Join us for a fun, family-friendly day to celebrate 30 years of the reserve's official opening! Take part in nature-themed activities, chat to all the different stallholders, enjoy the live music, and indulge in some light refreshments and cake. There'll be something for everyone!
We reopened another path this month, laying lots of lovely woodchip to define and maintain the walkway - with the help of our furry friends!
We submitted our strong objection to the proposed development of 90 homes off Scamps Hill, just a short distance from the nature reserve. We believe it would negatively impact the local environment, increase flood risks, put further strain on our local infrastructure, damage our community character, and is poorly planned. We also spent an evening removing the invasive Himalayan Balsam in the North-East corner of the reserve.
July's conservation day saw us restore the original meadow path, clear away brambles, and tidy up other overgrown paths.
June was a busy month! We attended Village Day, which was a huge success! We really enjoyed speaking to all the visitors to our stand about what we've been up to and what we've like to achieve over the next few months. Thank you to everyone who donated money to help us keep doing what we're doing!
At our Conservation Day, we cleared up the car park and opened a new path. We also unveiled the beautiful bunting made from your pledges made on our stall at Village Day.
We also conducted a survey to gather the community's views on the reserve, its management, and its future - read the findings here.
The focus of this month's gathering was to survey nature as summer approaches. The other initiative was to reopen a path that previously was fenced off. Having certain areas fenced off over the last few months has prevented visitors from trampling new plants and resulted in healthy regrowth across the site.
We also prepared an interim management plan to help guide our efforts over the next 12 months, until a full 5 year management plan is co-developed with MSDC.
The last effort was to build and repair the pathways with the mulch that was left. The effort was successful, only a small pile of mulch is left which will be used for repairs. The focus started to shift to nature itself with holding our first wildlife survey. To do that we worked with the volunteers to record animals and plants using the apps iRecord (for plants and animals) and Birdtrack (specifically for birds). These findings were submitted for expert reevaluation and to record them against our Nature Reserve.
Amazed by the community spirit about 30 people participated in our monthly event to continue building the pathways and repair them where it was necessary and also to continue to create valuable habitats.
Following up on the success of the first event, we had another great turnout again with about 30 people with the focus on continuing to lay the mulch on the pathways and clearing out branches to turn them into habitats for nature.
We organised our first community working day for the reserve. A great team of 30 people turned up to help with litter picking, creating log piles for habitats, and laying mulch on the paths to keep them dry and accessible for everyone.