Working to preserve wildlife for the future
This spring, People’s Trust for Endangered Species is launching a new
project to help monitor our
largest terrestrial and most charismatic beetle, the stag beetle, up and down
the country. The Bury Buckets 4 Beetles project, or BB4B, is a great
way for everyone to get involved in conservation at a local level and do
something practical to help.
Taking part is fun and easy to do! All you need is a garden, allotment or
any other small green space, a plastic bucket, a little time and lots of
patience. By making holes in your bucket, filling it with deadwood and soil
and, finally, burying it in your chosen spot, you can create an artificial
breeding site for stag beetles where their larvae can develop. Once your
bucket is in place, stag beetles (and a whole host of other insects) may use
it to lay their eggs in. In the space of the next three or four years these
eggs will develop in to fully-grown adult stag beetles. We plan to ask you to
dig up your bucket in the spring of 2007 and carefully check for stag beetle
larvae (developing beetles), and to let us know what you find. This will tell
us exactly where stag beetles are now living
and breeding. Repeating the checks annually will alert us to both changes in
their numbers and the areas where they are found.
You may be able to obtain woodchip from your local tree-surgeon or park warden. Alternatively, you can make it from old wood in your garden. If you think that you would be able to supply woodchip to other interested individuals in your area, please email stagbeetlequeries@ptes.org with information about your location to be added to our database.
If you are interested in taking part, you can download a leaflet with more details here, or contact us by phone or email (020 7498 4533 or enquiries@ptes.org) and we will send you one. If you have any queries concerning how to take part, or about stag beetles in your area, please email stagbeetlequeries@ptes.org. For more help identifying beetle larvae please click here.
If you have read through the leaflet and have decided to set up an artificial breeding ground, it is essential that you register your site so that we can remind you to check your bucket for larvae in future years and we can gain useful information about stag beetle populations up and down the country. You can register your site online here or by phoning us on 020 7498 4533. The first 500 people to contact us about the survey will receive a free voucher towards the purchase of a bucket for use in the project from B&Q.
People’s Trust for Endangered Species would like to thank B&Q for their generous support with this project