Wild Maps & Camera Traps
Boothby Wildland, March 2024
Boothby’s Interactive WildMaps
We’re really excited to share an interactive map we’ve been working on with a nature tech company, Ace Nature. It’s a Boothby Wildland map – and a whole lot more!
The Boothby WildMap has recently been launched on the Nattergal website. Using a high resolution aerial image as the base map for the entire site and splitting it up into 100m grid squares, we’re able to delve deeper into the wildlife across the site and understand more about all the different scientific studies that have taken place.
Click on a grid square and you’ll uncover a list of all the birds, mammals, insects and other species that have been recorded in that location. There are onsite videos and audio recordings available, and you can click on the pin icon to see all the other places where that species has been recorded.
Boothby’s WildMap not only enables us to share what we’re finding out about Boothby Wildland and the plans we have for it, but also enables you to get involved. Watch our explainer videos about the site, and about the surveys and data we’re collecting; take your own photos and add them to our timelapses via our Fixed Point Photography locations; see the latest drone flights; or look for your favourite species. We’ll be adding more layers of information as time goes on. As an interactive map there’ll constantly be new things to check out!
Having this interactive feature on the website is so exciting – eventually everyone will be able to contribute sightings and of course it means anyone can log on from anywhere in the world and learn more about the incredible rewilding journey we’re undertaking, as well as how the landscape is changing.
Buzzards Squabble over Breakfast
Trail cameras are a great way to have a sneaky peek at wildlife in a way that you wouldn’t usually be able to capture. Placed away from public areas and left out for days at a time, the cameras take both still images and short videos when triggered by movement. This means when scouring back through the footage we can get anything from twigs bending in the breeze to badgers and buzzards!
Good places to put them are along well used tracks and overlooking water. Knowing that not only water, but also decay attracts life, our Ranger Lloyd Park recently placed one by a pheasant carcass. On retrieving the footage, he found lots of clips of buzzards squabbling over their meal-time….which, if you’d like, you can watch here as part of our digital WildMap platform.