Working out our quad(rant)s

Another gloriously sunny Saturday, another community mission in Eton Wick! We met at St John the Baptist Church, where we enjoyed a lovely warm welcome and brief from our task owners Claire Taylor from Wild Eton Wick and Rev La Stacey from the church. Today's job was a BioBlitz in the churchyard, which involves taking a snapshot of biodiversity in a given area at a given time.

We each had to choose a patch (or a few) and record all the flora and fauna we could find. No detailed knowledge was required as we had books and plant identifier apps on hand to help us. At first glance we could mostly see grass and daisies, but closer inspection yielded a variety of wildflowers and grasses, as well as more decorative plants that had been introduced in borders and on graves. Happily we also met a few crawling and flying insects and Sula even found a bee's nest.

Unlike some GoodGym tasks, there were no dramatic 'before' and 'after' pictures, but it was lovely to spend a peaceful hour contemplating and learning about nature, and satisfying to know that each quadrant we ticked off contributes to a bigger project to measure biodiversity trends.

We used the what 3 words app to pinpoint where we were working. Almost as if it was summarising my afternoon, the what 3 words name of my second quadrant was 'wiser. wiser. fled'. I drove to Eton Wick but at the end of the session I went for a lovely run with GoodGym member Anna. So I got a little bit wiser wiser about flora and fauna and then I fled!

Although the task didn't require any heavy lifting, we all had a good workout. Amanda ran nearly 9km round-trip, Jen walked over 7km, Sheila cycled from Maidenhead and back and Sula cycled from Windsor having already done some gardening and a dog walk. Great work team!