Knowing what we have is the starting point. We're listing here just some of the ways you can help, from getting out to survey local species and habitats to helping manage and use the information we gather. Contact wildcookham@gmail.com to find out more about any of them. The links at the bottom take you to more great ideas to get involved and make a difference.
Get to know our trees
WildCookham is mapping all the significant trees in Cookham and adding them to the Woodland Trust’s national Ancient Tree Inventory. That way we can add some protection to them as well create a much more accurate picture of the local landscape and the wildlife in it. We now have a small team of surveyors and we need more. No previous skills or tree knowledge are needed. You can get some training in the simple techniques needed, as well as the equipment that will help. This is a really great way to travel around our local countryside, learning more about it and helping build an important database. Contact wildcookham@gmail.com to find out more.
Much Ado About Mothing
There are some 2500 species of moth in the UK and around 450 of these have been recorded in Cookham. Many are exquisitely beautiful, and their presence, or absence, can tell us much about the state of our nature. You can create, or buy, a simple moth trap in your garden which can give you and your family a lot of fun and help us understand more about them – without harming the moths. We have experts on hand to help get you started as well as to assist with identification of the moths you find in your traps. And information about the species you find can be fed into the local database so you’ll be involved in growing local knowledge and records: that’s a key to developing policies and projects to protect our wildlife for the future. Contact wildcookham@gmail.com to find out more.
Nature’s class act
All of our local schools are doing their bit to encourage an interest in the natural world, with wildlife gardens, ponds and nest boxes. Could you lend a hand? Maybe you’re a parent, a teacher or would just to help our young people to understand and love nature. We’d love to have you join our team of volunteers supporting our schools and helping to create a community of the future that understands how important it is to nurture nature. Contact wildcookham@gmail.com to find out more.
Making it all run smoothly
Gathering information about our environment and our local habitats and species is crucial to our work. It helps us to prioritise and focus: and crucially we need data to ensure we protect important places and species from undesirable development. You can help in many ways – gathering data, organising data gathering/surveying activities, creating and managing databases, working with other groups and organisations to ensure that our data gets to the right places. If you’d like to help study our local world or if you have some administrative experience or some IT/data skills, we’d love to hear from you. Contact wildcookham@gmail.com to find out more.