Make your wildlife observations count!

[Des Bowring]

I work at Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre (BRERC) as a volunteer, and I would urge anyone to send in records of the wildlife they see in the park. The centre has literally millions of records and is busy digitizing them - a mammoth task. The database is an invaluable tool with which to identify key wildlife sites and threatened habitats throughout the Bristol region, and it would be great to see St Andrews Park well and truly put on the map and recognised as a wildlife haven, leading to a more sympathetic habitat management regime by the council perhaps! So if you see bats above the bowling green or painted ladies near the pond, send BRERC your sightings. There is an easy-to-use recording form on the website. See

www.brerc.org.uk

Don't worry about getting the Ordnance Survey grid references exactly correct - BRERC validate all records, correcting grid references when necessary. The pond is ST592751 and the central grid reference for the park is ST593751.

I will be submitting the data from the monthly bird walks shortly.

[Simon Randolph]

Good point Des. I think I'll wait until I've accumulated a bit more data but it is good to see we are beginning to build up a significant list of species (albeit largely common).