"And They Lived In A Wood ... "

March 24 - 31, 2001 Kharkov, Ukraine

Spring Ecology Expedition

Photos from the Spring 2000 expedition.

Counting the ant-hills

Our first ant-hill of Formica rufa.

The fenced ant-hill of Formica rufa.

This is a short report of our 6-days ecology expedition. The aim of our outing was the investigation of spring forest wildlife. Because of the low temperature (average day's "+3°C", night's "-2°C") there were very few species that we could find.

Transmigrated birds had only began to come, our observations included:

Winter Birds:

Parus major
Parus coeruleus
European Nuthatch (Sitta europea)
Dendrocopos medius
Garrulus glandarius
Common Raven (Corvus corax)

Spring Arrivals:

Turdus philomelos
Turdus merula
Emberiza citinella
Fringilla coelebs

We found only a few natural hollows for cavity-living birds. Because of this, we began to look for ant-hills. We have found 64 ant-hills of Formica rufa. With an average density of 2.1 ant-hills per hectare.

From archive materials we found out that the most harmful for the oak forest are Tortrix viridana and Ocneria dispar.

The results of our expedition helped us to make up the future plans:

Summer-Autumn (2001):

Expedition to learn about insects, first of all harmful ones.

Spring (2002):

Expedition to update our map of ant-hills and hanging birds-houses (tomtit-houses).

Dear friends,

Boarding school N 14 in Kharkov, Ukraine was created in 1962 for social support children from the poor families. Today our work is based on protecting our environment. We collect data of living species we observe and analyze changes in the Kharkov region wildlife.