03/01/19 - HNY

Following the busy festive season and the end of 2018, we’d just like to wish all our followers, visitors and wide-ranging supporters a happy, healthy and wildlife-filled 2019. Whether you have ‘liked’ us on here, re-tweeted on our Twitter account, volunteered with us, attended a corporate work party or one of our talks and events, bought cards, calendars or logs, made donations to our Go Fund Me page, sent in sightings, records and photographs, or simply enjoyed visiting one of our reserves – we’d like to thank you for all your help and support during the year. It’s been a great year on our reserves with fantastic counts, sightings and breeding success recorded. We’ve also been able to start work on several exciting improvements and projects around the reserve, all made possible by your support - we’re looking forward to seeing what we can all deliver together in 2019. We hope you found time to visit us over the festive break, or perhaps you had a walk closer to home – getting out into nature is a great way to start the New Year, and no matter what the season is there’s always something to see! And don’t forget – if you fancy volunteering, or have a corporate work day or talk that you’d like to organise, feel free to make contact on here and we’d be happy to accommodate you. Finally, a massive thank you to our amazing band of volunteers who we just couldn't manage without.

Whilst we’ve been busy working out on site lately, finishing off our management work with our amazing team of volunteers before the ground conditions get too soft or we get flooded out, we’ve also been busy in the office with reports, finance bids and other end of year works that require completion. One of the jobs is to compile the wealth of records we, our volunteers and visitors to the reserve have collected over the year, in order to send them in to the various monitoring schemes, clubs and county recorders for annual reports. Like many naturalists on these cold dark winter nights we’ve been busy compiling our butterfly transect data, our moth record and mammal sightings to send off – and we’ve also been getting our bird records pulled together for the York Ornithological Club and Rare Breeding Birds Panel. Looking back over the data we’ve collected has been a nice reminder of the warm summer months – so we thought we’d share some warmer, sunnier photographs on this rather chilly winter’s day!