Wildlife Friendly

We have many ongoing village projects on different wildlife groups including bats, hedgehogs, birds, butterflies, bees, wildflowers and trees. Our biodiversity group meets at the beginning of each year to plan the year ahead. At the end of the year we try to produce reports on our findings and observations. Many of our records are sent on to the Wharfedale Naturalists Society (WNS) and WNS in turn transfer their data to the West Yorkshire Ecology Service (WYES) in Wakefield. The WYES database is especially important as this is one of the primary sources of information for local authorities and builders in assessing the biodiversity impact of proposed developments in planning applications.

Having started up as recently as 2016 it is too soon to say whether any of our wildlife species year on year are increasing or decreasing but we are now beginning to develop a good understanding of our wildlife populations and we are able to identify populations at risk. We are, for example, concerned about hedgehogs, about several bird species (such as curlew, swift and grey wagtail), about brown trout in the becks and about our wildflowers.

These pages describes our main projects and gives details of our local nature reserves. We also present notes from our meetings.