THANKS A MILLION FOR BUILDING BIRD BOXES!
Lottery winners pool resources to help out wildlife trust
FIVE National Lottery winners have spent winter lockdown supporting a North Staffordshire nature reserve.
The winners, including Neil Jones and Julie Kirkham from Lightwood, created 30 bird boxes for Cotton Dell Nature Reserve in Oakamoor.
They made the boxes with the hope of attracting an endangered species – the pied flycatcher – to the nature reserve.
Neil and Julie won £2.4 million in 2010. The pair were joined virtually by Stafford winner Amanda Lewis and Wolverhampton winning couple Denise and Stuart Powell, to deliver the boxes.
Nest box building is the latest volunteering project big National Lottery winners have undertaken.
Since the start of the pandemic, the previous winners have pooled resources to create fresh vegetable planter boxes for schools and NHS workers, as well as knitting twiddlemuffs for people with dementia, making small garments for premature babies and creating Christmas angels for charities.
Staff at the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust (SWT), who manage the woodland reserve, are hoping the initiative will attract the rare pied flycatcher - a striking black and white woodland bird that spends the spring and summer breeding in the UK before migrating to Africa for the winter.
Sadly, it has declined to the point of being on the ‘red-list’ of UK birds, meaning it is of the highest level of conservation priority.
Neil delivered the bird nesting boxes to the site near Alton Towers and met up with Staffordshire Wildlife Trust Conservation Officer, Jonathan Groom to help with the positioning of the 30 boxes.
Neil said: “Like so many people not able to travel or see friends and family, for the past 12 months we’ve been enjoying the simpler things in life, including the birdlife that visit our garden, so we were thrilled to be part of this project. Now spring is here we’re hoping that these nest boxes will, in time, provide a safe home to some of our feathered friends.”
Staffordshire Wildlife Trust Conservation Officer Jonathan Groom said: “While the future residents of these wonderful nest boxes won’t know they were constructed by a multimillionaire taskforce, hopefully they will enjoy them.
“The pied flycatchers are one of a handful of bird species which readily adapt to using nest boxes instead of natural holes in trees. We hope that by providing nest boxes, we may encourage them to nest.”
Amanda Lewis, from Stafford, won £1 million in 2016. She said: “It was very therapeutic to calmly paint all the boxes and I can’t wait to see if they help attract new birds to the nature reserve.”
Nationally, since its launch in 1994, more than £338 million in National Lottery funding has helped support 46 Wildlife Trusts in the UK.