St Chad's Church
Giving & Caring
Charities...Eco-congregation...Gifting ...Stewardship
St Chad's Church |
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The Eco-congregation Wildlife & Churchyard Headingley Biodiversity Group In May, three members of the Green Team, Alan Griggs, Mike Willison & I, attended a day's course at St Chad 's run by the Yorkshire Naturalists Union. The YNU use our churchyard as a venue for teaching students how to monitor and record wildlife, as there is a dearth of field recording naturalists. We had completed a pre-workshop task of mapping and recording plant and animal life along 100m of hedgerow and during the day we learnt about bird ringing, were shown 22 different species of slugs and snails in the churchyard and examined an impressive bird report complied by a Biodiversity Group in a Dorset village. We all thought this bird report was something which could be duplicated in Headingley, and would be of value in monitoring garden birds during the year. Who could have imagined that house sparrows, which were once so common, are now on the Red Data list as a species with high conservation concern? We are looking for a small group of people who are prepared to mark on a prepared form, the maximum number of any bird species they see in their garden, during the first week of each month. This information will be collated and hopefully a pattern emerges, showing the most bird-friendly areas of Headingley. If you are interested in taking part, please contact me and we will arrange a meeting in early autumn. Suzanne Dalton |
! AWARD ! St. Chad's has been awarded a Certificate of Excellence in Churchyard Management at the award ceremony for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust Living Churchyard Project. Well done all concerned. * Bat Watch at St Chad 's * This event on August 16th was very well supported; Paul Andrews, from the West Yorkshire Bat Group gave an interesting talk in church on the natural history of bats (they represent approximately one quarter of all mammal species) and answered a range of questions before we were issued with bat detectors and went outside. As we gathered in the churchyard, a couple of young foxes trotted almost up to the group - completely unfazed and too busy looking for worms and beetles to worry about us humans! Bat detectors (the size of the original mobile phones) pick up the high frequency calls made by bats and convert them into sounds audible to humans. Different species of bats echolocate at different frequencies and sound different also. Along the wide paths through Church Wood, we picked up both common pipistrelle and soprano pipistrelle bats (they echolocate at different frequencies). It was difficult to see them amongst the trees, but back in the churchyard, we could see bats around the church and swooping over the long grass - their calls chattering out on our bat detectors, with a "raspberry" noise when they caught an insect. Each bat can catch up to 3,000 insects in a night! Paul was very pleased to see we have bat boxes in the churchyard, and kindly offered to conduct a comprehensive bat survey in the church grounds next year. It is probable there are more bat species around St Chad 's than we monitored in just one evening. Suzanne Dalton |
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