Need some fresh air? At a loose end? Why not join us for a spot of butterfly counting? Everyone is welcome, but children under 12 must be accompanied.

We have ID sheets and Record Sheets ready, all we need now are some volunteers to spend 15 minutes counting butterflies. You can either submit your own records through the App or Big Butterfly Website, or let us do it for you. And don’t forget, we need to know even if you HAVEN’T seen any butterflies – negative results are important too!

As part of our new Connecting Glencairn project, each month we will be looking at ideas for getting out and about around Moniaive. These will be linked into our current work and will encompass Health & Wellbeing, Active Travel and Community Land Access. In July, we are heading up onto the hillside:

In June, we looked at wet places, and their links to biodiversity and heritage. We co-hosted discussion on access to freshwater habitats as part of our workshop on High Focus Habitats with the Galloway & Southern Ayrshire Biosphere at the Glencairn Midsummer Gathering, and you can see the results of that discussion elsewhere on our NEWS page.

Thanks to everyone who attended our Workshop on 22/06/24 at the Glencairn Midsummer Gathering. Faith Hillier from the Galloway & Ayrshire Biosphere gave a talk about High Focus Habitat and species, and Deb from MI led a follow-up discussion on how and where we access these in Glencairn.

We’ve summarised the comments from these discussions, to add to those from our previous local engagement on community land access. All your feedback gets used to show support for the work we do.

We are currently looking at options for biodiversity improvements by further riverside tree planting; and of course, we want any schemes we support to also include path improvements to make it easier for us to all access the countryside around us.

If you missed the workshop, the following Resource Sheet gives links to key information, to help you find out more.