The two sites – allotments and churchyard – provide an amazing eleven acres of varied native hedgerow, native trees, wildlife-friendly areas, numerous nesting sites (including the boxes Tony Gibson put up in February), and an expanding network of allotment ponds.
Our sites can make a real difference to the environmental health and biodiversity of Durham, which in turn promises to increase our enjoyment of being on the site and the health of our crops. But how special is the wildlife on them, and what impact are our efforts to enrich it having? To answer those questions, we need to record what we see on as regular a basis as possible. Some of you are already doing this, and many of us recorded birds for the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch in January. To put recording on a firm basis, and so that regional and national researchers can see our records, Yvonne Collingham and Ruth Chambers are exploring the use of the recording apps i-Record (https://irecord.org.uk/) and i-Naturalist (https://www.inaturalist.org/), which would provide us with an easily-used repository of any form of wildlife – birds, insects, bats, fungi, plants. Visitors to the site as well as SMAA members could make contributions to it, so that we could build up a really exciting picture. Watch this space!