Pollinator Project - insect survey

Pollinator Project - insect survey

Join the Pollinator Project with a relaxing wildlife survey that takes 10minutes.


Flower Insect Timed Counts (FIT counts) - Sit watching a patch of flowers for 10minutes whilst recording insects that land on those flowers.  
Why pollinations? - Your results will help us to understand more about pollinators in Jersey and will feed into a larger UK scheme to help understand changes in numbers of pollinators. 

Join in! FIT counts - Get the app to help!  
1. You can complete a fit count in good weather between 1 April and 30 September. 
2. "good weather" is dry, and with temperature at least 13c in sunny conditions, or at least 15c when cloudy. 
3. Choose just one type of flower as your target flower - where possible use one of the fit count target flowers, but if you can't find one from the list you can choose a different flower as the target. 
4. Mark out a 50 50 cm patch containing your target. 
5. Count the number of individual flowers for your target species that are within your patch. 
6. Set a timer for ten minutes, and count all insects that land on the target flowers (ignore other flowers, and do your best to count each individual insect once only! ). 
7. Identify the insects into their broad groups (bumblebees, hoverflies etc. ) any that you don't recognise should be counted as "other insects". 
8. Fill in some simple weather details. 
9. Don't forget to send in your results via our enter fit counts form or app.

 

Resources:

The resources below will show you the insect groups (you don’t need to know the exact species, just the group they belong to) and flowers and how to do the survey. The recording form for in the field is very similar to the one that you transfer your results to online. You don’t need to have an iRecord account or you can create one to help record all your wildlife sightings.

You can get all the information to get involved from here 

 

 

Resources: 

Insect guide 

Flower guide 

Pollinator Survey training talk - delivered 26/06/20 by Denise McGowan 

 

FIT counts or Flower Insect Timed Counts is part of the UK’s Pollinator Monitoring Scheme.