Back in the half term holidays, we popped along to the Go Wild in the Woods event which was held at Firestone Copse.
The day offered lots of fun activities for families, including wildlife walks, canoeing, making bug boxes and building camps with Forest Schools, tree climbing with Goodleaf and inspecting owl pellets for remains of the owl’s supper.
During the day an activity organised by the Isle of Wight Biodiversity Partnership called ‘BioBlitz’ took place.
Purpose of BioBlitz
Its aim was to get visitors to record how as many different species of animals, insects, plants and flowers etc that they’d seen during the day.
We now hear that a whopping 300+ people took part and a record number of species were spotted, 436 in fact.
This is more than were found in the whole of the New Forest at a similar event (415) and eclipsing the island of Jersey which identified only 163.
Isle of Wight Council’s Ecologist Colin Pope said: “We were delighted to get one of the best totals in the region, and we certainly made the most of our day – starting with a dawn chorus walk to identify birds at 5am, and finishing with a bat walk and moth trapping in the evening.
“We found some unusual species, including a nightjar – a rare and secretive bird which was seen at dusk, red and black froghoppers in the woods, wild service trees growing along the water’s edge and flounder and grey mullet in the creek”
Read our review of Go Wild in the Woods 2010.
Image: © Used with the kind permission of Ian Boyd
