Hello from us at WAL. We hope you’ve had a great summer despite the rather rubbish weather! Still, whilst we grumbled about the lack of sunshine, our local wildlife didn’t seem overly bothered. Plenty of wonderful sightings on our Lympstone Wildlife Watch Facebook site including hedgehogs, badgers, frogs, adders, a plethora of butterfly beauties and wildflower plants that support these wonderful creatures. If you’re not part of our 100+ strong community, come and join us here.
Following the great success of the Wildlife Festival earlier in the summer, we’ve been poring over your feedback and ideas for next-step positive wildlife action in Lympstone. If you missed it, Mary Truell’s wonderful write up about this magical day is definitely worth a read – see July’s edition of the Herald on the village website. Safe to say, we’re not short of ideas! Rather the challenge now is not getting too carried away wanting to do everything all at once. So, with this in mind, here’s a rundown of some of the things we’re hoping to get involved with over the next 6-12 months. We’d love to hear back from you – so please drop us a line at wildaboutlympstone@gmail.com, especially where you see something in bold & italics below.
Wildlife walks & talks
Hugely popular during the festival, we plan to run more of these with our local Lympstone experts. We hope the first one will take place in October and will let you know via our email listings and village communications when the date has been agreed. Depending on demand, further walks and talks will be scheduled throughout the year. Please email us at
wildaboutlympstone@gmail.com if you’d like to be notified about walks and talks and/or if you have suggestions for presenters and leaders.
Nature, health and wellbeing
This was a topic of great interest at the festival, stimulated by some of the latest research, and personal stories, about how connecting with nature benefits our health and wellbeing. We hope to support a variety of further nature and wildlife-based wellbeing opportunities in the village, but will start by sharing these wonderful stories that so many people were moved by. A small booklet will be published and copies made available in the village. See our website page (https://www.lympstone.org/clubs-socities/wildabout-lympstone) to read a few of the stories and please email us at wildaboutlympstone@gmail.com if you’d like to comment or share a short story of your own for inclusion in this booklet.
Lympstone’s 2024 Lympstone Garden Festival
WAL is hoping to join forces with Lympstone’s Garden Festival by supporting the opening of some wildlife-demonstrator gardens. The idea is that these will showcase some examples, or real-time demonstrations, of wildlife friendly gardening practices for both small and large gardens. Perfection is not required – in fact the wilder the garden the better! Examples may include wildlife ponds, bird and bug boxes, wildlife-friendly planting ideas and maintenance, composting, wildlife corridors etc. If you might be interested in opening your garden for this purpose, or have an idea for us, please email us at wildaboutlympstone@gmail.com
Community orchard/Well-being garden
A highly desired outcome for many in the village, we are exploring funding opportunities and talking with the Parish Council to explore possible options for suitable land, either public or private. If you have any thoughts on this please email us at wildaboutlympstone@gmail.com
Improved management and expansion of wildlife-friendly green space
WAL will work closely with the Parish Council as it continues to enhance its policies in this area. We’ll help to communicate good practice across the parish to benefit all – whether we’re
helping to enhance the wildlife health of public green spaces, or in our own gardens.
Creating a map of Lympstone’s wildlife and natural landscape
We all agree it would be a wonderful idea to visually showcase Lympstone’s rich wildlife, as well as the positive actions underway to protect and enhance this. Informed by local surveys and knowledge, this would be displayed somewhere central in the village for all to enjoy.
Whilst on this note, we’d like to draw your attention to the Devon Biodiversity Records Centre (DBRC) https://www.dbrc.org.uk/. This is the primary database for wildlife sightings and records in this area. As such it is importance evidence for EDDC when deciding on the type of ecological and environmental surveys required for any planning purposes, as well as any
appropriate mitigation measures. You might be interested to know that Lympstone has both a Cirl Bunting and Great Crested Newt Consultation Zone, meaning that planning applications
need to consider the potential impacts of a development on these species over a 5km buffer around any DBRC recorded sighting. Everyone can help to expand the DBRC database. Single sightings can be uploaded here https://www.dbrc.org.uk/wildlife-sightings/ and multiple sightings can be recorded on the Excel spreadsheet downloadable from the Wildlife Records area of the home page https://www.dbrc.org.uk/. DBRC will verify all uploaded sightings. Please spread the word – we can’t protect wildlife if we don’t know it’s there!
WAL email group
If you are keen to keep up to date with WAL activities, please email us at wildaboutlympstone@gmail.com with your email address (your name will already be part of our email group if you
took part in the festival and/or left your email address in the feedback book).
And finally…
A big thanks to all those who have contacted us with wildlife boosting ideas and project suggestions. We will do our best to support as many of these as we can over the coming months, joining forces with other groups in the village.
WAL email: wildaboutlympstone@gmail.com
Rebecca Abrahams and Mary Truell
Email: rebecca_abrahams@yahoo.com truell@me.com
Website: https://www.lympstone.org/clubssocities/wild-about-lympstone
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WildAboutLympstone
