Tag: York
Ecotherapy – Connecting to Nature
This is the first in a series of blogs about Ecotherapy – a method of promoting good mental health and physical wellbeing through outdoor activity in the natural environment. With the current situation in the world, many people have been seeing and feeling the benefits of being in nature and rediscovering or fully appreciating their […]
Wildwatch April 2020
Wildlife at St Nicks has been flourishing this spring. Wildwatch volunteers would normally be meeting every week to record – and enjoy – this. Alas, this is impossible right now. However, several Wildwatchers have been able to visit individually and share their sightings with us all. And of course staff members continue to do essential […]
Wildwatch March 2020
New life sprung forth this March at St Nicks – as always. Despite inevitable difficulties, the Wildwatch team was still able to enjoy some great wildlife sightings. Wildwatch groups met as usual on the Wednesday mornings of the 4th and 11th of March – seventeen of us on the latter date. (What a long time ago this […]
Spotlight on… Tawny Mining Bee and Bee Fly
The Tawny Mining Bee (Andrena fulva) and the Bee Fly (Bombylius major) have a story to tell. The first is a solitary bee while the second is not a bee but a fly impersonating one. Both can be seen on the reserve at St Nicks from April to June. The Bee Fly tries to stay as […]
Keeping connected to nature: even during lockdown
Hard times for us all. So many pressing concerns. Not least of these, for many of us, is the way in which our access to the natural world has suddenly become so constricted. Absence, it is said, makes the heart grow fonder. How true this seems now, regarding not just family and friends, but also […]
Crayfish on the Foss
Written by St Nicks’ Natural Habitats Manager Jonathan Dent. This autumn, thanks to funding from the Postcode Local Trust, we have been privileged to assist wetland ecologist Martin Hammond to survey the upper reaches of the River Foss to determine to state of native white-clawed crayfish populations. White-clawed crayfish are the UK’s only native freshwater […]
Champions of York’s Grasslands
What happened when St Nicks worked with volunteers to give our local green spaces some love and attention: a report on the Meadow Keepers project compiled by Natural Habitats Manager Jonathan Dent and Projects Assistant Esther Smith. Grasslands are all around us in York, but we can often walk past them without a second thought. […]
Zero(ish) Waste Wedding
This blog was written by our Projects Assistant Esther Smith. The average UK wedding produces a third of a metric tonne of solid waste and 14.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s a whole extra UK resident’s average carbon footprint for a year and a half, in one day. Probably the most environmentally conscious way to […]
Landfill vs Incineration? Which is the lesser of two evils?
There’s been a lot of publicity recently about the closure of Harewood Whinn (read more here) so our Waste and Recycling Manager Sam Taylor has decided to compare landfill and incineration. In York your waste is no longer sent to landfill, instead it is sent to Allerton Waste Recovery Park where it undergoes a number […]
Recycle week 2017: How ‘not’ to recycle
It’s Recycle Week 2017 so that means it’s time for Recycling Coordinator Sam to dust off her keyboard once again… I have written quite a few blogs on waste this year, content on plastics seems popular, as does busting myths. This blog is going to be a bit different. First of all, let’s be completely […]
