Do You Know Your TooWit From Your TooWoo?

Do we have any owls in Curry Rivel parish?

We invite you to go for a night walk and help us to build up a picture of whether we have owls and where they are by sending notes of sightings and owls that you've heard to David German by email to davidgerman555@gmail.com, (little owls are also active by day). We'd like to know the date, what you saw/heard and where (with a 6 figure grid reference if possible). We'd be particularly interested to know if you think they bred this year.

What owl was that? The likely candidates are barn owl, tawny owl and little owl. Males and females often make different noises – with tawnies, for example, she does the screechy toowit and he does the soft, placating towoo. Alarm calls are also different to calls at a nest. To find out what owls look like and sound like, you could visit the Somerset Wildlife Trust website or the barn owl trust website. We are aiming to produce a map to share your sightings, and will send the records to the environmental records centre in Taunton(Somerset Wildlife Trust.

We'll be sharing a map of the hedgehog sightings soon.

Why bother about wildlife in Curry Rivel?

We all want to live in a beautiful place, the image of which for most people is countryside with hedges, trees, fields, perhaps a river and a distant view. Curry Rivel in fact! Curry Rivel parish has some fantastic places – a few fields full of wildflowers – including the Parish Council's very own East Field! – a rich network of hedgerows, small woods, and even a site of international significance for birds, West Sedgemoor. But many of us are unaware of the blessings on our doorstep, and what really is here. So we'd like to invite people to open their eyes and ears to wild life in this parish and what makes it special, and to note what they have seen and heard. The information that we all gather will we hope help make people become more aware, and help to keep the parish how we'd all like it to be – rich in wildlife – and even perhaps improve it.

If you'd like to be involved in taking part, or planning, or running activities to help find out more about the wildlife around us, please contact David German on 01458 259688 or by email at davidgerman555@gmail.com