The Nature in Your Neighbourhood project moved into its second year in April; Moorlands Climate Action volunteers got their hands dirty and started sampling on site – and they loved it! After a year of preparation and publicising the project, there was a real feel of beginning to do what our members love best – improving nature in their neighbourhood. For a very few volunteers it meant brushing up on old skills. “I haven’t handled a quadrat for years and it was nice to get back to something I really enjoyed doing,” said one. “Particularly as I was doing it on land I pass often, just round the corner from my house!”
But for most, learning how to survey and record was brand new. “I’m an amateur gardener but I love this, it’s really different,” was the verdict of another volunteer. “It’s amazing what you see when you have to get up real close and make sure you don’t miss anything.” Those who participated in more than one survey found the ability to compare conditions particularly instructive, for example soil quality and water retention.
One common theme was that learning together was actually fun – people could laugh at small mistakes in site drawings or identifying the wrong plant. This sense of team effort was amplified by the reaction of passers-by and, for the urban sites such as the Haregate estate, immediate neighbours. Dog walkers stopped to chat about what we were doing and residents even started talking about what they were doing in their own gardens and asking for advice! In the urban examples it was heartening to attract a small number of volunteers from outside the group (and outside the normal demographic). In one case a young girl was brought to look at the survey by a local friend of an MCA member and ended up staying the afternoon to take a full part in it.
An ex-council estate is perhaps not the easiest territory to attract volunteers to anything that is seen as coming from ‘outside’ (and initial engagement events struggled) but once we moved onto the ground it became clear that love for nature was as strong here as anywhere. Perhaps the best most satisfying moment was to hear (from a Haregate resident): “It’s brilliant you’re doing it here.”
Around 25 MCA members participated in the initial surveys at sites across the district (some are also members of the more hyper-local groups that have been brought into the project). Although the focus has shifted to the actual site surveys after a year of establishing the project, MCA also continued its NiYN publicity efforts, both through its own activities (market stalls and stalls at external events). MCA members also took part in leaflet drops to encourage public participation.
The quarter ended with Moorlands Climate Action’s annual Hug Festival, where members staffed a NiYN information stall. This was themed along the line of ‘hedgerows’ to highlight one of the valuable habitats that the project may in the future enhance or create.
We learnt a number of lessons along the way. One was the issues involved in scheduling events that worked when volunteers may have so many other commitments (both in personal, work and voluntary lives). Another was the continuing issues over establishing land ownership and the right to manage a multi-year project on that land. Learning how to overcome those difficulties was one of the reasons behind the NiYN idea; over the quarter it became clear to those MCA members who had been most impatient to start actual habitat enhancement (and were less naturally enamoured of the many meetings that a multi-party project involves), that in the absence of the knowledge and co-operation that NiYN has brought, we would have not have been able to get to where are now. Nor be part of something wider that will reach out beyond our immediate world.