A year review and Merry Christmas message

A year review and Merry Christmas message

We’ve had an interesting year for wildlife recording and whilst many citizen science recording schemes have been put on hold this year we’ve still seen records flowing through our website. During lockdown we didn’t need to do much adapting with the management of the JBC, we are lucky that our wildlife database system can be viewed online. We’ve have over 16,800 records inputted this year, with December still to go! Thank you to all our dedicated and hardworking volunteers who spend hours surveying wildlife, entering and sorting data and verifying biological records. We could not be a biodiversity centre without you, so thank you for continuing to support us this year.

Despite lockdown we’ve been making pond dipping videos and doing virtual worm lessons to support Jersey schools engagement with local wildlife. We’ve found newts breeding in Grouville school pond and viewed slugs and worms over Zoom from my home office.  We’ve delivered virtual talks on topics such as Bats, Reptiles, Amphibians and Pollinators and we’ve reached countries around the world on our virtual talk programme. As restrictions lifted over the summer we were buzzing to start bee recording and welcomed India Wedge back from the UK to help us with our pollinator identification. Spiders were surveyed late summer and we’ve trained more volunteers to join our Spider group.

We’ve welcomed Michelle Gray to our team as Biodiversity Centre Manager and she hosted a screening of the David Attenborough film A Life on Our Planet, with talks from A Size of Jersey and SCOOP, two local projects with biodiversity conservation high on their agenda.  Schools have welcomed us back in their classrooms for the planting of pollinator patches and we’ve trained educators on the importance of ponds in schools.

As the nights draw in we’ve done some beetle embroidery and bee ID learning and we are working behind the scenes on our plans for 2021.

So what’s next for the Jersey Biodiversity Centre? We’ve received funding to support our Natural History Arts programme from Ecology Trust Fund and our Pollinator Education programme from the Co-op Eco Fund. We are excited to get back out and survey wildlife with you all in the New Year.

Have a Merry Christmas and happy wildlife spotting.

 

 

Bumblebee training August 2020
Ogier making bee hotels September 2020
Pond Watch educators course October 2020
Embrodiery evening Nov 2020
Author
Sarah Maguire