Time to walk on wild side

JUST how much do you embrace the wild and natural areas near to your home? Do you spend too much time indoors?

Here at The Lancashire Wildlife Trust, we are gearing up for our annual 30 Days Wild Campaign, aimed at getting people into the Great Outdoors.

The campaign is a challenge to get people to do something wild every day in June.

It can be anything from feeding the birds on your bird table to climbing a big hill just to look at the wonderful green areas stretching out across the North West region.

To dog owners, like myself, getting up and out into the woods every day is nothing new and I have to admit that without my daily strolls with our Alfie I would not see half the wild sights that I talk about here.

Curlew often fly overhead at this time of year, roe deer are visible early in the morning and a woodcock once flew straight towards me before veering off into the bushes.

Over the past 10 years I have seen red deer, great spotted woodpecker, treecreeper, brown hare, fox, blackcap, nuthatch and dipper.

So getting out every day will give you the opportunity to see wildlife.

For those of you with the internet, you can log onto our website www. lancswt.org.uk and get a calendar to monitor your progress and receive some Random Acts of Wildness. These are just ideas of how you can spend your 30 days in June.

I have to admit that one or two of these are a bit hippy dippy for a lot of people’s tastes – hugging trees, standing barefoot in grass – but they generally do offer a chance to look at nature in a different way.

Personally I will be visiting all 37 of our nature reserves and, hopefully, seeing wildlife that I have never seen before. You can get involved at any level and it would be nice to hear about your favourite wildlife experiences – by letter to the newspaper or on Twitter (@lancswildlife) or Facebook.

Things I love include wandering through carpets of wild garlic, exciting many of my senses. In spring and early summer the smell is amazing although it tends to make me hungry. Also known as ransoms, wild garlic flowers in spring and is a great source of early pollen for insects. If the clouds are low-lying it is a great time to be in the meadows.

So whatever the weather join our 30 Days Wild challenge along with tens of thousands of other people.

A heron is always a welcome sight The Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside is dedicated to the protection and promotion of the wildlife in Lancashire, seven boroughs of Greater Manchester and four of Merseyside, all lying...