This year's City Nature Challenge took place over the weekend 30 April - 3 May, and what a great weekend it was. Sarah-Jayne Forster from RSPB Scotland's Giving Nature a Home's team tells us more.
A big thank you to everyone who took part in this year’s City Nature Challenge. It really was a special weekend for wildlife and not even the Scottish weather put people off – it was most definitely a little bit parky!
We had ferns and fungi, birds and beetles, so much amazing wildlife all recorded by nature enthusiasts old and new!
This year we split our City regions into two - Greater Glasgow and Edinburgh, the Lothians and Fife. And while not strictly speaking a competition it was fun to see a bit of East/West rivalry going on.
Finding out about the wildlife in and around our cities is so vitally important if we are to help protect nature, which is why this International event means so much. The wildlife records from the weekend are uploaded to local and national databases, where they are used to inform conservation, management and research.
This year we saw:
Greater Glasgow
1307 observations
72 people recording
378 species identified
Edinburgh, the Lothians and Fife
1278 observations
86 people recording
426 species identified
So, Greater Glasgow just pipped Edinburgh, the Lothians and Fife in terms of number of observations but, let’s be honest, it’s all about the nature.
Due to the weather we didn’t get as many insects as we hoped apart from a few hardy bumblebees! However, it was a good year for plants with over 60% of the records form each city being plants. There were lots of signs of spring with bluebells, cuckooflower, cowslip, primrose and Welsh poppies being in abundance across the central belt.
In Glasgow we got some nice species such as kingfishers and sand martins and some of our non- native parakeets which can now be seen in a lot of Glasgow parks. In Edinburgh we also got a few seabirds such as Eider ducks and fulmars which are both amber listed species due to declines. You can have a look at this year's recordings here Greater Glasgow 2021 and here Edinburgh, the Lothians and Fife.
Once again, thanks and well done everyone. And watch this space for next year’s event – looking forward to it already, fingers crossed we’ll not need our parkas and woolie bunnets!
And don’t forget you can continue to help nature and be a citizen scientist by keeping your phone handy when out and about and continue to record the wildlife you see on the iNaturalist app.