Get help working out what you have seen

DBRC can often help if you have seen some wildlife and need help identifying it – we will ask you to contribute your sighting to our records in return! We can also provide information about the distribution of wildlife in the County (see data searches).

The best way to work out what wildlife you have seen is to consult an ID guide. Download a list of handy ID guides. Many national wildlife group websites can also help you with your id, see our useful links section. 

We have information on this website to help
you identify marine animals  and  identifying signs of otter or mink. 

Tell us about your sighting

To tell us about your sighting, please complete our land sighting form for terrestrial sightings or our sea sighting form for marine sightings.

Sending in photos

Photographs can help us to identify a species. To send us a photo of your sighting, contact us. Please note that photos need to be of high quality, in focus and ideally with something to indicate scale. Please also limit your photos to 1MB in total. Sadly, we are not able to look through disks of photos from your own electronic library; however, we can usually find time during our busy work schedules to check the occasional photographic sighting. 

General wildlife questions

Our team members do know a lot about wildlife and will do our best to help you, but we have limited resources to be able to answer general questions about say, gardening for wildlife or what to do if a badger is damaging your garden. For these types of enquiries you may want to contact the Devon Wildlife Trust wildlife enquiries service.

Injured wildlife

For all urgent enquiries about injured wildlife please contact the RSPCA or your local vet for advice.