The start of a new year also meant the start of our nature and wellbeing sessions in Barrow-in-Furness! Over the past couple of months we’ve set up 3 hubs at The Dock Museum, Bram Longstaffe Nursery on Barrow Island, and The Roundhouse café in Walney. Our nature and wellbeing officer Jessica, and trainee, Holly, have been working with our wellbeing participants on a range of projects at our hubs, from making shell windchimes and oyster shell art, appreciating the beauty of nature around our coasts; making insect houses and bird feeders to give nature a helping hand over the winter months; and a range of surveys including wading bird spotting on Barrow channel and shoresearches - where we recorded invasive species, species indicating climate change, and marine animals which indicate the health of our coast.
Barrow blog: January roundup
Yolanda teaching shoresearch methodology, and ID-ing rockpool creatures. Photo credit – EcoWild, Green Lancaster
Oyster shell art, N&W sessions
We also conducted a shark eggcase survey with participants on our Walney sessions. We learned how some species of sharks in UK waters, and all skates lay eggcases, and once the sharks have hatched, the eggcases can be washed up on our shores. The participants then learned how to identify eggcases from different species based on their size and shape, then searched the strandline on the shore – we found 190 eggcases in total. Which were recorded and the data sent to The Shark Trust, to help monitor shark populations in the Irish sea!
It’s also been an exciting month for our community engagement officer, Yolanda, who has been out chatting to our local communities whilst braving the winter weather. Yolanda and Holly have been at the HARRI (Health Advice Recover Resilience Information) bus and also visited the beautiful Sandscale Nature Reserve at Roanhead to hold a stall for Blue Monday, promoting the program and advertising our upcoming events!
Yolanda teaching shoresearch methodology, and ID-ing rockpool creatures. Photo credit – EcoWild, Green Lancaster
We’ve then held a range of community events including DIY bird box making for True Colours community group, where particpants learned basic DIY skills and built their very own bird boxes!
Ecowild, a student group from Lancaster University, also visited us last weekend where we were lucky enough to spot the seals at South Walney Nature Reserve. The students, led by Yolanda, then conducted a ‘walkover survey’, learning how to survey the shore or ‘intertidal zone’, and record all the species of seaweed, plants and animals present.
Finally, we ended the month on a high note with one our most popular events - a shoresearch rocky shore survey at Earnse Bay. We had a fantastic time, and a huge thanks to everyone who turned up to help us record approximately 30 different species, including hermit crabs, breadcrumb sponge, polycheate worms, blennies and brittle stars!
We’ll be holding regular shoresearch events over the next year, so if you’d like to get involved, or find out what the Barrow team have coming up over the next few months head over to the ‘What’s on’ section on our website!
A rockpool on Earnse Bay with a hermit crab living inside a periwinkle shell in the middle of the photo, and a sandmason worm to the left of the hermit crab