As mentioned on the BBC Breakfast news yesterday, and from the Canal & River Trust:
Take a trip to your local canal, river, reservoir or lake and record what you see there. It’s a fun activity to do with the family and will help us to monitor and protect the wide variety of precious wildlife that the waterways are home to.
This year we’re calling on everyone to ‘Stop, Look and Listen’ to what’s happening around them, following our own survey results which show surprising gaps in people’s nature knowledge.
We’ve been working with with the renowned Wildlife Sound Recording Society to create a series of nature noises and challenge people to identify them as part of our Wildlife Ear and Eye Q test. Surveying toddlers to OAPs, the results showed that 25% of parents and 30% of children could not identify the sound a duck makes.
We also found that 23% of parents and nearly a third of children thought that ducks have yellow feathers, perhaps the result of children’s TV programmes such as Peppa Pig.
Findings also show that 76% of parents believe that they are less knowledgeable about nature than the previous generation with 68% of parents also believing that their children are less knowledgeable about nature than they were at their age.
When put to the test the gap in wildlife knowledge between parents and their children is actually surprisingly close, however the gap between grandparents and their adult children and grandchildren is much bigger.
They also have a fun Ultimate Wildlife Sounds Quiz eg ‘Which naughty bird is mimicking a police car siren?’
Why not try a survey at Fleet Pond Nature Reserve?