Ecological consultancy is something that only really got onto my radar in the last year. Last summer I volunteered in Romania for a month on a conservation project, which consisted of helping to save a population of great crested newts, counting a silly amount of lady’s bedstraw, and being chased by a mother European brown bear. By the end of the trip, I had gone from knowing nothing about ecological consultancy to having a bunch of friends who had unknowingly intrigued me to pursue the career path through their tales of the trade! On my return, I found aLyne Ecology online and, with the photos of Sarah’s garden-based office and a whole tab on the bats Sarah cares for, I thought ‘this looks like the place for me!’
Being a philosophy graduate who hadn’t really interacted with a scientific subject since the age of 15, I didn’t hold out much hope of getting any work experience with aLyne Ecology. Evidently, I lucked out on emailing a company that has a very open-minded manager, who wanted to give me a chance. And so, I received Sarah’s email with much excitement. It stated her only major condition was whether I could work with several dogs and cats competing to sit on my lap. Sign me up!
Wind the clock to post meeting the chickens, bats, cats, dogs, and humans of aLyne Ecology, and I was off on my first survey already! This was a site the team had already been to but needed to deliver a health and safety talk to the construction workers alongside a final check up on the inhabitants of the roof void.
Sarah’s talk was a great educational experience on my first day and, with the construction workers being particularly committed to the requirements she had detailed, I was glad to see the genuine material protection ecological consultancy can provide for important and wonderful wildlife. Afterwards, we got suited and booted (headtorches, masks, the lot) and climbed on up into the roof void to have a peep at… a brown long-eared bat roost! Needless to say, I can’t really imagine anything that would make for a better first day. All cosied up in the apex of the void, the bats were such an exciting sight and solidified my newly found love of the weird fluffy things I’d be surveying much more into the future!
Having started my work experience in the autumn, the number of surveys was dwindling and the amount of bat call analysis was on the increase! The boys kindly started me off on BatExplorer, a software that is super user-friendly and enables you to listen back to the calls while you analyse them. This contrasted greatly to the challenge that came in the form of Anabat a month or two on. Instead of colourful hockey-stick shapes, Anabat whips up graphs reminiscent of my grandad’s old lecturing material. It’s actually still a fantastic bit of software to use and it’s amazing to see the visual representations of bat calls you recorded. The detective work can be really exciting, especially when after a half hour of discussions and riffling through reference books, you find you have a rare social call or species.
As bat transects were far and few between during the autumn season, Sarah got me on every bat transect she could. Having the opportunity to pair the live data with the recorded calls (of both bats and the occasional surveyor, the latter of which sounding something akin to Hotel California) was really satisfying work and I believe it has helped my every-growing bat knowledge. In a similar vein, the dual approach of (a) completing a Preliminary Roost Assessment and then (b) coming back to the office to create the figures and write the report, has been a much more useful way of the aLyne team teaching me how to do these individual tasks.
A true highlight of my time with aLyne so far was at a really extensive site that featured a variety of habitats including two types of woodland. My sensei (a.k.a. Martin) brought me for my first experience of a reptile/amphibian check, which involved looking under reptile mats mostly placed around the edge of the woodlands. Low and behold! We found many a sunbathing babe, including the smallest toadlet I’d ever seen. It measured smaller than a thumb nail and we named it Terry.
After discovering Terry, we moved onto the next mat which had a slow worm cosying up under it. Again, I reminisced fondly on times with my grandad; when I was little, he took me to the top of his garden where he had been building on a homemade compost heap. I peered into this smelly, dark mass of old food waste as my grandad pointed out what my untrained ten-year-old brain thought was a tiny snake! This is one of my earliest memories of where my love of wildlife began, and I was pleased to be reminded of it briefly when Martin and I found Susan the Slow Worm at this fantastic survey site. During the rest of the checks, we found grass snakes, smooth newts, common frogs, and more slow worms and common toads!
Over the winter months, my main role has been getting to grips with some of the software and report writing. I’m really grateful to the aLyne team for taking the time to train me during their more restful time of year, as it’s given me the opportunity to get a head start on understanding the office work before the busy survey season starts! I am really excited for the approaching survey season and am readying myself for the infamous nonsensical conversations that happen in the office when the fatigue of dusk and dawn bat surveys takes over - supposedly around August time, we all will stop forming proper sentences. Let’s see how we all fare!
Lucie really impressed us with her willingness to learn and her enthusiastic attitude that we decided to offer Lucie a permanent position to join our team. Well done, Lucie we are really happy to have you as member of our team!
If you are like Lucie and you are interested in doing a work placement with us, please get in touch with us by clicking here.
If you would like to know more about the surveys Lucie carried out please follow the links above or click here.
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