Nature news

The Otter Group and the Photography Group are growing. Meanwhile, a batty theme emerges in the latter part of our news from the Specialist Groups. The Living Churchyards Group details new licensing rules concerning surveys and work affecting bats in church premises. As the Mammal Group monitors the effects of climate changes the Bat Group has recorded a stray migrant new to Britain. It has also been involved in an exciting project at the Monkey Sanctuary near Looe. To complement this report we include a submission from the Monkey Sanctuary, which has great news for anyone who would like a close look at the lesser horseshoe bat.

Otter Group

The Otter Group, like the otter population in Cornwall, is expanding. I have a long list of names of people who have requested information about otters, details of Otter Spotter training days, baseline sites to monitor or who want to find out more about our specialist events.

Training and refresher days are held in each of the six districts around the county throughout the year. To help with surveying a new form has been developed. It's really very simple and comes with good notes. Although an otter record can be made at any time of the year, we are hoping to encourage monitoring of baseline sites in the

months of June, September, December and March. Our winter annual Otter Spotter jolly is very successful (people avoiding Christmas?) We've been graced with good weather so far and people have been tempted along by buns and a themed talk and walk. Our specialist guest speaker this year was internationally recognised otter expert Dr Paul Chanin. His talk on 'why did the otter cross the road?' attracted a record 80 people. A record number of otter road kills were also collected in the South West in 2002. The Wildlife Veterinary Investigation Centre carried out 51 post mortems on corpses that many of the Otter Group had alerted us to.

Otter.
Photo: Stuart Hutchings

Thank you to every one who has supported this otter work - and otters - in Cornwall. It is clear that, like the otter, the Otter Group is active throughout the year.

Kate Stokes

Photographic Group

We have finally made the break. For the indoor meetings scheduled for May, June and September we are going to the Methodist Church Hall in St Agnes (although I accept that this notification is too late for the May meeting, this meeting was not listed in the spring magazine). The meeting room at Allet has shrunk as we have grown larger and the result is that the two are no longer compatible. It is a shame that we will lose this association with the Wildlife Trust but that's life.

Looking ahead to the competition in November we have decided to leave the five categories as they were last year: (Slides: Flora;

Fauna; Composition & Form. Prints: Flora & Fauna; Composition & Form). The 'Composition & Form' will include landscapes with a heavy natural history bias. Two changes have been agreed; these are: we will permit a maximum of three images in each section per person; in order to celebrate the silver jubilee of the South West coast path we will ask the judge to choose the best images that show the 'natural history of the coast path' and we hope to have a prize for the very best, so it might be worth you keeping that in mind when selecting your entries.

David Chapman