Wildlife Circus

Tom Hooker Surbiton Wildlife Group The quarterly meeting of the Kingston Biodiversity Network was held at the new Quaker Meeting House, Fairfield East in their wonderful new building.   Here we heard from Kingston's  Greenspaces Manager regarding the updated Greenspaces Strategy 2015-2018, which will include some of the documents we have been compiling over the last two years. This  includes the Habitat Action Plans for Open Water, Woodland and Grassland. It also has a statement on lighting and there was some debate on the topic of unwanted light spillage from members of the audience.  Karen Harper spoke about the London Invasive Species Initiative and made clear the distinction between 'invasive' non-native species, which cause harm to the environment such as Japanese knotweed and Giant hogweed and 'non-invasive', non-native species, such as Little owl, which cause no harm. Lastly Tom Hooker, the Chair of Surbiton Wildlife Group (see previous post)...

We held a wildlife walk at Claremont Gardens, Surbiton for 25 Brownies from the local pack, with assistance from a member of the recently constituted Surbiton Wildlife Group (thanks to Stephanie).  This centred around the main attraction, which is the pond. A bat walk was initiated as it grew dark and twenty participants from the Wildlife Group, were able to hear bats echolocating, whilst using bat detection equipment.  Although late in the evening (sunset + 30 minutes) common pipistrelles finally arrived to drink and feed over the pond. In fact it was here that two bats spent a lot of their evening foraging over the water.  Surbiton Wildlife Group wish to improve the pond area, which is partially dry, and have submitted an application of  £10k  to Aviva now online for VOTING! Once you have registered on the site you have 10 votes to use. If they receive sufficient votes to beat other projects in the same category, the project goes through to a ...