Posts Tagged ‘Volunteering’
Nature at Home
This spring Londoners have helped protect each other by curtailing our daily travels to stop the spread of the coronavirus. This has also, necessarily, affected our trips to visit greenspaces and see wildlife. We are still receiving records from people’s gardens, of wildlife spotted through windows or from permitted walks…
Read MoreJoy of Recording: Bedfont Lakes – the volunteers assisting an ecological transformation
Bedfont Lakes is a 72.5 hectare country park on the edge of Greater London, and one of the best birdwatching sites in the southwest of the capital. Its size rivals that of Greenwich Park and Wandsworth Common. Yet, when I mention it among Londoner friends and colleagues, no one’s ever heard of it…
Read MoreLondon Recorders’ Day 2019
On 2nd November, natural historians, conservationists, educators and data managers of London came together once more; we left the grey skies and wet streets of west London and entered that towering cathedral to nature, the Natural History Museum, for the second annual London Recorders’ Day. GiGL, the Field Studies Council (FSC) Biolinks Project and the Natural History Museum Angela Marmot Centre for UK Biodiversity co-organised and hosted this event following the success of last year. The varied talks and displays discussed the joy of studying nature, skills and careers, diversity and inclusiveness, and the use of biological records in practice…
Read MoreJoy of Recording
…I returned to the UK in 2011, moving into a house boat on a wharf at the junction of the rivers Brent and Thames. One day, while working on a small patch of garden on the wharf’s bank, I noticed a tiny little snail that I hadn’t previously encountered; after making enquiries around the neighbourhood, my landlord told me it was a Thames two-lipped snail (Balea biplicata)…
Read MoreJoy of Recording: fourteen years of data
My desire for identifying wildlife started at a very young age, sometime between five and seven, when it was usual for me to be found crawling under school huts. A lot of my childhood was spent crawling around looking at invertebrates in my local park in Luton, Bedfordshire where I grew up. However…
Read MoreVerification: We Need Your Help
Are you enthralled by Ephemeroptera? Can you tell a Baetis rhodani from a Cloeon dipterum? Do you find fungi fascinating or think slime mould is sensational? If so, then you may be just the person we are looking for.
Read MoreJoy of Recording
Collecting and submitting records provides a focus for my wildlife outings. That being said, I try to remember that looking for wildlife is not simply about numbers. For me, it may have been initially, but it certainly is not now. It’s also about having fun. …
Read MoreWater for Wildlife
The Freshwater Habitats Trust is a national organisation dedicated to protecting all freshwater life. Our largest current project, the Heritage Lottery funded “People, Ponds and Water” has been running since 2015. We are helping volunteers to take an active part …
Read MoreLiving History
In 2011, I wrote about my involvement with the ornithology records of the London Natural History Society, noting that I had first crossed their path some twenty years before that. Five years on, the nature of the project has changed, but much of the original challenge remains. I had seen my role, offering services to GiGL to process some old data, as not too demanding. However, when space in the Union …
Read MoreJoy of Recording
When I was a kid and teenager, I spent a lot of time looking for fossils, fungi and berries. It didn’t occur to me at the time to try and put a label on everything, beyond whether it was useful or edible. It was much later that I became interested in identifying what I saw around me and then in counting it and recording it. When I moved to London I was fascinated by the quantity and variety of wildlife I discovered in an urban environment.
Read More