people’s trust for endangered species WildliAUTUMNf 2014e WorldISSUE 6 UK ISSN 2049-8268 Risso’s dolphins Norfolk bat magic Harvest mouse habitat Noble chafer beetles It’s now or never Overseas Ethiopian wolves Essential action Africa’s rare antelopes for Borneo’s Russian butterflies orangutans Hope for Syrian brown bears Hedgehog heaven Big cats on camera Pine martens Discover how your How evidence from What we’re doing to garden can become a PTES camera traps can improve the chances haven for our best-loved save a crucial wildlife of Britain’s second mammal species corridor in Malaysia rarest carnivore WILDLIFE WORLD WILDLIFE WORLD 04 PTES people Meet Tracy Foster, whose design for the PTES/BHPS Hedgehog Street Garden scooped two awards 05 Frontline Why governments must never neglect ecology for the sake of economy 20 16 06 Conservation news A quick roundup of recent news at home and abroad, and the view from Nelson’s column 08 Species focus In this edition We’re working for a future where pine martens are restored to their native British and Irish range 10 Scrapbook We love hearing from friends of PTES, be they researchers or volunteers, so please, tell us your story 12 Our work with primates © Northshots / Pete Cairns / Pete © Northshots From orangutans to bonobos, gibbons and slow lorises, we are working to conserve threatened 18 08 primates wherever they need our help most 16 PTES in action How we’re turning your support into positive action to help threatened species and habitats around the world and at home in the UK 22 DIY Hedgehog Officer Henry Johnson offers some great ideas for making 14 22 your garden hedgehog-friendly Editor: Dr Amy-Jane Beer WATER VOLE Editorial team: Jill Nelson, Zoe Roden, Nida Al-Fulaij Welcome Design: becolourful.co.uk Bringing the Britain’s water voles It’s hard to believe three years have passed since we began Creative lead: Phillip Southgate have been a conservation Illustration: Hayley Cove working on issue one of Wildlife World magazine, but time has Print: 4-Print wild back to life priority for over 10 years. flown. I hope you’ll enjoy our more streamlined new look created Patchy monitoring was Cover image: Wildlife World is published by the talented Phillip Southgate. As always you’ll find this edition Sergey Uryadnikov making it difficult to build by People’s Trust for packed with project reports and updates from the vital work PTES Shutterstock.com a clear national picture Endangered Species is involved with around the world. PTES is a relatively small charity, The opinions expressed in this to show which measures © magazine are not necessarily those of D ave Willis ave but with no shortage of ambition – the embodiment of thinking Our wildlife is disappearing. Almost work and where more help People’s Trust for Endangered Species. globally while acting locally. I’m continually amazed and inspired two thirds of species in the UK have is needed. That’s why we by what these projects achieve by thoughtful allocation of funds Contact us declined in the past 50 years. There’s are using our expertise to PTES Wildlife World Magazine to people with the passion and expertise to change the fate of threatened wildlife on the nothing natural or inevitable about this. develop a National Water 3 Cloisters House © iStockphoto.com / Mike / Mike © iStockphoto.com ground. Often their actions bring real benefits for human communities too. Read on 8 Battersea Park Road It can be stopped. And everyone can Vole Monitoring Scheme, to to learn how your support is restoring balance, informing policy, protecting landscapes London SW8 4BG play a part. That’s why People’s Trust be launched in 2015. Watch and livelihoods and, of course, saving species. Thank you! ⚫ www.ptes.org for Endangered Species exists. this space for updates. [email protected] people’s 020 7498 4533 trust for Dr Amy-Jane Beer, Editor L ane Find out more facebook.com/ptes.org endangered www.ptes.org twitter.com/AmyJaneBeer twitter.com/PTES species Wildlife World 3 YOUR PTES FRONTLINE PTES PTES PEOPLE LOVES Eco-nomy Have you noticed that ecology and economy have the same root? Eco is from Oikos, the Greek for ‘home’. Hence ecology is the study of home, and economics is the management of it. The two are inextricably linked. As political parties jostle for pre-election position, Amy-Jane Beer OTTERS: RETURN TO THE RIVER asks what they’re going to do about the real eco-nomy? Laurie Campbell & Anna Levin £14.99 (paperback) This beautiful book has been many ur friends at RSPB recently launched a campaign to subject to legal eradication efforts. An outrageous prospect. years in the making, but the results of push environmental issues up the political agenda, asking Environmental lawmaking should be about ecology, not photographer Laurie Campbell’s us to ‘Vote for Bob’, a chirpy red squirrel. Bob isn’t really economics. At its most asinine, the law can protect badgers with extraordinary patience and field Oa squirrel. Bob is a lapwing. Bob is any native bird you one arm, and shoot them (badly, as it turns out) with the other. craft are worth the wait! care to mention. Bob is a badger. Bob is habitat. Bob is the planet. It can flip the status of the common pheasant from non-native Bob wants you to use your vote in 2015 livestock at hatching to wild (read ‘native’ to show you care. By all means, support for purposes of the Infrastructure Bill) © I ain Green Bob, because your voice counts. But let’s so that it can be set free with millions of not pretend that would be job done. others into specially managed woodland As any campaigner will tell you, and, come 1st October, shot. If sheep Garden designer Tracy Foster’s fondness for hedgehogs nothing gets your view across better broke into your garden and wrecked it, than direct communication – be it a letter, the farmer would be liable. If pheasants resulted in the award-winning Hedgehog Street Garden an email, or a personal challenge to the do the same, well sorry, they are ‘wild’ at this year’s Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. We candidate on your doorstep. Prospective animals. However once dead, they deftly MPs don’t come to my door – we’re off the metamorphose into livestock again to asked what drew her to work with PTES and the British beaten track. But this time I’ll be seeking smooth the sale and export pathways Hedgehog Preservation Society. HEDGEHOGS them out. We should all do so, because for their meat. Those that escape the / © iStockphoto.com Pat Morris we all know things they don’t, and guns are also reclassified, just in time to ne of my earliest memories is of a family of £14.99 (hardback) understand things they prefer to ignore. be rounded up for breeding. This legal hedgehogs visiting our Sheffield garden when Revised and updated, this classic The Infrastructure Bill passing the shapeshifting has nothing to do with L OI was a small child and I’m sure it contributed from the Whittet British Natural History Lords this summer was ostensibly about ecology, and everything to do with C eonard to my lifelong fascination with wildlife and gardens. I realised that Series is the best introduction to planning. But it included other new stakeholder interests. Policy is powerful. When I heard that hedgehogs were struggling to hedgehog biology we know – a must legislation, some of it highly damaging It can, and will reassign the value placed survive because their habitats are being carved up gardeners have for every natural history bookshelf. to conservation, including reassigning on our wildlife – unless we make our by impenetrable boundaries I realised that gardeners, been unwittingly any species ‘not ordinarily and naturally informed opinions clear. designers and landscapers have been unwittingly resident in or visiting the UK’ as non- Government policy can, I’m not naïve enough to suggest making the problem worse. making things native. These include European beavers, and will, reassign the value politics hasn’t always been rife with When I found out that the Hedgehog Street project whose controlled reintroduction PTES vested interest. On the plus side, we was looking to create a show garden I immediately worse for has supported for years, and other placed on our wildlife, have freedom to point this out, and sent them my ideas and was lucky enough to be hedgehogs extinct natives such as lynx. It also unless we make our social media gives us a previously chosen. The garden was designed to show people how includes re-established and naturalised unimaginable power to challenge. easily they can help hedgehogs and still have a stylish species on Schedule 9 of the Wildlife and informed opinions clear A government of any colour should garden – and what better place than a garden show Countryside Act – red kites, large blue also be green – so it’s not about who to get the message across? butterflies, capercaillie, common cranes, wild boar, little owls, is elected, it’s about ensuring they all pay heed. I wouldn’t dream Producing the show garden was a fantastic white-tailed eagles, brown hares, cornflowers and corncockles, of telling anyone how to vote. But I do dream about ordinary experience, and I learnt so much about hedgehogs A MEssAGE FROM choughs, corncrakes – even barn owls. Native vs non-native is a people like me confronting policymakers with the evidence along the way. It was wonderful to see how MARTHA hot topic in conservation circles, but it’s a question as artificial as and insisting they act on it.