Shropshire’s rarest wild mammal featured at national conference
Shropshire-based Stuart Edmunds, who has coordinated Shropshire Pine Marten Project for 15 years will be a speaker at this month’s national Mammal Society conference, which is held at Bangor University on the 28 and 29 March. The conference brings together wildlife experts, enthusiasts and ecologists from all over the UK and beyond to present the latest in mammal research.
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Shropshire Pine Marten Project discovered the presumed extinct pine marten in July 2015 by installing camera traps in a remote part of the Shropshire Hills. Since then, Stuart has recorded over 500 clips of martens on camera traps in other areas of Shropshire and has experimented with innovative ways of attracting pine martens to his camera traps.
The project has been funded by small grants, crowdfunding and most recently, a conservation grant from the Shropshire Hills National Landscape. This has allowed Stuart to work with further communities to create local recording groups to check on cameras installed in areas which haven’t yet been monitored. An enthusiastic group in Wheathill has helped to look for pine martens around the Clee Hills area for the last year and although no martens have been recorded there yet, cameras have collected footage of other interesting wildlife, including roe deer, polecats and brown hares.
The presentation at the Mammal Society conference will recap on Stuart’s experiments with camera traps in Shropshire over the years and demonstrate the most successful methods for detecting the presence of these elusive animals in areas where they might be living undetected.
Stuart commented: “Camera traps and other technology have showed us that there are occasionally mammal and bird species living in Shropshire that we wouldn’t have otherwise known about. I’m looking forward to the chance to put Shropshire on the wildlife map at a national event and raise awareness of the importance of monitoring wildlife to work with landowners, parishes and developers to determine ways to work alongside nature, rather than against it.” Despite the number of videos he has recorded, Stuart also adds “pine martens are still very rare in Shropshire and there are only a handful living here. They roam across large areas, often at night, so they are often hard to find”.
Stuart is chair of Shropshire Mammal Group and was awarded the International Fund for Animal Welfare conservation award in 2019 for his commitment to raising awareness of wildlife in Shropshire.
