Tag: shrewsbury park

The Friends of Shrewsbury Park will be hosting a bird walk tomorrow, Tuesday 3rd June, starting at 10.30am down at the Garland Road gate into the park. The walk will be led by Park Ranger John Beckham and will check out the bird boxes that were erected last year with help from pupils at Timbercroft School, as well as walking around the old allotment area.

The walk will go ahead whatever the weather, so come prepared and wear sturdy shoes.

The Friends of Shrewsbury Park are holding their Annual General Meeting this Saturday, 12th October starting at 11.00am. Kathy from the Friends wrote with details:

We will be holding our Annual General Meeting on Saturday 12 October 2013, at 11am.  We will meet at the bottom of the path that leads down from the car park, and joins Dothill.  If you are unsure where this is, please get in touch.

We will start with the business side (reports, elections), and then go on to finish the path through the old Nature Reserve – we hope you will be able to help us with this. If you are able/willing to do so,  then please bring along secateurs, loppers and stout gloves.  There will be a hot drink and biscuits for volunteers.

We welcome members joining the Management Committee, so if you have some spare time and would like to join the small, friendly team, then please get in touch with me and I will give you more information.

This will also be an opportunity to admire some of the Friends’ achievements over recent months, such as the new drainage system and re-surfaced path on Dot Hill pictured above. This part of the Dothill path was susceptible to flooding, as can be seen in the picture with an earlier post about the improvements, so the changes will make a big difference. Further down the path the Friends have erected a new set of wheel-chair friendly gates and a hand-carved notice board at the Garland Road entrance to the park.

If you are skilled in web site maintenance you may be able to help the Friends with their excellent website. They are looking for a volunteer to take over the technical aspects of updating their site as the web designer who has looked after it for the last five years has had to step down due to work commitments. Potential web masters can contact Kathy by e-mail on fspdog@hotmail.com or come along and see her at the AGM.

The Friends are currently raising funds for a water fountain for the park, and have produced a 2014 Calendar which will be sold to help raise money. It includes art work by local children and photographs showing the park at different times of the year. The wintry January photograph is included below. The calendar costs £5.00 and will be available at the AGM or via the Friends.

Bats are just amazing creatures; flying mammals that are superbly adapted to their nocturnal lifestyle. And much maligned – they are not vampiric blood-suckers, swooping down to latch onto a jugular vein. Admittedly a few Central and South American bats do feed on the blood of livestock such as pigs and cattle, but they lap up the blood coming from the cut they make in their prey’s vein rather than sucking it out. Even this has a good side: a drug has been developed from the enzyme in the bats’ saliva that prevents the blood clotting, which may, one day soon, be used to treat people who have had a stroke. A scientist with a sense of humour has called the drug Draculin.

The Friends of Shrewsbury Park are bat lovers. Their bat walk has become an annual event, and the next one is on Friday 17th May, meeting at 8.00pm at the car park off Plum Lane. Last year’s walk took place on one of the few dry spring days, and attendees were rewarded with detection and sightings of a number of hunting pipistrelles. Hopefully the long, cold winter hasn’t had too much effect on the bats and this year’s walk will be similarly successful. The walk will pass by the bat boxes the Friends constructed and, with council assistance, attached to trees in the park last year. Sometimes it is a year or two before boxes are inhabited, and bats move between different roost sites at different times of the year, so it will be interesting to see on Friday if the park boxes have any occupants.

Bats are a priority species in the Royal Borough of Greenwich Biodiversity Action Plan, which says in the species action plan for bats:

Many bat species roost in loft spaces in houses and this sometimes causes people concern, as there are many misconceptions about bats:
• Bats are not rodents, and do not gnaw at wood, wires or insulation.
• All British bats consume insects and therefore their droppings are dry and crumbly, they do not putrefy like mouse droppings.
• Bats do not nest and therefore do not bring bedding material or insect prey into roost spaces.
• Bats are clean, and spend many hours grooming.
• No species of British bat feed on blood.

Aims for Greenwich:
• To protect and enhance the present population through increasing the provision of roost sites in Greenwich.
• To protect and enhance linear landscape features and wildlife corridors for bats to commute between roost and feeding sites.
• To increase the abundance of insect prey available for bats.

A good way to find our more about bats is to go along to the Bat Fest organised by the Bat Conservation trust and the Natural History Museum, which this year runs over the weekend of 1st and 2nd June at the museum in South Kensington. Volunteers from the London Bat Group will be on some of the stands. Last year it included various batty activities for children,  some more detailed technical stuff about echolocation and a series of Nature Live talks. Also there was the marvellous Jenny Clark, a bat carer who has converted part of her home in Forest Row, Sussex into a bat hospital. She brought along some of the rescue bats that couldn’t be released back into the wild because, maybe, they were unable to fly or had been hand-reared from babies. It was a rare chance to get close to live bats, and to learn how cute and fragile they are, and that they purr when stroked.

If you share my fascination with batty matters, take a look at these Youtube videos of bats in action. First, on  BBC’s Top Bat, a sequence showing Daubenton’s Bats hunting at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire.

I just love this video of the Long Eared Bat silently stalking moths using its hypersensitive hearing.

It was a cold dry morning during the week when a group of children from Timbercroft School headed over to Shrewsbury Park to help Royal Borough of Greenwich Tree Officers put some new bird boxes up in the trees there. The boxes were built by Friends of Shrewsbury Park, several of whom also came along. A total of 13 boxes were fixed up on trees in the park, and should be just in time for this years’ nest building and breeding season.

The bird boxes are the first step in a number of improvements that the Friends will be making to the park over the coming months. Work has already started on fabricating the wheelchair-friendly gates that will be erected at the park entrance near the Garland Road end of Dothill, and a sculptor is creating a carved noticeboard to stand at this entrance. Once the weather improves part of the Dothill path which is susceptible to flooding will have a new drainage system and will be resurfaced. There are also plans to plant wild flowers alongside the path: the Friends will be looking for volunteers to help with this.

The improvement work is mainly being funded by a grant of over £11,000 from the The Veolia Environmental Trust, with the council also providing some support.

They will also be leading a bat walk around the park again this year, on Friday 17th May. It will follow a similar route to last year’s successful night-time stroll, when lots of pipistrelles were  detected with the bat detectors and seen swooping just above head-height, hunting midges and other food using their high frequency echolocation system. This year the walk will take the opportunity to check the bat boxes that were put up last year for signs of bat inhabitants.