Ayrshire Nature Connections Project – 2025

In 2025 SWSEIC received funding from Carrick Futures to deliver 10 wildlife events in the Carrick area in South Ayrshire. Over the year we have run events in Pinwherry, Colmonell, Girvan, Barr, Barrhill & Ballantrae. The purpose of the project was to engage members of the public in an area where we receive relatively few wildlife records, in the hopes of inspiring people to submit their sightings and raise awareness of overlooked and underappreciated species.

Over the past year we ran four community moth trapping events. These events work by inviting members of the community to host a moth trap in their garden for a night and then coming back together in the morning to identify and record what the have caught. Over the four events we caught 1278 moths of 162 species. These included several new species to Ayrshire, such as the Scabious Conch and Ribwort Slender. The four sessions saw 26 people volunteer to host a trap and over 100 people joined us next morning to see what we had caught. Moths are one of the best ways to engage people with wildlife as you can hold them in your hand – many are inactive during the daytime – and most people are oblivious to the diversity of colour and form that moths can take. At least two of the community councils we worked with are investigating getting a moth trap of their own which would further improve our local moth knowledge and connect more people to a hidden aspect of the natural world.

In summer we ran a recording day at Loch Lig, a site near Barrhill, which only had 2 species records prior to our visit. SWSEIC staff and volunteer wildlife recorders met at the site, and we between us we have now collected records for 320 species. Working in partnership with the Galloway and Southern Ayrshire Biosphere we ran a green health workshop at Colmonell, where we introduced wildlife recording as a learning tool and alternative way to connect to local natural heritage whilst contributing to conservation and scientific understanding.

In autumn we ran a bat walk with the community at Ballantrae. We successfully found four different species of bat and did our best to teach the 17 attendees everything we knew about bats! The bats took a little while to show up, but once they did we were treated to Leisler’s/Noctule bats Nyctalus sp flying over our heads, with Daubenton’s Bat, Common and Soprano Pipistrelle feeding along the river below. We also held two fungi walks, led by Peter Norman from Southern Uplands Partnership, both of which fully booked out within 24 hours of advertising the events. These were held at Glenapp Estate and at Barr Trails. We uncovered over 50 species of fungi and also discovered a Parent Bug at Glenapp which was only a second record for South Ayrshire.

Finally, we delivered a talk in Pinwherry about the results from the project, with a particular focus on those who had volunteered their time in attending the project events. The talk highlighted a few locally important habitats and species to keep an eye open for.

We are glad to say the impact of the project has been immediate. Not only have we formed new partnerships and strengthened existing ones, but our events have already contributed new and important records for the area. We are delighted that several of the attendees have expressed a desire to continue learning more about their local natural heritage, especially some of the cryptic species like moths, bats and fungi. Some have already become wildlife recorders and submitted their first records. A welcome example of how the community has already started to fill gaps in our knowledge is the secretive Slow-worm. It is one of our most poorly recorded reptiles, and having highlighted that there are only three known sites for the species in mainland Ayrshire, four of our event attendees have submitted new sightings for the species and we have doubled the number of known sites – an excellent result. We hope we continue to get wildlife records from our new recording colleagues over the coming years.

We would like to say a massive thank you to all the partner organisations that helped us plan and promote these events. The success of the project would not have been possible without the support of the various community councils, local development trusts, private landowners and NGOs. We look forward to it continuing to work with these partners going forward.

Malcolm Haddow

SWSEIC Support Officer

If you are interested in joining our recording group you can do so here.