Spending time in the park over the last few weeks has been a delight. At last, I saw the kingfisher, flying over the middle pond, then swooping over the raised bank going downstream. It is clearly the common Kingfisher with the blue back and bronze chest and I have recorded this on our iNaturalist pages. I also saw a fox last week, at about 8am in the morning near the stream. Amazing! I feared for the ducks!

A few of us met recently and decided to take forward our ‘Everything that Lives’ in the park project. it is now listed on iNaturalist as a project called ‘Emersons Green Park‘ and you will see our first observations there, including the fox and the kingfisher. I also uploaded some pictures of the frogs and frogspawn on the Langley pond that Sue reported. You are all invited to post your observations there. Or, If you prefer to go low tech then simply send your observations to me (chris.sunderland@blueyonder.co.uk ) , preferably with a photo, saying who you are, what you saw, when you saw it and where it was.
Cataloguing Everything that Lives in the park may be slightly overwhelming at first, so why not take something that interests you, maybe, the trees for instance. I don’t know if you have come across the Know your place site that serves the Bristol area. it provides old maps of the area that actually overlay with today’s maps, so you can see how an area has changed. If you do this for the park, you see that there are two areas of ancient woodland. One is Green Lane, as we would expect . The other is the line of trees and dense undergrowth near Adderly Gate. (shown here)

I had noticed how this area seemed to be particularly teeming with birds. Maybe this would be a good place to start our Everything that lives project? What sorts of birds, trees and shrubs can you identify in this area?

Enjoy the Spring.

Chris