Interest in wildlife conservation and ecology has never been higher, and yet access to wildlife biology internships, voluntary experiences and research assistantships is challenging. This REP provides a field-to-presentation project on the survival of wild ducklings in a safe field setting at Abberton reservoir nature reserve near Colchester. The REP student will have unique access to this field site, being able to work alongside other students at the University of Essex and volunteers at the Essex Wildlife Trust on site. The focal study species will be Mallard, an important species to many different stakeholder groups and the public across the world, which is currently experiencing declines in productivity across Europe.

Few if any data exist on the survival of juvenile Mallard in the UK since 1962, and none in England, and none on the duckling stages. Part of the reason for this is that the precocious stages of juvenile waterbird development are difficult to study, with high use of cryptic habitats and much higher rates of movement than would be expected. There are two approaches to the study of duckling survival. The first is building a data set on the abundance of different sized and aged duckling broods; this can provide many data points (100s to 1000s) but it fails to capture when duckling brood survival is zero. The second is to follow individual broods to conduct ethnographic studies, ideally on marked individuals. This second method can include observation of predation events and counts of duckling numbers changing over time via repeated visits to the same brood using radio telemetry; this method provides rich data of small number of broods (10-20) and will be the focus of the REP placement.

This project is part of a larger multi partner collaboration spanning three projects that capture the Productivity, Survival, Movement biology and health of wild Mallard populations in contemporary England. The REP student will join this collaborative team which in addition to the University of Essex and UEA includes Essex & Suffolk Water, Essex Wildlife Trust, British Association of Shooting & Conservation, Adonis Blue Ecological Consultants, the British Trust for Ornithology and APHA. The REP student will have the opportunity to present the data they collect to colleagues in the School of Life Sciences Ecology and Environmental Biology group at Essex, but also in a online format with external stakeholders. The data that the student collects, should it be suitable, may help in a future manuscript examining productivity changes in wild Mallard populations in England for which they would receive co-authorship.

The project has some dependence on either coming to the field in a vehicle when others are visiting the site, or using public transport or own vehicles for travel. While reasonable adjustments can be made, the project fieldwork component can be on rough terrain, require long fieldwork hours without nearby access to facilities. We envisage 3-4 weeks of the 6 week placement to be in the data collection phase, and 2-3 weeks in the analysis and presentation phase.