of facial stripes and scars to figure out who’s who. Fortunately, the sharp night-time footage from the cameras placed to monitor wildlife at our hides has allowed us to identify at least 6 badgers, with more individuals that we suspect to be different yet to be named!
Keeping tabs on wildlife visiting our hides
Here at Aigas we have several wildlife hides for our guests to visit, including two specially designed for evening pine marten and badger watches. It is therefore imperative that we keep tabs on the frequency and timings of visits to these hides from both pine martens and badgers, to give our evening watches the best chance of success! Stationing a camera trap at each hide and keeping a daily log of which species are visiting at what time has allowed us to do just this, and produced some fantastic footage of other wildlife such as red squirrels and Jays along the way.
General wildlife monitoring
Having a set of camera traps has allowed us to discover a lot more about the wildlife found here at Aigas. We realised that although seen only occasionally, otters are present on the Aigas loch regularly in the dead of night, their waterside haul-outs (known as ‘couches’) being used by both red and roe deer as a drinking platform. A deer carcass up on the moor produced awesome footage of scavenging buzzards, red kites, hooded crows, foxes, badgers and even wood mice!
Environmental education
Our education team were able to allow groups of visiting children to place camera traps out and see what they could find, reviewing the footage upon their return visit a few weeks later. They were ecstatic to find that they’d managed to video red squirrels, roe deer, and a number of small birds passing by their traps, with one group even capturing the eye-shine and bounding movements of a distant pine marten.
In addition to this, our social media posts with camera trap footage have been particularly popular, allowing us to share the wildlife of Aigas far and wide. This has helped us to increase awareness and understanding of the conservation and ecology of many species in the Highlands, from pine martens to Scottish wildcats. None of this would have been possible without the high-quality footage provided by our set of camera traps, and we are very thankful to NatureSpy for loaning them out to us.
Thank you to Calum and Lucy for sharing their updates and footage with us! You can learn more about Aigas Field Centre over on the NatureSpy project pages.
Aigas Field Centre use Browning camera traps for high quality images and versatility with various wildlife monitoring needs.
