Crazy a-bat protecting the pennyroyal

We all know that GoodGym are huge fangs of puns and tonight’s task was no exception. After a nice run and walk GoodGym members arrived with their bat-packs ready to get muddy. We met our task owner, Kristina at Queen’s Eyot to learn about Pennyroyal a plant growing on a local SSI (Sites of Special Scientific Interest) and in one of only three echo-location, location locations in the country. The Pennyroyal needs protecting and our task tonight was to pull up ragwort and thistles to enable it to continue to thrive. Kristina treated us to a fang-tastic lesson about bats before we got started. We learnt that there are 18 species of bats i(17 of them breeding) in the UK) and each one has a distinctive series of sound waves which can be used to track them. Fangs very much Kristina!

Acro-bat-ics were then needed to scale the gate at the entrance to the field (with approval from our task owner) but once we were inside there was certainly no winging it. After a quick lesson in plant identification (and what should definitely not be eaten) Georgeta got straight to work pulling up the younger ragwort. Emily, Jenni and Amy were not winging it with their huge collections of ragwort and Sophie, Claire, and Louise were definitely not hanging around either. Amanda and Mandy went to the different edges of the field and were helped by another volunteer Katie. We found a number of wild and bat-iful orchids along with thousands of damsel flies - simply stunning!

It was great to see how the work GoodGym did last year to clear the field has really helped reduce the weeds this summer so everyone can give themselves a huge bat on the back. GoodGym - we really are bat-ter together!