Celebrate Cookham's nature with 'garden safari' for Big Wildlife Weekend

Cookham residents are being encouraged to get out into their gardens and spot some nature this weekend, for WildCookham’s Big Cookham Wildlife Weekend.

The Big Wildlife Weekend this Saturday and Sunday will encourage residents to go for a ‘garden safari’ and see how many forms of wildlife they can find.

They’re then encouraged to send pictures of what they discover to WildCookham, who will track and identify species.

The event is a celebration of the charity’s 10-year anniversary, aiming to encourage homeowners to foster wildlife and enjoy nature in their own urban space.

Project team leader Brian Clews said: “In this special anniversary year for us, we want to measure what effect our work has had by everyone exploring just what is using our flowers, foliage and ponds.

“It will be great fun for families and there is little doubt that folk will come across things they had never noticed before.”

The charity says that through creating ponds, establishing wildflower patches, and allowing some of the garden to go ‘wild’, everyone can help wildlife thrive, even in a small space.

It established the Wildlife Gardens Awards nearly a decade ago to chart how ‘rewilding’ gardens, or encouraging natural features, would improve local biodiversity.

Still running today, the scheme awards certificates to urban gardeners who contribute to biodiversity by including up to 24 simple, low-cost, wildlife-friendly features.

In the build-up to the Wildlife Weekend, WildCookham began a project to extend the rewilding by handing out a packet of seeds to every primary school child in the area.

Named after a prominent local ecologist who designed it, the Adrian Doble Wildflower Seed Mix provides gardeners with the ideal seed combination to foster biodiversity in this area.

And now that the wildflowers have bloomed, the Wildlife Weekend will reveal how nature has benefited from the project.

Participants simply need to spot and photograph as many flowers, bugs and beetles, butterflies, aquatic creatures, small mammals and birds as they can find in their garden.

WildCookham has created free resources to help people identify what they find and send in their pictures.

The weekend precedes National Insect Week, June 24-30, which WildCookham hopes people will go on to get involved in.

Organised by the Royal Entomological Society, Insect Week aims to raise awareness of ‘the little things that run the world,’ the more than 24,000 species of insect in the UK alone.

It hosts a range of events and competitions during the week, which can be found at insectweek.org.

To get involved in the Big Wildlife Weekend find WildCookham on Facebook or email wildcookham@gmail.com.