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The next meeting of the Branch will be held on Thursday 26th January, 2012 at 7.30pm, and will be a talk entitled Wildlife and Environmental Crime in Fife - the latest trends locally. This will be given by PC Ian Laing, who is the Fife Constabulary Wildlife and Environmental Crime Co-ordinator.
The talk will take place at St Peter’s Episcopal Church Hall, Hope St., Inverkeithing.

Volunteer Shepherds Wanted!

We are looking for volunteers to help with checking the Flying Flock at Kilminning Reserve near Crail. If you would like to help with the Flying Flock project, this is a great opportunity to get involved. No special skills are required, and you can help out as and when it suits you. We will organise a short introductory session with Laura Cunningham, our full-time shepherd, when you start. Checking involves walking through the reserve, counting the sheep and reporting any problems to back to Laura. For more information or to volunteer, please contact Alistair Whyte on 01236 617 115 or email awhyte@swt.org.uk

Report of last meeting (This is taken from Jack Matthew's press release)

A Microcosm of Life on Earth

The Scottish Wildlife Trust, Fife & Kinross Branch, held its pre-Christmas meeting in St Andrew’s Town Hall on 13th December, 2011. Dr Gordon Corbet presented his long-awaited account of Life on the Dumbarnie SWT Nature Reserve, on the coast near Largo in Fife, which he had been due to give a year ago, but snow had intervened and forced a postponement. Now, a year later, he gave us a fascinating tale of animals, plants and fungi, so minute that most people are quite unaware of them, but which make up a complex and extensive community that is a crucial part of the living world all around us that we as humans can affect in so many ways.

Dr Corbet is a professional zoologist by training and an inveterate naturalist by inclination, so his talk was full of new and intriguing information. He is well known for his work at the British Museum (Natural History) and elsewhere. What is less widely known is the work that he has carried out after his retiral and return to Scotland, when his investigations turned from mammals, on the scale of metres, to minute and less familiar creatures, on the scale of millimetres, three orders of magnitude smaller, a change that required a different approach, techniques and skills if he were to identify and understand the tiny creatures and plants and the role they play in the community in the chosen area, a strip of sandy coastal grassland, Dumbarnie Links Nature Reserve near Largo on the south-east coast of Fife. Here he set up and started a comprehensive survey of all the forms of life that he found there.

Here, as the Reserve Convener, he has tackled this immense task with vigour and enthusiasm for many years, identifying the species that he finds and making inventories of the community, studying variations and relationships between species and with environmental factors, so interpreting how the whole system operates and how it may respond to changes in the environment, knowledge that is crucial for predictions of the effect of global climate change and for our preparedness for such change: this has in effect been his “second career”. He showed us a wide range of insects and other tiny creatures, small toadstools and mosses, organisms that we could recognize in a general fashion, but showing details of form and pattern that were quite astonishing. Smaller still, there were creatures and plant forms quite invisible to the naked eye: the tardigrade that under the microscope looked like a ponderous, many-legged hippopotamus, but was just a fraction of a millimetre in length. We were introduced to tiny mites that ride on the heads of small beetles, not as in the old rhyme, “Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, and little fleas have lesser fleas - and on, ad infinitum” - not at all: these mites hop off when the beetle alights on a dead body to lay its own eggs, go off in search of the larvae of flies that may have reached the carrion first, and give them a fatal dose of their own eggs, so leaving the “field” that much clearer for the the beetle larvae when they hatch. This is a quite extraordinary case of commensalism, the beetle and the mite feeding at the same table to their mutual benefit.

It takes keen observation and great patience to understand the complexity of life that Dr Corbet and his colleagues have recorded on just a few hectares of sandy coast and as reported in the journal, British Wildlife, Dec. 2011, pp. 104-109 (recommended reading!). Dumbarnie Links is noted, not do much for the presence of rare species or special features that require particular protection; but as the best known and documented example of a coastal “Links” ecosystem in Scotland and beyond. It is this that justifies its status as an SWT Nature Reserve, and for this we owe a great debt of gratitude to Gordon and his co-workers.

AGM Report (This is Jack Matthew's press release)

The Scottish Wildlife Trust, Fife & Kinross Branch, held its 2011 Annual General Meeting in the Lumsden Memorial Hall, Freuchie, on Thursday, 17th November, and chaired by the President, Dr Jean Balfour, FRSE. Mrs Sonia Daniels reported that her first year in the chair of the Branch had started with the cancellation of various meetings due to the appalling weather, after which matters could only get better! They duly did so, with a variety of talks and presentations on topics of interest to naturalists and country-lovers, and field excursions in the spring and summer. Relations with SWT HQ are good and, as the Treasurer reported, the finances are in a healthy state. The Committee membership was confirmed and all is set for the programme scheduled for the coming year. The meeting concluded with a vote of thanks to the President, and was followed by a review of some of the SWT Reserves that fall within the purview of the Branch.

Alistair Whyte,, SWT Reserve Manager based at SWT HQ in Cramond, emphasised the importance that the Trust places on designated Reserves throughout Scotland and the crucial role that the branches (Members’ Centres) play in their management. Fife & Kinross MC has local responsibility for ten of these Reserves, each of which has special features and requires individual attention, understanding and management; an appointed Convener oversees the work on each Reserve, supported by local volunteers as necessary; four of these Reserves had been selected to illustrate their diversity of habitat and plant and animal life, and the particular management requirements:
1. Fleecefaulds, near Ceres (convener: Alison Irvine), a wild flower meadow.
2. Dumbarnie Links near Largo (Gordon Corbet), coastal grassland on sandy soil
3. Bankhead Moss near Peat Inn (Jean Stewart), a raised bog with a history of use in the linen industry
4. Cullaloe, near Aberdour (Janie McNeil), a former reservoir with a diverse fauna and flora
In order to maintain – and even enhance - the natural history of each of these Reserves, ecologically sensitive management is essential, and the SWT is fortunate to have Conveners who know their plants and animals and understand the ecology of each particular site: A flower meadow will degenerate into scrub if the land is not grazed and the grass cut in the appropriate manner and season. Just as a coastal Links needs to be managed carefully if it is to provide a first-class golf course, so must the requirements be met for the plants and animals one can hope to see in such a place. A raised bog is a naturally transient phase in the change from a shallow lake to a forest, a process that has to be halted by active management, of the water table and preventing the encroachment of scrub and woodland. And a disused reservoir – like a disused quarry, which also features in other SWT Reserves in Fife – provides a great opportunity to repay at least a small part of our debt to Nature, as more and more Wild Land is expropriated by Homo sapiens

All credit must go to the Conveners and their helpers for the work they do – and with such enthusiasm as Alistair, Alison, Gordon. Jean and Janie showed last week.