Tracks, Trails and Bake Sales: Month One of the University Mammal Challenge

Blog written By Georgie Fletcher – Lincoln Imps Team Lead

At the end of January, I received an email from my personal tutor about an event run by the Mammal Society. I investigated it a little more, read some blog posts from past groups, and tentatively posted in our group chat to see if anyone else wanted to make a group with me and give it a go. A few hours later after a fantastic response, we had a full group of five ready to take on the challenge. We were to become the first group from the University of Lincoln ever to take part, and we were ready to get going.

Tom crossing the river while prepping for UMAC. PC: Lincoln Imps

We sat down a few days before the official start of the challenge to map out week by week what we wanted to do. This included how we would complete the weekly challenges, and we set about starting to organise the events, making sure everything was in place to make it a fun and hopefully stress-free experience. Our expectations were low, but our enthusiasm high, and we were excited to begin.

Bake Sale Fundraiser! (Left to right: Tom, Becky, Sam and Lucy). PC: Lincoln Imps

One thing I hadn’t anticipated was how absolutely amazing the team I was blessed with leading are – over just the last month Tom has written a truly beautiful mammal story about a mother fox and her desperate attempts to get home to her kits. Becky has created several brilliant social media campaigns highlighting UK mammals, engaging people across the university and beyond. Lucy has taken a deep dive into owls and their small mammal dinners, creating a fantastic presentation to share at our owl pellet event next month, while Sam has made a schedule of social media mammal posts and diligently checked our footprint tunnels and camera traps.

This is all on top of the 14 transect walks carried out, going through all the videos captured on our camera traps, attending the free ID courses provided by the Mammal Society, creating social media posts, putting on a bake sale event and doing all the assignments for our course too! Without their enthusiasm, we wouldn’t have had half as much fun or encouraged so many people to use Mammal Mapper either, which helped us win the week 3 challenge. Our families haven’t escaped unscathed – all across the UK they’ve been logging their mammal sightings for us too.

Proudly sharing our main events schedule poster. PC: Lincoln Imps

Doing UMAC has taught me so many new skills, and not just mammal related ones, although I can now identify a variety of tracks (fox anyone?) and visually identify small mammals on our camera traps, which I couldn’t do before. I’ve organised events, created posters, liaised with different departments, completed surveys, walked transects, filled in risk assessments, written blog posts, made reels and encouraged engagement on social media… the list is truly endless. And that’s just month one!

We have so many more events planned over the next eight weeks and are really, truly excited to be taking part. We’ve even been included in a university newsletter and managed to raise an incredible £212 during our bake sale event for the Mammal Society.

The Lincoln Imps Team (Left to right: Lucy, Becky, Sam, Tom and Georgie). PC: Alex Foxley-Wood.

So… if you’re an undergraduate student who will still be at university next year, add this to your calendar for 2026 and take part! It is genuinely so much more than you think it will be, and the skills you learn will be invaluable for your future. Of course, arguably the greatest thing of all is the satisfaction of knowing you’ve spent three months helping our beautiful UK mammals – could you really ask for anything more?

Want to know more about UMAC? You can keep track of everything we’re doing by searching @Lincoln_Imps_UMAC on Instagram