A four-day City Nature Challenge will give the residents and workers of Westside the chance to take part in a global challenge to see who can spot the most wildlife.
The Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust and EcoRecord are working to stimulate interest in the work and to help to collate the local results.
More than 500 cities around the world from Auckland to Zaragoza are taking part and every single bit of wildlife will count – from a garden dandelion to a bird flying through.
The challenge is running from Friday 26 April through to Monday 29 April.
If you are a Westside office worker, why not take a lunchtime break and go for a walk to see how many different species you can spot. Even better, come back to the area during the weekend to let your children teach you all about the nature in the area where you work.
Local residents could challenge each other to spend the whole weekend hunting high and low to see who can find the most species.
Great places to look would be the canal towpaths and basins, the Five Ways Island, Broad Street’s wilder areas, such as Sheepcote Street’s roundabout entrance to Brindleyplace, the landscaped areas in front of the Library of Birmingham, and behind it in and around the Civic Centre.
And don’t forget the Waters Edge bridges over the Main Line Canal at the back of the ICC and the hanging baskets outside of Broad Street’s JD Wetherspoon pubs The Soloman Cutler and Figure of Eight, which also claims to have the city’s largest beer garden at the rear, and the Tap & Spile pub overlooking Gas Street Basin.
As proud as the Legoland Discovery Centre is of its giant Lego giraffe across the canal from Brindleyplace, this is the one creature that probably won’t be accepted. But who knows? If enough people include it in their surveys maybe it will get an honourable mention!
To take part, download the iNaturalist app. If you then photograph any plant or animal, it will identify it and send the find straight to EcoRecord.
Did you know, for example, there are 24 species of bumblebee in the UK as well as some 245 species of ‘solitary bees’. If you spot a bee, you will need the app to tell you if it’s a buff-tailed bumblebee or if it’s white-tailed or red-tailed.
Then again it might be a garden, tree or early bumblebee or even a common carder bee.
For more information about the survey and local city events visit the Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust website here at www.bbcwildlife.org.uk/CityNatureChallenge
Westside pictures by Graham Young.
ENDS
